Somalia Through A Mother’s Eyes.

This week we have received heart-breaking reports from our team on the ground delivering food throughout East Africa to Somalia and Ethiopia Refugees. Many children continue to needlessly die. Thanks to CHRF Donors, together we are doing something about it by delivering hundreds of thousands of meals and making a difference in the lives of many. Please read a Mother's Reflection from the crisis on the ground in East Africa. How do you put into words the plea on a woman’s face when she desperately wants some attention for her dying child? How to explain that there’s a system of cards and a process? That all the other hundreds of mothers sitting and waiting in the scorching sun have done their waiting and it’s now their turn to have their gaunt, sick and skeletal child attended to? You need to wait yours. How do you, when waiting any longer may be a wait too long? How do you describe the particular smell that emanates from the ill and starving? It’s a distinct odor - one of poverty, one of desperation, one of hopelessness, one of imminent death. And yet these mothers DO not resign their hope on behalf of their little ones, little ones that spend all their time desperately suckling at withered, turned to dust breasts. And neither will we, regardless of the sometimes futility of it, the never ending journey of suffering and starvation. We’ve been a team in this you and us, for many, many years and still the job needs doing. There is no end. No giving up. The motivation pure, the commitment resolute and the outcome of lifting the veil of suffering and starvation, however slightly, worth every tear, every sacrifice, every hardship. From the thousands and thousands who call a few rags and plastic bags ‘home’. Those who have mud walls and a grass roof to call home but no food in their stomachs – for days and days, month after month. They work the soil, they plant the seed and then they wait. And wait, for rain. This year it hasn’t come. Their hopes die, their animals and livestock die and their children die. It’s brutally hard but it’s real and happening every single day. The facts and figures are there in the media for the reading, to be glossed over and filed away into some recess of the brain but they’re not simply numbers, they’re Enyabebe, Anybat, Gifiti. Children and people with hopes, hurts, desires, fears, dignity, dreams. Keep them in your hearts, remember them in your prayers and whatever you do, do not give up on them.