Images of poverty in Niger leave many stunned
Ndirangu Wachanga / Staff Columnist
Issue date: 9/30/05 Section: VIEWS

Excruciatingly painful sights of starving people in Niger continue to confront us in our living rooms at prime time. These images are so horrendous that, despite their months-old presence now, they are still frighteningly chilly.

We have agonizingly watched pot-bellied children with bleary eyes, looking maddeningly confused by what is happening to and around them. With their faces sapped of life, these young souls are veritable exhibits of despair in fighting for existence. Not even their feeble and cracked lips can hold onto their mothers' shriveled and dry breasts.

Their arms are too decrepit to scare away flies finding relish on their pus-inflamed sores. Dry mucus has clogged their nostrils. And they wriggle in pain as they struggle to insufferably catch a breath, which may be their last. As they cling to their mothers' chests, desperately in search of comfort, most of them are dead by the time a news story is filed.

According to World Food Program Executive Director James Morris, most of the children we see in news reports are beyond help. The world waited for too long.

We have seen emaciated mothers mourning their children. Their wrinkled, lifeless faces are touching sights of human suffering. Even more unnerving is their sense of hopelessness, of their inability to help their dying children. We may never know how torturous it feels to mourn your child while waiting for yet another one to die, all before your groggy eyes. How traumatic to bear the pain of losing an entire family while waiting to die of hunger.

We have seen men, physically shrunken and emotionally defeated, feeding their families with carcasses of their livestock, their dilapidated clothes hang unfittingly on their withered bodies. Their bony cheeks, showing ribs and dusty bare feet is a grotesque picture that deafeningly scream to our face with an ominous voice as they wonder where they will be the following day.

We have seen a vast mass of land, inhabited by nothingness and death. Interspersing the portentous sound of vultures flapping their wings in the sky are airplanes bringing aid to this angst-ridden country. Natural vegetation is long scorched. Rivers have dried up. Bones, both of human and animals, can be seen strewn in some areas.

When the United Nations sounded the alarm about this disaster in November last year, the world seemed not convinced. It was probably waiting for the graphic pictures. And surely the pictures would soon start streaming in. What using a dollar to save a life could have averted has now risen to $80 per day per person to help the victims. But ours is a world only moved by graphic images.

Niger was visited by this tragedy when swarm of locusts wreaked havoc on its crops. The rain then failed. And when it came, it was with vengeance. The Niger was flooded. Probably, the situation would be more sickening had the government not heeded the "advice" of the International Monetary Fund to stop stockpiling emergency stock. But it was not just advice. It was an order.

It is estimated that almost 4 million people are in danger of starvation. And the time you have taken reading this piece, hundreds of people in Niger have unwillingly taken a pilgrimage to the hereafter.

Ndirangu Wachanga is a journalism graduate student from Nairobi, Kenya. He can be contacted at gnimzeewachanga29@yahoo.com