The famine sweeping southern Somalia is posing a painful challenge to humanitarian organizations. Children are dying by the thousands just a few kilometers from warehouses full of emergency food supplies.
Somali Famine Defies Easy Answers
New arrivals enter the sprawling Sayidka tent city. (VOA - P. Heinlein)
A security guard on a hill overlooking the Sayidka IDP camp. (VOA - P. Heinlein)
A family arrives at the newly-opened Sayidka camp for internally displaced people in the shadow of Somalia’s parliament building. (VOA - P. Heinlein)
An exhausted family sleeps in the open after a long journey by foot from southern Somalia to Mogadishu. (VOA - P. Heinlein)
A woman constructing the frame of what will be her tent home at the Sayidka IDP camp in Mogadishu. (VOA - P. Heinlein)
A. woman digs hole to plant a branch that will serve as the tent structure of her new IDP home. (VOA - P. Heinlein)
This Somali child is suffering from measles and malnutrition. (VOA - P. Heinlein)
Arfon Abdi Hassan shows the measles scars on the back of her one-year old son. (VOA - P. Heinlein)
The ruins of Mogadishu’s Roman Catholic cathedral are home to dozens of tent-dwelling families seeking refuge from famine in southern Somalia. (VOA - P. Heinlein)
Hamsa Ali, with two of her five remaining children, tells how her 3-year old son died a day earlier of measles complicated by malnutrition. (VOA - P. Heinlein)