Bearing witness to Africa’s suffering


Joe Moran | September 21, 2011

A malnourished child hangs on to life in the stabilization ward of the Ifo Camp Hospital in the Dadaab refugee complex in northeastern Kenya. Already the world's largest refugee settlement, Dadaab has swelled in recent weeks with tens of thousands of recent arrivals fleeing drought in Somalia. Photo: Paul Jeffrey/ACT Alliance

A malnourished child hangs on to life in the stabilization ward of the Ifo Camp Hospital in the Dadaab refugee complex in northeastern Kenya. Already the world’s largest refugee settlement, Dadaab has swelled in recent weeks with tens of thousands of recent arrivals fleeing drought in Somalia. Photo: Paul Jeffrey/ACT Alliance

We live in a global society.

If ever I needed proof of that I got it two weeks ago when Joe Moran, Jr. became unemployed. Jobs that once provided steady employment are dwindling with many going abroad.

My son has worked hard for 13 years at different things: He’s a certified Tech-10 Toyota technician; he’s a licensed commercial deep-sea diver (was under a Navy ship doing repairs on 9/11), has installed Direct TV satellite systems, and for the last seven years or so has worked designing and producing prototype medical robots.

He has always landed on his feet, and I hope he will do so again.

But there are others in our world whose recovery is tenuous at best. They are in the Horn of Africa; and the misfortune that is their current lot threatens their very lives.

Because of almost instant satellite communications, we are witnesses to thousands of Somalis and vulnerable East Africans plodding their way over miles of barren, dusty stretches to Mogadishu or to refugee camps in Kenya.

We are left numb as we hear of parents being forced to make their own excruciatingly painful, modern-day “Sophie’s Choice” as to which of their weakened children will have to be left behind, and which of them has enough strength to survive the grueling trek.

“We left him there by the side of the road, and ‘to Allah’,” one broken-hearted mother told a reporter.

As always, it is the little ones who are the most vulnerable. In the last 90 days some 29,000 children under 5 have starved to death. The United Nations and other global experts estimate that another 800,000 children in the area suffering from acute malnutrition stand to face the same fate.

A man -who found this reality too painful to witness- said to me: “I think the people there must be used to this;” and added: “Do you think it bothers them as much as it bothers us?”

In 40 years of doing international service work I have never found a mother for whom the death of a single child was not an almost unbearable tragedy.

Northeast Africa is facing its worst drought in 60 years. It comes on top of decades of corrupt government, feuding war lords, repeated famines – now exacerbated by an Al-Qaida inspired Al-Shabab insurgency that, as a military strategy, is blocking food relief to the starving.

Immediate help cannot be denied. Food aid and water are being rushed to the area, and commitments are being made by governments, multinational agencies, and international humanitarian service agencies and non-governmental organizations such as Church World Service.

Even as we speed up emergency aid we need –at the same time- to accelerate the work of addressing one of the principal causes of this perennial problem. We must begin now to fund initiatives that aim at ending or at least mitigating the disastrous effects of these increasingly cyclical droughts. And that comes down to ensuring that villagers have enough water.

One of the ways that CWS and other NGOs have started doing this is by helping villagers construct sand dams. A Sand Dam is a rock- and cement-fortified structure built across a seasonal riverbed (or “wadi”) that sees rushing water during the wet or rainy season, but which dries up once the rainy season is over.

The dam traps sand and water, and the sand sponges up and preserves the water beneath it long after the rains have ended. In one village in Kenya where Church World Service helped construct a dam, a once 11-hour round trip to collect water was reduced to just one hour.

Then there is the added benefit that sand naturally filters the water. This is a life-saving technology! And the average cost of one of these sand dams is about $6,250 dollars. You can see one in action here.

Take a moment to check out some of the images coming from Africa’s drought. In this global world in which we live, the people you see here suffering in Africa’s drought are our “neighbors” –every bit as much as the couple who live next door. If we pass them by – as did the priest and the lawyer in the Christian scripture’s story of the “Good Samaritan-” we risk defaulting on our humanity.

If, in looking, the tears come, let them! For given the immensity of this tragedy, they are our first, genuine gesture of compassion. And they too are precious currency.

Joe Moran is the managing regional director for the U.S. southeast.