BRETT HORNER
PATIENT WAIT: A woman waits to be attended to by the Gift of the Givers doctors at Forlanini Hospital
THE South African aid agency Gift of the Givers has arrived in Somalia with food, medicines and around 50 volunteers, of whom about half are doctors.
For three weeks now the organisation has been running feeding centres out of four camps housing thousands of displaced families.
South African aid to Somalia’s starving population is being boosted this week with the arrival in Mogadishu of two ships carrying 1100 tons of food and medicine as part of much larger consignments that will follow from the Durban-based humanitarian group headed by its founder, Dr Imtiaz Sooliman.
The organisation has been working to help feed some of the estimated 3.2 million starving people in the Horn of Africa nation. This week, a cargo plane dropped off 35 tons of aid ahead of the arrival of a contingent of doctors and media.
Mogadishu has become the centre of the food crisis in the region. A combination of drought, war and weak interim governments has produced a devastating humanitarian crisis in the country.
On Friday, the UN said nearly a million Somalis had fled to neighbouring states, while 1.4million were displaced within their own borders.
The worst of this instability is playing out in Mogadishu, where sprawling communities in makeshift plastic tents have sprung up as more and more people flood in for help.
UN satellite imagery has identified 188 of these camps and Gift of the Givers has been in the thick of the humanitarian response.
"We have to stand together as Africans and pledge our commitment to our brothers and sisters in Somalia," said Sooliman.
Apart from its feeding centres, which continue to serve thousands of nutritious "wet" meals every day, the group’s volunteer doctors have been working miracles on the medical front, too.
On Friday, surgeons performed four operations working entirely with equipment they had brought with them. One emergency operation saved the life of a woman who suffered severe internal damage from a gunshot. An AK47 bullet was recovered from her.
Somalia, and Mogadishu in particular, remains volatile even as the Transitional Federal Government inches closer to elections planned for August next year. The country has been destroyed by 20 years of civil war, the capital bearing terrible scars from years of heavy pounding.
Gunshots and cannon fire are heard every night, although some stability has been restored to Mogadishu after the African Union Mission to Somalia pushed out terror group al-Shebaab last month with a force of 6200 peacekeepers. The al- Qaeda affiliate once controlled 80% of the city.
A UN security source said terror incidents had decreased dramatically as a result . But Shebaab loyalists continue to plant roadside bombs as they resort to what the security source described as "asymmetrical warfare".
"We are going for total care of a population that hasn’t had care since 2008," Sooliman said, adding that about R2-million had been deposited towards the cause by various South African companies in the last five days.
http://www.dispatch.co.za/news/article/1967
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