A Wealth of Kindness Among Somalia's Poorest.

(Somalia, January 15, 2008 Ceegaag Online)  

After she escaped the urban battleground of Mogadishu, walked 20 days in the blasting heat, slept in the sand, dreamed of explosions and watched her four children get sicker and skinnier, Asiya Ali arrived one recent evening at this unfamiliar seaside town.

There was no international relief effort to greet her, only the setting sun and a town full of people already strained by the worst crop failure in recent memory. And so, scared and tired, Ali said, she turned to the only resource she had left: her clan.

"I'm Bimal," she told anyone she found wandering the soft sand streets of Marka, a process that led her to Fatima Mohamed, a distant relative she had never met.

"She cooked tea for us, gave sugar for the children, gave us tomatoes and bread," Ali recalled. "She said, 'Welcome.' "

Nearly a year after Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia with U.S. support to oust an Islamic movement there, the Somali capital of Mogadishu remains locked in a brutal urban war that has driven an estimated 600,000 people -- more than half the city's population -- into the countryside.

U.N. officials say Somalia has descended into the continent's worst humanitarian crisis, a situation veering toward famine in some areas.

Yet in the narrow streets that wind through this town of whitewashed buildings, it is difficult to find even one encampment of displaced people or a family that has been turned away.

Instead, the tired and hungry arrivals -- about 15,000 of them this year -- have been quietly absorbed into the grass-roofed houses of local residents such as Mohamed, who estimates she has hosted 10 families over the past year. Most of them, she said, are related to her through clan -- Somalia's intricate network of families, some of which trace their ancestry to Adam.

"We have nothing at all," Mohamed said. "But we do what we can."

While other parts of Africa notably Sudan’s western region of Darfur, have comparable levels of child malnutrition, there are few places where the gap between need and response is so great. The shortfall has been attributed to Somalia's lack of security, its often uncooperative government and the current focus of so many aid groups on the crisis in Sudan.

More than 200,000 of the people who have fled Mogadishu are living along a single road leading out of the city, a 10-mile stretch thought to be the largest single gathering of displaced people in the world.

The rest have fanned out to points north, west and south, arriving by truck, by donkey and on foot in towns such as this one about 50 miles from Mogadishu.

Here in the lower Shabeelle River region, long known as the country's breadbasket, vast fields of maize, sorghum and beans are shriveling for lack of rain, and food prices are skyrocketing.

Even without the beleaguered newcomers arriving daily, the situation has been so tenuous that the United Nations dispatched two ships this month with food intended to shore up the local population.

Mohamed said she had exactly one loaf of bread and a few tomatoes for her own family when Ali arrived last month. She divvied it up.

She had a bit of room in her house, and Ali and her children are still sleeping there. She had an extra dress and a piece of pink cloth, which she gave to Ali. "Without her, the problem would have been very bad. We're grateful she has a good heart," said Ali, who was wearing the dress.

Others arriving here have found refuge with local Somali groups such as one run by Mana Abdurahman, who has taken in more than 200 orphaned children this year, as well as families from Somalia's more marginal clans.

"I don't care where they're from," said Abdurahman, the daughter of a prominent clan leader.

Abdurahman walked through the place she calls her "village," a swath of sand and huts and shady palms, greeting two recently arrived families and a young girl named Asha, who had been dropped off by her Mogadishu neighbors.

In a small gesture of mercy, Abdurahman has decided to wait a while before telling the little girl she is the only one left of her family of seven. The rest were killed in a bomb blast in Mogadishu.

"Where is Ibrahim?" Abdurahman asked her gently.

"He's at home!" Asha said brightly.

"Where's your father?" Abdurahman asked.

"He's at home!" Asha said.

In the absence of more robust international aid, Somalis are mostly relying on such kindnesses and on money from relatives abroad, as well as the clan structures that have so often been blamed for undermining attempts to form a viable central government.

"Clans can be manipulated and badly used by politicians," said Mohamed Uluso, a political leader of a powerful subclan. "But clan is part of the life and welfare of Somali society, especially because we don't have a government taking care right now."

In fact, aid groups have blamed the transitional government of Somali President Abdillahi Yusuffor thwarting the meager relief effort.

In a briefing to the Security Council last week, the United Nations' humanitarian chief, John Holmes, appealed to donor nations to send more humanitarian workers and aid to Somalia, but he also emphasized the need to address the underlying political causes of the crisis.

Checkpoints manned by government soldiers and freelance militias, for instance, are charging as much as $400 to let trucks carrying food and other aid pass. U.N. workers have been arrested by government soldiers in Mogadishu, where political assassinations are becoming commonplace.

And just last week, Somalia's security chief, quoting an order from Yusuf, abruptly shut all roads and ports south of Mogadishu, leaving 3,700 tons of food on ships anchored off the coast.

The order was lifted without explanation the next day, and a battalion of rowboats headed out to offload the sacks stamped with the U.S. flag.

The other day, a crowd of several dozen families arrived with wooden carts to haul away sacks of sorghum and split yellow peas stacked at an abandoned school that was serving as a food distribution point.

Among them was Hawa Robleh, 45, who said she was receiving food aid for the first time in her life. She has to feed not only her own eight children, but also a family of distant relatives from Mogadishu who have been with her for two months.

"Life is difficult for me, but it's more difficult for them, because they left their homes," Robleh said. "We've shared everything we had."

She added, though, that even with the food rations, her generosity may not be enough.

"Since they arrived," she said, referring to her guests, "the children have become thinner."

Source: Washington Post

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