He must be about eight, maybe nine, sitting on the bench and holding his little sister as they wait in line between uncountable numbers of mothers holding their sick children. I’ll call him “Saleh” and her “Samiyah”*. His face is mixed with fear and determination for his sister to be seen. Earlier I saw him kiss her head when he thought nobody was looking. He loves her.
She is two, a little girl with platted hair, sat on her brother's knee. He says their mother is at home. I think he means she is here in the refugee site, perhaps under a shelter made of plastic sheeting, or simply under a tree like other families we have seen. The father, if alive, is probably still in Sudan, where all the fighting is.
I quickly ask Saleh to tell me his sister’s health problem, knowing that this late in the day we won’t have time to see everyone before we have to leave the site for security reasons.
He talks about her diarrhoea first, but you can see she is starving. Her hair has changed colour from lack of nutrients, and she's exhausted, barely connected to her surroundings. I ask to see her arms, hardly wider than my thumbs, and I gently check her arm circumference with the special measuring tape we use to assess nutrition status. Samiyah’s result is “Red - Severe Acute Malnutrition”, and she’s well below the threshold.
We explain to Saleh that we will give him sachets of therapeutic food, a specially made mix of peanut paste and nutrients to treat malnutrition. We tell him that he must give her two sachets per day, and that we have enough to give him one week's supply. Hopefully, I think, by that time we will be back here again with more. Hopefully the rains will not fill the waterways which could block the route to the site. Hopefully she will survive long enough to get the next ration.
