With tiny arms and protruding ribs Khaled, barely a year old, stares blankly at the ceiling from his hospital bed. Each movement requires a great effort. He yawns and blinks in slow motion.
The little boy in a pink fleece is one of hundreds of thousands of children in Yemen at risk of dying of starvation. The country is running out of food after two years of civil war in which more than 10,000 people have been killed. “He was just starting to crawl,” said Safia, 20, his mother. “Now he has stopped. Look at him. He has completely slowed down.”
Khaled is lucky to have made it to a hospital ward in Sana’a, the capital. Tales abound of children and the elderly dropping by the side of the road on their way to seek medical help. A far greater number are dying at home.
“It’s distressing seeing all these kids on the verge of death,” said Kevin Watkins, head of Save the Children, our partner for this year’s Sunday Times Christmas Charity appeal. “We are trying to raise public awareness and get health workers and supplies into the worst affected, hard-to-reach areas.”
More than 2m of Yemen’s children are malnourished, a quarter severely. At least one child dies every 10 minutes from starvation and associated illnesses such as diarrhoea and pneumonia, according to Unicef, the children’s charity. Hospitals cannot cope.
Advertisement
“Our health system is falling apart,” said Hilel Mohamed Al Bahri, deputy manager of the Al-Sabeen hospital in Sana’a. “We may soon have to close.”
Plastic bags are used to cover holes in broken incubators for babies. Each day families seeking help have to be sent away. “Some will go to a private hospital,” said Samia, 25, a doctor’s assistant. “But those who can’t afford it will just go home.”
One of the babies, admitted with pneumonia and weighing only 3½lb, has defied the odds by surviving for two weeks. She is listed as “unnamed”: her parents deposited her at the hospital and left, unable to pay the small fee that the hospital charges since government funding dried up three months ago.
Staff have not been paid since then and many health workers have gone home. Medicine has run out. Saudi Arabia has imposed a blockade as part of its effort to restore to power a government that was ousted by rebels, known as the Houthis, who are sponsored by Iran.
The proxy war between regional “puppeteer” powers has destroyed the economy and infrastructure, reducing parts of Yemen to rubble. Civilians have paid an appalling toll: tens of thousands have been killed or injured, many in Saudi airstrikes, and 3.2m have been left homeless. Schools and hospitals have been bombed.
WHAT YOUR MONEY COULD BUY
Advertisement
Health centres are overflowing with tiny bundles of suffering. Ten-month-old Ali cries in his mother’s arms until he is handed a packet of Plumpy’Nut peanut paste, a therapeutic food for malnourished children.
Salwa, his mother, had carried him four miles to the clinic. She could not afford the bus fare. She, her husband and seven children survive on one bag of rice each month. They sleep on blankets on the floor. Water comes from a stream carrying parasites and water-borne diseases.
Food had been scarce in Yemen, the Middle East’s poorest country, even before the war broke out in 2014. “Now things are desperate,” said Watkins, who refers to a “pre-famine environment” in which 14m people do not have enough to eat.
At another health centre Saoud, 30, holds up Saleh, her eight-month-old son. “He lost so much weight I didn’t know what was happening,” she said, adding that a doctor had diagnosed severe malnutrition after measuring the boy’s arm with a tape. Saoud’s husband is a charcoal-maker but “we don’t get enough money from that” to survive on, she said. “I feel helpless and sad.”
Nearby was Noha, 19, cradling her baby daughter, Amira, in her arms, another victim of the malnutrition that threatens to cripple an entire generation.
Advertisement
“She is weak and cries a lot in the night,” said Noha.
“The doctor gave me medicine for diarrhoea, vomiting and coughing but the rest of the treatments were not available.”
The airport has long been closed, except for the occasional UN flight. It is swarming, bizarrely, with stray cats. Supplies are often blocked at the main port, as a Saudi-led coalition tries to stop weapons supplies from Iran to the Houthis.
Some drugs are available at hugely inflated prices and the parents of dying children sell whatever they can, from cars to livestock, to pay for them.
According to Watkins, however, the poorest put off going to hospital — often until it is too late.
Advertisement
By donating to our appeal you can help health workers to reach them. “I don’t want my baby to die,” said Safia, the mother of Khaled. “I just want him to get better.”
How you can give
Pearson, the world’s largest education company, has generously pledged £100,000 of matched funding. In addition to £100,000 which has been donated by the healthcare company GSK, this means every £1 donated up to that amount will be worth £2.
Online Go to www.savethechildren.org.uk/sundaytimes
Advertisement
Call 0800 038 0212
Post Download, fill out and send in a coupon to donate. You can find the coupon in the newspaper or by going to tinyurl.com/ChristmasappealYemen
Text HELP to 70008 to donate £5* to Save the Children’s Emergency Appeal
*You’ll be billed £5 plus standard rate text message. We receive 100% of your donation. By texting HELP you consent to future phone calls and SMS about our work and how you can support us. Include NO PHONE to opt out of calls and SMS. Queries? 02070126400
