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Going Home to Hunger and Death
Monday, April 8, 2002
(21:55)
By Jonathan Steele
The Mail & Guardian

“The return issue is a disaster," says Duccio Staderini of Médecins du Monde. “We know people's places of origin are not safe in terms of food security, and health provision is zero. But the international community is pushing to have people back home."

Abdul Kade has the soft cheeks of any normal toddler, but when his mother peels off his trousers and lifts his sweater we see a shockingly different person. His legs are matchsticks, his buttocks hang limp and his tummy is swollen by severe malnutrition.

The image is out of Africa, so it seems fitting that the two nurse nutritionists looking after Abdul and the other tiny Afghans in a feeding centre run by the charity World Vision should be Africans.

“Afghan children have round moon-faces so it's not like Africa where sunken eyes and cheeks give starvation away immediately," says Jennifer Kisingula from Kenya, who has been in this remote corner of western Afghanistan since January.

She and her colleagues visited several villages around Qala-i-Nau, the main town in Badghis province, peering at random into mud-brick houses to try to gauge the scale of the catastrophe. They found that three summers of drought had brought some people, literally, to their knees.
(More: The Mail & Guardian News Source)
2002 © The Mail & Guardian.

Dan