Kristin Davis meets Madina Farah Yusuf at Dadaab in Kenya.

As conflict and drought continue to ravage Somalia, the world’s largest refugee camp keeps growing—by more than 1,000 people a day. Dadaab, in Kenya, is teeming with 380,000 people, four times the number the camp was designed for.

And more are on their way.

East Africa—particularly the triangle between south and central Somalia, northern Kenya, and southern Ethiopia—is now in the grip of a serious drought and food crisis that is affecting more than 10 million people.

Oxfam Ambassador Kristin Davis, star of Sex and the City, just visited Dadaab to help draw the world’s attention to the drought and what countless refugee families are enduring.  One of the women she met there was Madina Farah Yusuf, who walked for 10 days with her seven children to reach the camp. On the way, Yusuf came across four other children whose parents had died of starvation. She took them in and guided them to Dadaab, where they are all now taking shelter together under a tree.

“We left Somalia in fear for our lives: There was so much hunger and war,” Yusuf told Davis, before recounting her harrowing journey to Dadaab and the hardships that continue. “Bandits robbed us of our food and clothes on the way. It gets very cold at night, and the children cry. We only have one blanket. It is also unprotected out in the open. I worry that hyenas will attack the children.”

At the camp, basics are in short supply.

“We drank some tea this morning,” Yusuf continued. “But we have very little food. The rations are not enough for everyone to eat every day.”

An Oxfam pump a few hundred feet away is providing her family with water, but many people still need shelter and toilets.

Oxfam is responding to the drought and food crisis with water, sanitation services, and food. Our goal is to reach 3 million people. Your support can help us get there.

"Everyone is hungry. There is nothing to eat," says Raha Souley, who was planting beans after some rain finally fell. Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

Caroline Gluck is a humanitarian press officer for Oxfam. She is reporting from Niger.

I’ve been left with some haunting images over the last few days as I’ve travelled in Niger to document the country’s worsening food crisis.

A mother who brought in her emaciated one year old son to a malnutrition clinic, weighing half the normal average weight for a child of his age.  She was so under-nourished herself that she had no breast milk to feed him.

Families who supplement cassava and millet flour with wild leaves and berries to fill their stomachs.  Proud livestock herders for whom their animals are their sole source of income – literally, their bank accounts–forced to sell them at bargain basement prices.  And a drive through an area I have dubbed the animal graveyard – a journey of more than four miles where I counted more than 70 dead animals half-buried in the bleached desert sand. Some lay under the shade of a tree, their bared teeth grinning grimly from their sunken skulls. Read the rest of this entry »

Women dig through anthills in search of small amounts of grain the insects have stored there. Photo by Oxfam

“Five years ago the world ignored warning signs from Niger, failed to act rapidly, and lives were lost. The international community cannot make the same mistake again.”

Those are the words of Mamadou Biteye, a regional director for Oxfam in West Africa sounding the alarm for a food crisis that, so far, has failed to penetrate the consciousness of much of the western world. The stunning thing is it’s affecting 10 million people across the Sahel region of West Africa—10 million people who are scrambling to find enough to eat.

What does that mean?

For women in the Chadian village of Djaya, it means rising early and spending the day under the hot sun digging through anthills in search of small cashes of grain stored there by insects. If they’re lucky, some of them can scrape together about five and a half pounds from a day’s work. Read the rest of this entry »

Ethiopian children play in the village of Gutu Dobi where some members of the community were surviving on just one meal a day. Photo by Sarah Livingston/Oxfam America

Months in the making, a story-gathering trip to Ethiopia that I’ve been planning is finally coming together. I fly out on Thursday. I’ll be visiting with farmers, often rain-parched, in the far north and herders in the south who have been struggling to overcome a drought and food crisis that left 13.5 million Ethiopians dependent on aid for survival last year. That’s close to 18 percent of the entire country of 77 million people. And news is now trickling in that the UN has just allocated $6 million from an emergency fund to address a new spike in hunger that could leave 6.2 million Ethiopians needing food aid in the coming weeks. Poor rains from mid-February to mid-May are part of the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

At home in Zimbabwe, Lillian Pedzisa holds her grandson; her sons Tendai, 19, and Dennis, 17, prepare to cook maize. Photo by: Annie Bungeroth/Oxfam.

The New York Times reports that the food crisis is worsening in Zimbabwe where in “the hardest-hit communities, people are surviving on one meal a day and trading their cows for buckets of maize, the main staple food.” Read more about the crisis.

Family members share a meal in a house where village residents are hosting refugees from the Casamance, in the village of Janack in the Gambia. Photo: Rebecca Blackwell / Oxfam America

There are a lot of problems facing our next president, none of them simple. Watching all the rhetoric flying around, I keep thinking that words only mean so much; whoever wins this election better be able to come up with some nuts-and-bolts solutions.

But here’s one issue we haven’t heard much about, yet would be relatively straightforward to tackle: the global food crisis.

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Earlier this week, my boss, Jane, walked into the office carrying a big basket of pears. Picked from her tree and lovingly wrapped in orange towels — like babies in a Moses basket — they were small and a little dark. They reminded me of the food you get from a local farm, not quite as shiny and unblemished as the stuff in the grocery aisles, but better-tasting, perhaps, thanks to all that character.

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