For a two-year-old child, Bishir Arab should be twice his weight, but severe malnutrition has seen his body weight plummet to just six kilogrammes. Too exhausted to show any emotion, Bishir was one of many children hospitalised in Gode, some 75 km southwest of Denan, southeastern Ethiopia. From a handful of children initially brought in for treatment, the numbers have turned into a steady flow, overwhelming the two doctors at the hospital. "We are starting to see more patients come in with drought-related illnesses and signs of severe malnutrition," said Zelalem Gizachew, one of the two doctors. "But we are very short of drugs and with only two doctors, any increase will be difficult to cope with." He added that the use of dirty water meant diseases like measles and diarrhoea were also spreading in the area. These had exacerbated wasting among undernourished children. "We have not received any help even though we have no food," said Bishir's mother Idil Arab, who trekked the 75 km to Gode Hospital from Denan. "We have been forgotten." The area around Denan, a dry, dusty village in the extreme southeast some 1,400 km from the capital, Addis Ababa, is where the messengers of widespread hunger have made their first call. The bones and rotting carcasses of cattle are its signposts, foretelling disaster. "If there is no intervention, then we could be talking about the same disaster we had in 2000," said Abdullahi Ali Haji, the government's health officer for the area. As many as 98,000 people died during a drought in Ethiopia in 2000, according to estimates by the Journal of the American Medical Association. Effects of drought Around Denan, the effects of that drought and its impact on communities are still visible. Some 10,000 people continue to live in a makeshift camp on the outskirts of the village, having moved there six years ago in search of food. "The drought is already here. This is our warning that without immediate help...there will be deaths. We are still assessing the situation rather than making emergency interventions," Haji added. "We have to move quickly." Although some aid is beginning to arrive in this remote region, local residents said it was too little, too late. Aid workers said although urgent appeals for food, water and medicine had been made, often it took weeks, if not months, before the aid arrived. Yet the widespread food shortage in Denan had announced itself before arriving in the area. While land degradation, overcrowding and global warming have been blamed for the successive droughts that afflict Ethiopia's desolate Ogaden region, poor rains over the last nine years have left many families living on a knife edge. This year the rains failed completely, leaving the area, whose landscape is ribbed and rutted like a crocodile's back, with dried riverbeds and sun-parched valleys. Food prices have gone up by as much as 50 percent, while the value of livestock has plummeted, affecting mostly nomads, who rely on cattle, sheep, goats and camels for food and income. With livestock deaths on the increase, many people have started migrating to nearby towns in search of aid. Some of those who have recently been displaced have walked 200 km into the Ogaden from across the borders of neighbouring Kenya and Somalia, where the situation is said to be worse. In this area alone, about 1.75 million people - mainly nomads - need help, say aid workers.
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions