Peace Meals by Anna Badkhen

Author:Anna Badkhen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the United States in 2008, more than twelve million children did not have enough to eat, according to various antipoverty groups, and in Massachusetts, approximately one in ten children that year went to bed on an empty stomach. In the world, more than a billion people are starving, and every day, almost sixteen thousand children die from illnesses that could have been prevented had these children had access to enough nutrients. In the pediatric ward of Garissa Provincial Hospital in 2006, all fifty-six children in the charge of Dr. Khadija Abdalla were dying of starvation.

Humid air pressed down on the ward with a stifling heaviness that seemed never to bulge: not when the mothers slouching on sagging cots slowly flapped the loose ends of their tie-dyed head scarves over their absent-faced children; not when the fans churned uselessly above the cots and the plastic still lifes of water jugs and cheap, chipped bowls with unfinished baby formula. The heat poured in through the mosquito netting of open windows like syrup, clung to the perspiring white walls painted with garish balloons. Even the large, black-and-green flies did not lift themselves up in the air when Dr. Abdalla, the chief pediatrician at the hospital, made her afternoon rounds, but lazily crawled out of her path along the pale brown floor tiles that smelled of cheap disinfectant.

The drought that had forced the Woman with a Broken Jug out of the bush in search of water had killed the livestock and destroyed the crops of the parents, rendered barren the mothers’ breasts, and wasted the children’s bodies, eroding their limbs to the thickness of a grownup’s thumb. Assisted by six nurses, two per shift, who had time to do little more than deliver medicine and weigh the patients, the doctor was fighting to reverse the effects of malnutrition and treat the diseases that typically affect starved children everywhere close to the equator: tuberculosis, measles, malaria, cholera, dysentery, pneumonia.

Hypothermia, too, was a problem, despite the suffocating heat: “They have no fat,” Dr. Abdalla explained, curtly.

There was no tenderness in the doctor’s voice, no warmth in the way she touched her fragile patients. It was as though she was resisting becoming attached, as though she knew that these children would not be in her care for long, and was steeling herself. She may have been in charge of the main pediatric ward in the region, but ultimately, it was not up to her to determine whether the children made it through or succumbed to the famine that had put at least half a million Kenyan children at risk of starvation. The decision lay with the children’s mothers—most of them barely adult themselves. Every day, as nurses in the pediatric ward weighed the children to see if the treatment was working, the children’s mothers weighed the pros and cons of the treatment itself, doing the unsentimental arithmetic of famine: Who needs them more, the famished baby in their arms or the hungry family back in the

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