He must be about eight years old, maybe nine. Sitting on a bench, he holds his little sister as they wait in line through a crowd of mothers with his sick children. I am going to call him Saleh and her, Samiyah, although these are not her real names. On his face there is a mixture of fear and determination to have his sister attended to. A while ago I saw how he kissed his forehead when he thought no one was looking. She wants.
Samiyah is two years old, petite, with her hair in braids and sitting on her brother’s lap. He says that her mother is at home. I suppose she means that she is here, in the Andressa refugee camp in Chad, perhaps under a shelter of plastic sheeting or simply under a tree, like other families we have seen. The father, if he is alive, is probably still in Sudan, where the fighting is taking place.
I ask Saleh to tell me about his sister’s health problem, knowing that at this point in the day we won’t have time to see everyone before we have to leave for security reasons.
Very soon, refugees will be trapped here, with war on the one hand and rising waters blocking roads to safer places on the other.
First she explains to me that she has diarrhea, although it is obvious that she is hungry. Her hair color has changed due to lack of nutrients and she is exhausted. She hardly relates to the environment. I ask her to let me see her arms, which are barely wider than my thumbs, and carefully check her arm circumference with the special tape measure we use to assess nutritional status. Samiyah’s result is red, signifying severe acute malnutrition, and is well below the threshold.
We explain to Saleh that we will give him sachets of therapeutic food, a mixture made from peanut paste and nutrients to treat malnutrition. We explain to him that he should give him two sachets a day and that we will give him enough for a week. I hope we’ll be back with more by then. Hopefully the rains don’t fill the channels, which could block the route here. I am hopeful that he will survive until he receives the next ration.
This field must be evacuated. People have been living here for weeks. They have come escaping the fighting in Sudan. Now that the seasonal rains have started in Chad, the huge wadis (dry riverbeds) are filling up. Coming soon, refugees will be trapped here, with the war, on the one hand, and the rising waters, blocking the roads to safer places, on the other. And what is worse, the wadis will prevent aid from reaching those who remain. Everyone knows it, but the help to evacuate them still hasn’t arrived.
Some say that these refugees do not interest the world. Humanitarian responses in Chad receive little attention and thus little funding
Some say that these refugees do not interest the world. Humanitarian responses in Chad receive little attention, and with it, little funding. They say that aid cuts are the cause of the evacuation taking time to arrive. There was only one food distribution and we all know that it was not enough. Samiyah is proof of that, just like hundreds of other children like her. That same day we see a girl Saleh’s age drinking mud, trying to filter it through a T-shirt. There is no drinking water here. We also see children with measles and whooping cough. The shoots have already started.
In the afternoon we leave the refugee camp to reach our base before dark and, to our horror, we see that the water level in the wadi has already risen, almost cutting off our way in and out. I look out the window of our Land Cruiser as we drive through it and see that the water is already over the wheels. We don’t know how we’ll be back next week. These people are trapped, they need food, drinking water and medicine. I hope we’ll see Saleh and Samiyah after they’re evacuated. I hope they get the next ration, but right now I don’t quite know how.
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