Originally published February 7 2006
Two-year drought brings deadly famine to Kenya and Somalia
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Farid Abdulkadir, chief of disaster operations for the Kenyan Red Cross Society (KCRS), lays bare the seriousness of the two-year drought that now plagues Northern Kenya, Southern Somali and Ethiopia.
In the scorching heat of drought-stricken northern Kenya, an exhausted Khadija Osman slides a dry breast to her severely malnourished and emaciated baby as some 20 hungry children eat porridge around her at a Red Cross feeding center.
"I'm trusting God and asking for more assistance; otherwise, we will just die," she says weakly from her spot on the plastic sheet where she has spent every day for the past two months waiting for the two daily portions of gruel that she hopes will save her starving family.
Osman and the more than 100 others here at the feeding center in El Wak, about 820 kilometers (510 miles) northeast of Nairobi on the Somali border, are among the more than six million people in Kenya, southern Somalia and southeast Ethiopia threatened with famine in a two-year drought that has gripped the Horn of Africa.
Aid agencies warn that "pre-famine" conditions exist in large swathes of the region where extreme hunger and thirst have been reported for the past month, killing at least 20 people in northeast Kenya alone and prompting Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki to declared it a national disaster.
Last week, Kibaki appealed for 100 million dollars (84 million euros) in assistance and ordered the military to help with relief work, including food and water distribution and well drilling, but the scale of the need in this arid region populated mainly by cattle-dependent nomads may overwhelm those efforts, aid workers say.
At the district hospital in Wajir, southwest of El Wak about 580 kilometers (360 miles) from the capital, there is desolation on the faces of the emaciated children, two of whom died last week from severe malnutrition, according to Doctor Aluvaala Seme.
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