RENEE MONTAGNE, Host:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
DAVID GREENE, Host:
The humanitarian crisis brought on by the drought and famine in the Horn of Africa, is affecting more than 12 million people in the region and stretching relief and aid agencies to the limits. The country hardest hit - Somalia. Somalis continue to abandon their homes in search of security, refuge and medical treatment across the border in Kenya. As NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton has been finding out, children are the most vulnerable.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRYING)
OFEIBEA QUIST: The children are among the tens of thousands of Somali refugees who've arrived in Kenya in recent weeks and Dr. Mohamed Gedi says many are in very poor shape.
MOHAMED GEDI: Yes, most of the patients come in a critical state. Two hundred patients today are here because they are children - mostly below five years old, with severe malnutrition. Almost all of the patients here are from Somalia. We do still have a lot of patients who are in a critical state in the critical ward.
QUIST: Dr. Gedi is the hospital director for the emergency medical relief agency, MSF - Doctors Without Borders. For the past 18 months, he has been treating children who arrive at the hospital, many of them close to death these days, exacerbated by an outbreak of measles in the camp.
GEDI: The problem is most of them come in a very, very bad state.
QUIST: Amino Ali Isak is the young mother of a one-year-old girl, Hanan Ali Husein.
AMINO ALI ISAK: (Foreign language spoken)
QUIST: Isak says she herself was suffering from tuberculosis. She's convinced her sick daughter also has TB. But it's clear that the child is also malnourished. She seems to cry out in pain. Hanan's mother says she left behind her husband and another child in Somalia.
ALI ISAK: (Foreign language spoken)
QUIST: It's a familiar tale. Come the drought, the crops fail, the livestock dies off, food prices skyrocket, and there's nothing more to eat. All this suffering is framed in the double jeopardy of conflict, and now famine, in Somalia. Some families have to split up as the father stays home, while the mother heads off across the border to get help.
GEDI: Because these are patients who've been coming - walking for 10, 20 days. They don't have shelter. They don't have food.
QUIST: Dr Gedi says the long trek from Somalia, often by foot and sometimes by donkey cart, means the sick infants are even weaker by the time they reach the gates of the hospital.
GEDI: You have a mother with one sick child, but she has eight or nine other children that need her care. So, sometimes, she has to choose between the one who is critically sick - and by the way, most of them have seen many of these children dying, so they think even if they try their best for this ones, she is risking the lives of the healthy ones.
ALI ISAK: (Foreign language spoken)
QUIST: Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, Dadaab, northern Kenya. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
