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FROM THE FIELD

Volunteers Help Turkana's Nomads Grapple With Drought and Illness
11 Nov 2009 20:06:00 GMT
 Source: Merlin - USA
Alex Cottin, Regional Director, Merlin USA

Website: Website: http://www.merlin-usa.org

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On the outskirts of Turkana's capital Lodwar, community volunteers bring children to be tested for malnutrition. I had the opportunity to meet the volunteers and thank them for their support and hard work, despite the challenges.
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On the outskirts of Turkana's capital Lodwar, community volunteers bring children to be tested for malnutrition. I had the opportunity to meet the volunteers and thank them for their support and hard work, despite the challenges.

Background

•  Food and hunger

•  E. African hunger

•  Children

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Alex Cottin, Regional Director for Merlin USA visited health programs aiding nomadic communities of northwestern Kenya. Along the way, he met dedicated health staff and volunteers who are trying to keep families healthy as they endure the extended crisis. He sent blog posts chronicling those he met and how they are transforming lives and improving the odds for survival for so many. _________________

Despite the sheer grandeur and beauty of Lake Turkana this is not, by any means, a promising place for health. Last July, a food security assessment identified Kenya's northern pastoral areas at most risk of falling into humanitarian emergency.

The prolonged drought has forced as many as 50,000 pastoralist families to move their animals and change their migration patterns in search of water and pasture. To put things into perspective, now people here often have to walk over 20 miles to search for water.

A visit to this region reveals that children are at greatest risk in this humanitarian emergency. Food shortages are causing high levels of malnutrition. The World Health Organization considers anything above a 15 percent malnutrition rate to be an emergency. In Turkana, a district in the Rift Valley province, a recent survey showed that the rates are as high as 21 per cent.

In a region grappling with TB, HIV/AIDS and malaria, malnutrition complicates everything. It makes people more susceptible to disease and is connected to more severe and longer episodes of illness. This means that people will remain ill and weak over longer periods of time.

Imagine a young girl, as young as five years old, fighting off a general infection, or worse still, infected with TB and HIV-positive. How could she swallow and digest medications when she hasn't had anything to eat in days?

It is a vicious, seemingly endless cycle.

I spent the first day at one of Merlin's Outpatient Therapeutic Feeding Program (OTP) for severely malnourished children. Some OTPs are attached to a health facility while others are mobile and they are staffed by health workers and volunteers trained by Merlin. Ensuring greater reach is key in this vast landscape, so Merlin is pushing the mobile OTPs to more remote and isolated areas.

Volunteers are the most exceptional part of this program. Unpaid and often walking up to 10 miles a day, they are the ones who are delivering these children to health by bringing them to the OTP sites. They do so five days a week, up to 10 hours a day, going to different sites each day, depending on where the greatest need lies. It is the most selfless act of humanity I have ever seen.

One of my favorite travel authors, AA Gill, summed it up well when he wrote: "Nothing prepares you for mass starvation, for the promise of famine. Or rather, everything prepares you for it, years of photographs and terse newsreels... They all prepare you for it, but none of them protects you from the truth of it."

I watch as children are brought to the OTP and screened for malnutrition. The severely malnourished kids are fed Plumpynut® a nutritionally-enriched paste made primarily out of peanuts and sugar. If they have no complications, they can go home to be treated, a critically important aspect of the program. This makes it easy for the parents, who don't have to pay transport costs to get to the center or have to give up any paid work. Sadly, there are those with medical complications and they are admitted to the stabilization center in the pediatric ward located in the Lodwar District Hospital. Here they are fed and monitored closely.

As I watch these scenes unfold, one by one, I think of home. The holiday season is approaching and there will be many celebrations with home-cooked feasts. Yet here, I'm a witness to a disturbing reality: there are more people in the world who are hungry than ever.

Volunteers making a difference

This reminds me again of the volunteers, I was so impressed with them. I made sure to spend time speaking to them to get a sense of what drives them. No doubt they could be doing something much easier while getting paid. Their answer: "Because we make a difference." AND BOY, DO THEY EVER!

As with most jobs, a few things fall outside the job description yet still need to get done. In this case, though these outpatient sites are essentially "feeding facilities," many malnourished children come there with other illnesses or complications and their mothers have nowhere else to take them. The health workers and volunteers, though already understaffed and swamped, have to step in to help with additional tests and treatments.

One example was a severely malnourished child, who was crying and displaying the classic symptoms for malaria: high fever, lethargy and vomiting. The team drew some blood from his finger and an agonizing five minutes later, the results were in. Much to our fearful expectations, he had tested positive for malaria.

I tried to assure myself that this child would be given the adequate medicine and with more Plumpynut® he would be healthy in no time... Easy for me to say - I have a ready stock of anti-malarial medicine in my backpack and will be heading home for Christmas dinner.


[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]

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[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]

Background information

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E. African hunger - [Who works where]

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Kenya

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