(ERGO) – Nasra Adan Hussein, a disabled mother new to Salama camp on the outskirts of Abudwaq in Central Somalia’s Galmudug region, has nothing to feed her children except whatever she can beg from her neighbours.
“I don’t have any food. We depend on whoever is cooking among our neighbours. Often I take my children to them and ask them to feed them for me,” she told Radio Ergo.
Nasra is among 180 destitute families that have arrived in Salama IDP camp in the past three months.
All of her 130 goats and two camels died earlier this year in the biting drought. She moved from the rural area hoping to save her children, who are in poor health and condition.
She goes around the camp every morning begging for dry or cooked food and sometimes comes back to their hut with nothing. She lost the use of her right arm which was burnt when she was a child.
“I am a disabled mother whose children are looking up to her. When we were back in our rural homes we had animals, but now we have nothing. My children have no education, health care or shelter. I sometimes ask myself what I will do with these children, again I tell myself it’s Allah who brought them into this world,” she said.
Nasra owes $300 to a hospital where she took her children several times for treatment and is worried that she cannot pay the bills.
Another displaced woman in the camp, Fatumo Garad Ali, arrived in January with her two disabled daughters from Isgoys in Ethiopia’s Somali Region. Both girls have been paralysed in their legs from birth.
“My two sick daughters survive on two cups of tea a day. That’s all I can get for them because they can’t feed on the normal food that’s available in the camp,” Fatumo said.
The camp committee chairman, Idris Adan Abdulle, said they had called on the Abudwaq district leaders as well as the Galmudug regional government several times to come to the aid of the IDPs in Salama.
He added that there had also been requests made to NGOs but none had so far responded, leaving the newcomers from Galmudug and Ethiopia to depend on the goodwill of the equally struggling 750 families already living in the camp.
