GOUDOUDE DIOBE, Senegal — It’s 10 a.m., and the 2-year-old is still waiting for breakfast. Aliou Seyni Diallo collapses to his knees in tears and plops his forehead down on the dirt outside his family’s hut.
Soon he is wailing inconsolably and writhing on his back in the sand. A neighbor spots him, picks him up easily by one arm, and gives him a little uncooked millet in a metal bowl. The toddler shovels it into his mouth with sticky fingers coated in tears and grime. The crying stops, for the moment.
Each day is now a struggle for the women of this parched village in north Senegal to keep hungry children at bay, as they search desperately for food. Aliou’s mother can only recall one time in her life when it was worse — and that was more than 20 years ago.
“I start a fire, put a pot of water on it and tell the children I am in the middle of preparing something,” Maryam Sy, 37 and a mother of nine, says in a raspy voice. “In reality, I have nothing.”
Here are the two most alarming things about Aliou’s story: He lives in the richest country in the Sahel, and the worst is yet to come.
More than 1 million children under 5 in this wide, arid swath of Africa below the Sahara are now at risk of a food shortage so severe it threatens their lives, UNICEF estimates. In Senegal, which is relatively stable and prosperous, malnutrition among children in the north has already surpassed 14 percent, just shy of the World Health Organization threshold for an emergency.
Hunger in this region is a lurking predator that never quite leaves and comes back every year to pick off the weakest. Even in a noncrisis year, some 300,000 children die from lack of food across western and central Africa. All it takes is a drought and a failed harvest, and those who are now barely living on one meal a day will starve.
“If you don’t get certain nutrients, your brain is damaged, and you can never recover,” said Martin Dawes, West Africa spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency. “You are then obviously far more vulnerable to a reduction in your food bowl turning into acute and severe malnutrition.”
Aliou’s 3-year-old sister Fatimata and 8-year-old sister Kadja have orangish hair growing in at the roots — a telltale sign of the protein deficiency that comes from eating just one bowl of porridge a day. The girls are neatly dressed, but their clavicles poke through their tops like hangers.
Haby, their 4-year-old sister, has streaks of orangish-blonde hair that frame her face, almost as blond as the Cinderella cartoon character printed on her dusty T-shirt. Her mother worriedly smooths down the wisps around her braids. She does not know the culprit is lack of protein; she wonders if it’s something in the water.
The U.N. World Food Programme serves lunch at school, but the Diallo sisters don’t go. Their parents can’t afford the school supplies.
It’s not supposed to be this way in Senegal, a country of more than 12 million people where sushi bars dot the seaside capital.
Here in the northeast region of Matam, the drought couldn’t have come at a worse time. The country is already battling high food prices. And because of the global economic downturn, fewer Senegalese in this region have family members working abroad and sending money back home.
In better times, there was a vegetable garden in Goudoude Diobe, with cabbage and eggplants for a community of nearly 1,300 people. Families grew enough millet, sorghum and corn to feed the village and its 250 children.
Now most here, even the breast-feeding mothers, eat only a bowl of rice once a day. If they are lucky, it is cooked with oil.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 05/27/2012