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Somali mother forced to abandon starving child

Published:Friday | August 12, 2011 | 12:00 AM
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A Somali girl waits to collect water at the UNHCR's Ifo Extension camp, outside Dadaab, eastern Kenya, 100 kilometres (62 miles) from the Somali border, on Wednesday. The Dadaab refugee camp - the largest in the world - was built for 90,000 people. The current population is over 400,000 with thousands of new arrivals crammed into areas outside the refugee camp, waiting to be formally admitted.
In this photo taken Monday and made available Wednesday, Nyanyuduk Logiel, a 28-year-old mother of five, has brought her three-year-old daughter Lokol back for follow-up care at Kakuma mission hospital in Kenya's northern Turkana region, one of the most remote and marginalised areas in the country. The toddler is only about a third the weight she should be and can barely stand at only 12.35 pounds (5.6 kilograms). Drought in the horn of Africa has caused the deaths of more than five people in Turkana, Kenya, and has raised the cases of malnutrition among children. - AP photos
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DADAAB, (AP)

Wardo Mohamud Yusuf walked for two weeks, carrying her one-year-old daughter on her back and her four-year-old son at her side, to flee Somalia's drought and famine.

When the boy collapsed near the end of the journey, she poured some of the little water she had on his head to cool him, but he was unconscious and could not drink.

She asked other families traveling with them for help, but none stopped, fearful for their own survival.

Then the 29-year-old mother had to make a choice that no parent should have to make.

"Finally, I decided to leave him behind to his God on the road," Yusuf said days later in an interview at a teeming refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. "I am sure that he was alive, and that is my heartbreak."

Cruel choices

Parents fleeing the devastating famine on foot, sometimes with as many as seven children in tow, are having to make unimaginably cruel choices: Which children have the best chance to survive when food and water run low? Who should be left behind?

"I have never faced such a dilemma in my life," Yusuf told The Associated Press. "Now I'm reliving the pain of abandoning my child. I wake up at night to think about him. I feel terrified whenever I see a son of his age."