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Sudan mother and child new to a refugee camp. Photo: Bjarne Ussing, DanChurchAid/ ACT International |
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Outside a feeding center in Hamadiya camp in West Darfur on a Saturday in February, women were waiting in a long queue on the red, sandy ground with their thin children in their laps. A girl in a lacy white dress and a knitted cap fed from her mother's breast.
Inside the thatched hut, a little boy cried hysterically while swinging in the straps of a scale. A nutrition monitor wrote down his weight, and his mother comforted him before moving him to a wooden bench to be measured. He screamed again.
The nutrition monitor filled out a pink piece of paper, and the mother walked to the line of women who were waiting to submit their children's updated measurements for their personal files. |
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The nutrition monitor behind the desk studied the figures carefully to see if there was any progress.
Before leaving, the mother received a plastic bag containing a ration of corn and soya blend and some sugar and oil for the child. The rations were intended to last two weeks before the mother would return to repeat the procedure and until her child had gained weight.
So goes a day in the life of an internally displaced person (IDP) in one of the camps where the ACT/Caritas program is working. It is a life lived on the edge: families who have fled their homes and who are now living in makeshift shelters in harsh conditions where one of the most basic human functions – getting enough to eat – is a struggle.
The feeding center in the camp northeast of Zalingei was full of |
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Presbyterian Disaster Assistance is helping to provide food assistance
The World Food Program has the responsibility of distributing the main rations of food to families. However, because of the continuing violence in Darfur, large parts are closed to U.N. agencies as "no-go" areas. This makes it impossible for food and other assistance to be provided.
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance is supporting a program in cooperation with ACT/Caritas that is targeting children less than five years of age with moderate and borderline cases of malnutrition.
- Each child receives a ration of supplementary feeding consisting of 250 grams of corn and soya bean, 25 grams of oil and 20 grams of sugar per day, which all together provides 1,250 calories a day.
- The ration is usually given for one or two weeks at a time.
- When the child moves above 85 percent of his or her recommended weight for his or her height, treatment stops at the feeding center. The child's progress is then followed individually. Severe cases of malnutrition are referred to the hospital.
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mothers and malnourished babies on this day. Raising children in a camp for IDPs is not easy. Food and water are scarce, and hygiene is poor – especially in Hamadiya camp, where more than 30,000 people live. Many children are malnourished, and the situation in the camp makes it difficult to change their condition. The IDPs also live in clouds of the red dust that is everywhere and gets stirred up by the wind.
Another mother's struggle to care for her children in this situation was evident as she sat on a plastic mat in the shadow of one of the few trees in the camp, a 16-month-old girl laid in her lap, half asleep. The little girl is small for her age, and her arms and legs are thin. A staff member of the feeding center had visited a few days before to check on the child, who was coughing. The mother was told to bring her the center, where there is also a health clinic. The baby girl received medicine for her cough and was due to be registered at the feeding center.
"It was easier to bring up children in my village because we had everything there," explained the mother. "My husband had a job. We had animals, and we were growing different crops and tomatoes. Here we have to buy everything from the market."
The family of five had not received any distributions from the World Food Program yet, so they were supporting themselves. The father now does construction work in Zalingei, and the mother collects firewood to sell at the market, although the risk of being harassed by attackers outside of the town is high.
The family fled from their village over a year ago. They stayed with relatives in a village outside Zalingei for one year, but when they heard that they had to move to one of the camps in order to receive services for IDPs, they ended up in Hamadiya camp.
Now a two-by-five meter hut is the family's home. The mother sleeps in a steel bed with the baby, and the father sleeps with their boys, 6 and 12 years old, on a mat on the floor. Their few belongings are covered in a fine layer of red dust.
In between supplementary food distributions, ACT/Caritas nutrition workers visit homes to check on malnourished children who have been treated at the feeding center. They also help families improve the hygiene in their household.
"The general problem here is lack of food and the dust," said one of the staff who visits families. She spends a lot of time explaining to them that the supplementary food is only for the malnourished child and is not to be consumed by everybody in the family. "I say that the food is just like medicine and it is for the patient alone."
"But when we ask the mothers why their child continues to be sick they answer, 'What can we do?' And the child keeps on being malnourished," added one of the nutrition monitors.
In Zalingei, the World Food Program is increasing the number of beneficiaries it serves in order to meet the needs of the continuously growing number of IDPs. Though it is an uphill battle to improve the health of malnourished children, the general trend in the ACT/Caritas feeding centers in Darfur is an improvement of the children's nutritional status, according to the manager of the nutrition sector. |
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