Sir, – Thanks to Sally Hayden for highlighting the positive Somali culture of sharing even in the midst of poverty and famine (“Displaced in Somalia: ‘Only cooking oil and flour is possible to buy ... it’s not enough but we have no choice’”, World, December 20th).
From my experience of living and working across Africa, this culture of “sharing what little we have” is present in many different communities and countries. Very poor people, mostly mothers, share what little they have. Often we humanitarian workers provide specialised food like Plumpy’Nut, a peanut-based paste for treatment of severe acute malnutrition, to those mothers for their very malnourished children. These mothers will always share this specialised food with all of their children or with neighbouring children, particularly at this time. We have to predict this behaviour and ensure we provide additional “supplementary” rations for the (slightly) healthier children. This means that much greater financial resources are required as children continue to die in great numbers.
To get greater financial resources committed, a famine needs to be declared in Somalia as we seem well past the technical definition for such a situation. However, politics is impeding this declaration. Even without such a declaration, the international community knows that Somalia is experiencing famine-like conditions and children are dying every minute across the country.
We should not wait for reality to outpace politics in order to respond to devastating malnutrition and mortality. Nor should we continue to stand back while mothers bear the brunt of deciding alone which children to feed. – Yours, etc,
PAUL O’BRIEN,
Chief Executive Officer,
Plan International Ireland,
Dublin 8.