Local Editor
Saba, a little girl from Hodeida in Yemen, is suffering from severe acute malnutrition with additional complications of fever and diarrhea.
Weak from hunger, Saba can hardly cry. She comforts herself by sucking her thumb, while her mother holds her and strokes her hair.
Her condition is so serious that doctors at UNICEF’s therapeutic feeding center fear she won’t survive. She weighs just 5.7 kilograms.
The civil war has caused widespread food shortages and unemployment, leaving many families without the means to buy food.
Ashwaq Al-Raei, Saba’s mother says her husband hasn’t been able to find work since the conflict began.
To help her family survive, she has started breeding livestock. “I sometimes sell some sheep to get money. We were keeping bees for honey in the past but everything has gone. We used to eat bread and take tea but now we don’t even have bread,” she said.
Saba, and thousands of the children like her, need life-saving therapeutic food, such as plumpy nut and fortified milk, to survive.
Right now, 400,000 children in Yemen are dangerously underweight and suffering from severe acute malnutrition. The ongoing war has caused economic instability and nationwide food shortages leaving the most vulnerable at risk.
Source: UNICEFF, Edited by Website Team
