IN BAIDOA, Somalia — Aftin Noor stepped back from the tiny graves he’d been digging and surveyed his work. Exhausted, he turned his palms skyward, squinting into the relentless midday sun, and asked God for an answer.
“I dug three children’s graves this morning,” said Noor, his voice cracking, his undershirt soaked with sweat. “And I have dug 20 or more this month. Why?”
The immediate answer is cholera. The waterborne bacterial disease is sweeping through this city’s sprawling refugee camps, which are filled with people driven from their villages by a vicious drought. Spotty, tantalizing rain showers have left fetid puddles, speeding the infection’s spread. Like a desperate predator, cholera often picks off the weakest targets: children.
The drought and the looming specter of a famine have brought nearly 160,000 people to Baidoa from the baked countryside. They have come to save themselves from almost certain starvation. But an outbreak of cholera is spreading death through this place of refuge.
The exodus to Baidoa began in November, when stores of food began to run out following two years of limited rains. More than 55,000 people arrived in April alone. Whole villages have relocated here.
Somalia is no stranger to famine. Between late 2010 and early 2012, about 260,000 people perished, mostly around Baidoa, about 120 miles northwest of Mogadishu. Then, as now, the militant Islamist group al-Shabab, which controls almost all of rural southwestern Somalia and is hostile to aid agencies, made it nearly impossible for lifesaving food and water to be delivered anywhere but to the few cities under government control.
Baidoa was al-Shabab territory then. People starved while walking from their homes near here to camps in the distant capital, Mogadishu, or in neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia. Now Baidoa is an island of government control. Aid agencies have established a presence here.
Read more: Somalis are fleeing famine — only to find death in a place of refuge
Source: washington post