That was the last the world will probably hear of Fatima. Fatima was a child photographed by a BBC team in a MSF hospital in Niger. Fatima was so starved her body had stopped absorbing water. Her mouth was infected with parasites and she could not eat.
I want to recommend to everybody the reports by Hilary Andersson for the BBC on the crisis in Niger. Her daily reports are available on the BBC web site. I won’t provide a link but ask you to find the most recent one as they are updated each day. If you want to see the finest of reporting, check her dispatches out.
Hilary’s reports are difficult to watch but I ask you to make the effort. Her style is simple, unemotionally delivered descriptions of what she found. Without hysteria the facts accuse the west for its ignoring of the crisis until it became desperate.
Aid was too late for Fatima. It may be too late for the boy who is covered with sores. His body is starting to not fight the infection. A crisis will come if his blood gets infected but he has become stonger. He can now say “my skin hurts”.
The rains came too late for one family’s livestock. They are now reduced to eating the rotting meat scraped from the corpses. The head of the family’s mother and grandmother lie around with water as almost their only sustenance. One child died last week.
In the second poorest nation on Earth the crops have failed or have been eaten by locusts. Where they came, the rains came late and are adding to the misery. The ex-colonial power France sent some aid but enough for a small proportion of those strong enough to reach feeding stations. Many have to be turned away until they are ill enough to qualify for food. The mothers’ breasts are empty bags. Their newborn survive on the gruel they share with their mothers. A few day’s food can make dramatic differences. One child we saw earlier lying near death is now strong enough to walk.
There are heroes in this situation. The MSF staff who agonise over which child should have food. The mothers who walk miles carrying their babies in the hope they will get food.
We must also recognise the heroes and heroine in the BBC team. Without them we would not know about Fatima. Without their reports the world would not have been stunned into finally getting aid to the country. It’s often easy and justified to damn the main stream media for their incompetence. For once let’s praise a team. They have not driven in a truck of grain. They have not treated a single sick child. But by their skills another little girl called Fatima might just make it.
Years ago another camera crew told us the first stories of the famines in Ethiopia and those led to Band Aid and the campaign to halve poverty. Sometimes you can believe a TV airhead claiming to be a journalist could not change a diaper. The best can change the world.