Hope attracts the crowds at this MSF feeding centre in Kuyera, Oromiya region, Ethiopia. August 2008.
Photo by Fastxmsf
In Tunto, in the SNNP region, what the team considers as a “quiet day” is when fewer than a thousand people are struggling at the entrance to be sure to get in. Some days, two thousand or so people have come and the team have had no choice but to stop the activities to avoid an accident in the crowd. Each MSF team is trying new strategies for better crowd control and for limiting the screening workload. Some people just continue to come day after day, still hoping that they will fit in the criteria and get some food.
Just as evident to the doctors and nurses in the nutrition centres as the lack of access to food, is the lack of access to healthcare. People can neither afford the price of the food nor the price of the medicines. Children are prone to worms and diarrhoea and lots of malnourished adults also have chronic disease.
A few dozen kilometres from Tunto, in Mudulla, the queue of people stretches hundreds of meters in front of the nutrition centre. Here, activities for moderately malnourished children are only just starting and the number of severely malnourished patients remains high. In this area, a quarter of the patients are children between 5 and 14 years old and 12 percent are adults.
Bogalesh is coming for the first time. A neighbour told her that she should go because she could get food here. She waited until she could move, she’s suffering from arthritis. Bogalesh stands 149cm tall and weighs just 30 kg; according to the nutrition criteria, she will have to put on 10 kg before being considered as cured. And every week while she’s in the programme, she will receive 5 kg of flour, 1 litre of oil and therapeutic food to eat twice a day.
This mother of five children hasn’t received any food or financial aid directly, but one of her neighbours got 50 kg of flour in an emergency aid distribution and gave her 3 glasses of it a few days ago. As little as it was, this aid was most welcome, as the value of this in the local market is more than what a man can earn with a day of work in a farm (5 birrhs or 50 cents).