(ERGO) – Bisharo Mohamed Nur was happy to see her two malnourished daughters, aged one and three, thriving and recovering their appetite and vitality, after several weeks on a therapeutic feeding programme.
“Now their bodies have changed, but if you had seen them before you would be shocked, they were the size of this phone!” Bisharo told Radio Ergo’s local reporter in Kun-fur IDP camp, where they are living in Baidoa.
“When we were joining the camp, I carried one on my back and the other in my arms. They got better within a month of the feeding, they get food in the morning and at midday.”
Every day Bisharo collects two kilos of nutritional porridge, made from blended rice, millet, and wheat, to feed her four children breakfast and lunch. She also gets milk, sesame oil, and sachets of Plumpy’Nut ready-to-use therapeutic spread from Amoud Foundation, the NGO running the programme.
Bisharo and her husband were farmers, who lost their crops to the drought. When they joined the IDP camps in Baidoa, Bisharo’s husband found labour jobs on nearby farms earning $2-4 for a job. However, he left for home in Goomir in Dinsor when he heard that it had rained in October, hoping to work on their own four-hectare farm. As the rainfall was poor, it is not clear yet whether he will succeed in getting a harvest.
“My husband has remained at the farm, he doesn’t do anything else, he works on the farm. He planted millet and sesame although I heard that it has been hit by drought,” said Bisharo, noting that the family has no other source of food or income to buy food.
Amoud Foundation initiated the therapeutic feeding programme last November when the levels of malnutrition among children became alarming. It will run until April, helping about 400 malnourished children from 1,000 families living in 50 different camps.
Muslimo Siyad Hassan, a single mother of nine, said her youngest son aged 18 months responded within a week to the therapeutic feeding and is recovering. She had taken the baby to Baidoa general hospital three times since May, where he was diagnosed with malnutrition. It was not until she heard from another mother about the therapeutic food programme that she got the help the child needed.
Muslimo, who lives in Gaarisa camp, she manages to cook a meal in the evening for her family from the small earnings she makes selling grass.
“It’s a very hard job, I collect grass in baskets, I get 20,000 shillings for each basket and if I collect two that is still less than a dollar. When I sell the grass sometimes I also get laundry jobs. Whatever I get I buy food for my children. I am their father and their mother, since their father died two years ago,” she said.
Before coming to the camp in June 2022, Muslimo kept five cows in Sakow, Middle Shabelle, but they all died from lack of water and grass.
Amoud Foundation’s Ahmed Adan Isak, the head of office in Baidoa, said the camps selected had the highest numbers of families with acutely malnourished children.
“We target children under the age of seven because they are vulnerable to malnutrition and diseases. We aim to get healthier children with a balanced diet who are growing well,” said Ahmed.
