At the end of last summer, two United Nations officials visited the Banadir hospital in drought-stricken Somalia where widespread rebel and Islamist violence has restricted humanitarian access to the urban facility.
Reena Ghelani, then director of operations and advocacy at the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths, saw a facility that was overcrowded and crammed with hospital beds occupied by starving patients who had trudged from other regions of the country seeking treatment for malnutrition.
“They were the lucky ones. I don’t know how many didn’t make it. But to see that and to think that’s where we are again, it’s criminal,” Gehlani told Devex. “You never, ever get rid of the image of seeing parents … with children who they are slowly watching starve to death.”