SOMALIA ON THE BRINK OF FAMINE

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Paul Healy from the Irish charity Trocaire, which runs several healthcare clinics in the southern Gedo region.

Within weeks, the UN predicts a famine will be declared in parts of the country — a technical determination that critics say is abstract from day-to-day reality.

There is barely a village across the country untouched by the drought.

The most vulnerable are already stricken by catastrophic hunger and fearful of violent insurgency by militants from Al Shabaab — the Islamist group that controls swathes of Somali territory and is responsible for attacks that have killed civilians, including in the capital Mogadishu.

On the edge of towns in the Gedo region, informal camps full of people who have fled their homes in search of food stretch for kilometres.

Residents fashion colourful makeshift shacks from sticks and scavenged fabric in the dirt.

Thorny brambles arranged in rings around their base double as shields against the wind and fences to protect from unwanted visitors.

When it does rain, the roads turn to mud.

The more enterprising, or those with something to contribute, do what they can to help others, forming a kind of unofficial support net for the newest arrivals.

When there is a wedding between two in a camp, residents pool their resources to construct a shelter for the newlyweds. The camp lights up with song and laughter, there are howls and dancing into the night.

Thousands who turn up every week with little more than the clothes they are wearing are offered water and hot food by their neighbours. If a child is sick, they are given directions to a clinic in a nearby town.

Aden Moallim Mohamed, a self-described leader of one camp, who himself arrived earlier in the year, shows exhausted mothers how to plant scavenged deadwood into the soil to build the base of a shelter.

“We learned this building technique by pure circumstance,” he says with a grin while walking through the camp.

Inside displacement camps, ‘we share what we have’

In Dolow, a small community in Gedo along the Somali-Ethiopian border, roughly 150,000 people crowd the camps around the edge, far eclipsing the residents of the town itself.

Life in the camps is bleak and precarious. Every resident knows to expect a difficult night when storm clouds gather overhead.

A few hours’ deluge is not enough on its own to break the drought, but is sure to cause havoc among the dwellings, which quickly turn into muddy disarray.

Mr Mohamed recently spent a wet night underneath a rubber mat in a neighbour’s shelter, the pair trying to keep each other dry.

“We share what we have,” he says.

Sanitation is almost non-existent without proper toilets in most camps.

Disease is common. If uncontained, an outbreak of measles, for example, can spread quickly and kill children already weakened by malnutrition.

At Mr Mohamed’s camp, on the edge of Baidoa, a major centre in the Gedo region, many residents have lived there for months, and in some cases years.

For many, there is nothing to return home to and nothing to look forward to. Life as they know it will eventually come to an end in the muddy squalor of the camp.

All that remains is a daily struggle to stay alive.

“I have come here with no intent of leaving,” says Muslimay Durow, a mother of 10 who arrived after a journey of 90 kilometres by foot.

“We are waiting here for the mercy of God.”

As she speaks, her youngest child cries of thirst. She disappears and returns moments later with a small cup of water, which the child gulps gratefully.

Even in towns like Dolow, which attracts thousands of displaced people because of the heavy presence of aid organisations, public health care is severely limited.

The town itself is a modest grid of dusty streets, where young men sit idly outside shopfronts and wild goats chew on weeds that crowd hillsides.

Somali schoolgirls walk home in groups, wearing colourful garbasaar (a religious shawl) as Ethiopian soldiers slouch in the shade of military checkpoints.

On the outskirts, the town’s airstrip receives daily UN humanitarian flights.

The burnt-out wreckage of a jet aircraft registered to Tajikistan lies abandoned along the edge of the apron.

Above the terminal entrance, a sheet of white plastic covers the first part of the sign that hangs above that once read ‘international airport’. It now reads ‘national airport’.

At malnourishment clinics, babies cling on for life

A short drive away is the town’s only stabilisation centre, a specialised clinic set up to treat the severely malnourished.

Every morning, Somali women arrive clutching stricken babies, many of them close to death and showing symptoms of diarrhoea, infection or fever.

“The situation is very serious at the moment,” says Pamela Wesonga, the centre’s head of nutrition.

Staff use a band slipped over each child’s upper arm to measure its circumference. A reading of 11.5 centimetres or less indicates acute malnutrition.

Throughout the centre’s only room, women lay exhausted in beds as their starving children sleep or cry. Ms Wesonga estimates nine in 10 live in the camps on the town’s outskirts.

Some of the children have swollen limbs and torsos — symptoms of oedema, a condition developed in the most severe cases of malnutrition.

Three times a day, nurses under Ms Wesonga’s watch prepare a formula of therapeutic milk to give to the babies — the only thing their weak stomachs can handle.

Later, when they’re ready, they’re given Plumpy’nut, a nutrition-dense supplement that tastes like peanut butter.

A whiteboard in the stabilisation centre’s office showing the year’s patient data tells the story of the drought’s effect on children: admissions have more than tripled from 42 in January to 154 in July.

“The number of children you see here is just a fraction of the total number who are malnourished in the community,” says Shueb Abdishakur Ali, a Somali physician who performs regular check-ups on the patients.

“A number of them might actually die within the camps.”