Somalia's families forced to choose between children

I am in a refugee camp outside Bosasso, a coastal town in northern Somalia. The temperature is a barely tolerable forty degrees, the houses are cardboard shacks and there are herds of camels wandering about, shimmering in the stifling haze.

Outside one shack sits Asmara Mide, a 20-year-old mother with two small children in her lap. The children are quietly fidgeting, but in the circumstances they seem remarkably patient. Their mother is staring vacantly into the distance. It turns out that none of them have had anything to eat today.

Asmara and her children fled here to escape the hunger in their home region of Beladweyne, hundreds of miles south. It took ten days and ten nights in the back of a lorry, she says, and they were robbed of everything during the journey.

She raised the money for the trip, the equivalent of about thirty dollars, by selling her small house. Three dollars went on food, with the remaining twenty-seven spent on tickets for space in the back of the lorry.

Read more: Mogadishi – caught between famine and war

Twenty-seven dollars wasn’t enough for her entire family to flee Somalia’s drought, so Asmara had the most heart-wrenching of choices to make; which child to leave behind?

The eldest, a six-year-old girl, is still with her father. I don’t ask, but I presume she is judged most likely to survive Somalia’s child-killing drought.

“Every day they expect me to send money,” Asmara says. “Maybe I will bring them to this place if I can afford it, if they are still alive by then. God knows if I will see them again.”

It takes a crisis of monumental proportions to tear a family apart in this stomach-turning way.  Yet if the UN is correct, and tens of thousands of Somalis have already died of hunger, choosing between your children gives the chosen ones a better chance of life.

Most Somali refugees have fled to Kenya and Ethiopia, both of which would probably been shorter journeys in Asmara’s case.

But a hardy number – probably in the thousands though nobody has counted them yet – are escaping north to Bosasso. The town is beyond the control of Al Shabaab militants though infamous as a playground for Somali pirates.

“Save the Children”, which runs 14 feeding centres in the Bosasso region, has counted 6000 malnourished children here in the last few weeks, a doubling of its previous count.

Bosasso seems a strange destination of choice. The heat is formidable. The local government has precious little money to give anyone anything, and there’s precious little evidence I’ve seen that Somali pirates are prone to acts of charity.

Yet Somali truck drivers are making money from this catastrophe by charging $130 for the ride to the Kenyan border, when you can reach Bosasso for around $30, as Asmara and her two small children have done.

Then there are family ties. Asmara has a brother here, who sometimes makes a few shillings carrying luggage across town. And he is allowing her, along with her two chosen children, to sleep on a strip of cardboard tonight, just outside his own family’s sweltering shack.

You can follow Jonathan Rugman on Twitter @jrug