Sitting on thin foam mattresses sprawled across a crude cement floor in drought-stricken northern Kenya, dozens of mothers nurse emaciated babies as flies hover around mosquito netting.
The odours of medicine and sweat mixed with the stench of disease hang in the foetid air under the iron roof of this hospital annex. Set up to take in overflow from the packed paediatric ward, it too is filled with infants howling and batting futilely at feeding tubes in their nostrils.
These are the latest victims of a drought that has put more than 11-million people across East Africa at risk of starvation, 3,5-million of them in Kenya, where recent heavy rains have exacerbated already dire conditions.
Far from a blessing, the downpours are proving a curse for the hungry people of Wajir, flooding the parched soil, forcing families from homes, cutting off roads and vital humanitarian access and spreading deadly disease.
Since early April, this government hospital about 500km north-east of Nairobi has seen a huge increase in patients suffering from water- and mosquito-borne illnesses.
At the height of the drought two months ago, most admissions were for malnutrition, but most patients now also suffer from diarrhoeal diseases, malaria or pneumonia and are in an even more precarious state, officials said.
”With the recent rains, the rate of diarrhoeal diseases has increased and those who have moderate and moderately severe malnutrition have tipped over to severe malnutrition,” said medical officer Aluvaala Seme.
At least 66 patients have been hospitalised here, the only health care facility in Kenya’s 56-square-kilometre Wajir district, more than half with those symptoms and five children and an adult have died in April, he says.
The onset of the seasonal rains may have broken the drought but it has also led to massive water contamination as the heavy drops filter through thousands of rotting cattle carcasses that still litter the ground, officials say.
Pools of stagnant water have become breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitos and the rain has brought lower temperatures to this arid region, leading to an increase in respiratory problems like pneumonia, they say.
Making matters worse, measles, believed to be caused by an influx of unimmunised herders seeking water and pasture for depleted flocks, has erupted, sickening at least 64 people, many of them children, here since February.
And the worst may be yet to come, according to aid agencies concerned that news of the rains will dry up emergency relief contributions at a time when many livestock-dependent pastoralists scrounge to regenerate their herds.
”The most challenging thing is when it does not continue to rain,” said Yusuf Ibrahim, an official with the British charity Oxfam. ”So many families here have lost their entire stocks.”
”Relief operations must continue past the rains,” said Oxfam’s Rahay Hassan, noting that 80% of Wajir’s 400 000 population is now entirely dependent on food aid for survival.
The death toll from the combination of drought and disease could easily surge well beyond the more than 50 people already known to have died from drought-related malnutrition and associated illness since December.
On a visit to Wajir this week, Grammy-award winning singer and United Nations goodwill ambassador Angelique Kidjo toured the hospital and nearby drought- and rain-affected areas hoping to draw attention to the unfolding crisis.
”The challenge is huge,” she told a crowd assembled at a feeding point where much-needed staples were being distributed. ”The problem is not yet over. We have to continue helping.”
”We have to stop the vulnerability of losing lives so stupidly,” Kidjo said. ”We have the capacity. We have the brains, yet we behave like new-born kids.”
Among the main steps that should be taken, is a drastic shift away from the pastoral life, followed for millennia here, she said, echoing the sentiments of many in the humanitarian aid community.
”It is an issue of attitude change,” said Kidjo, who hails from Benin. ”You cannot preserve cattle and let your children die.” – AFP
