What It Feels Like to Be a Hungry Child

My name is Dalmar. In Somali, it’s a portmanteau of “dal” (land) and “mar” (to travel). It means: a versatile traveler. A traveler who’s seen many places.

It’s a good name. It fits.

A childhood of plenty

I was born under trees in a remote village.

My family were pastoralists. We had all animals. What these pastoralist communities do is, because they know the land, they move between Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya. These three countries have a border, and we have Somali ethnic communities that live among this border in the three countries. So, for us, we didn’t know whether it was Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia.

We just knew, this is our land.

My father, and my mother, they didn’t go to school. The only thing they knew was how to deal with animals, so we had our animals, we depended on our animals — mainly camels and a few goats.

Famine comes for the family

Famine doesn’t just come overnight.

There’s always either a political cause or a natural cause. Conflict and natural disasters are the two main causes that combine and make things worse. They are intertwined. I don’t even know any longer which one causes which.

As any humanitarian knows, most modern famines are man-made — be it through mismanagement, conflict, or crisis — and that historically, famines are much less likely to occur under functioning governments and societies.

When I was a child, I remember hearing about the famine in 1967, but also how our entire community and country mobilized to intervene to help.

This wasn’t the case a few years later in the early 70s’ more severe drought.

 

There was no water, nothing. The rains we were expecting failed.

 

 

And, unlike in 1967, there was a political conflict. The leaders weren’t able to mobilize the country in the same way.

This is what happened and still happens today. What causes famine is lack of political will. And that’s what happened to my family.

Not an ordinary dry season

We saw that everything around us was dying. Everything around us died.

I was a child — around maybe five, seven years. I don’t know, really.

And I need you to understand that when I talk of years and things like that — we don’t know the exact dates or ages. So, all these things, I’m looking at now that I’m educated, and I’m trying to piece it together. So, I don’t even know my actual date of birth. 1970. 1973. I don’t know.

But it’s very clear, before the famine, my family was very happy. I still remember this because I used to run after the camels and goats myself, helping my dad.

 

What I remember is we had plenty when there was rain. There was plenty.

 

 

We had a seasonal movement. Every dry season, families separate. This is the life, the cycle of life for pastoralists. We separate. Every dry season there’s four or five months that we are away from our families.

During the dry season, the stronger ones, especially men and boys, went with the animals to where the boreholes were. They were dark, they dried up more slowly, so the stronger ones would go there with the animals, because there was water. So, when this drought started, all my father and my animals were moving to the places where we used to go.

The women and children were left behind in the small settlement areas where we lived all together. Every once in a while, they would send a group of the stronger men back to the communities, taking milk and meat and things like that, because, when there was rain, there was plenty.

When the last camel dies

But this time the drought started becoming very severe. Even the wells where we were moving to save ourselves during dry season dried up. Everything completely dried up. The animals — starting with the cows and goats — they started dying. The camels were last to die.

You have to understand, in this culture, until the last camel dies, the pastorals don’t leave. That’s their life. If only this one can survive, they think, maybe rain is going to come tomorrow.

But now when the place started dying, when the animals started dying, the men said, now we have to go back. So, we had to trek back to the community to see, where we left the women and children, if there’s anything there.

I know now that what kills people is not actually hunger. Hunger doesn’t kill. It’s because the body becomes so weak and anything, any small disease that attacks it, kills it. That’s how people die. Hunger weakens the immune system, making the body more vulnerable to infections and diseases. People often die not from hunger itself, but from their inability to fight off illnesses due to severe malnutrition. Hunger is not the ultimate killer.

But I didn’t know that then.

When we got back home, we realized half of the people were already dead. Because of the drought, because of hunger, because of disease. Then the few that were left, they gathered, and they said, What are we supposed to do?

We knew we had to move to the nearest camp, but we didn’t know where the camps were. These are not places where you could go, where we’d been before, that we knew. There’s only word of mouth, that the few people who survived went to such and such a place in such and such direction. Guesses, really.

Some people said they went towards Ethiopia. That’s where the nearest camp was. Some people said, no, it was the other way.

 

In the middle of it all, all the areas had tribal differences. Conflict.

 

 

So, my parents had a choice to make. We were in a small town called Dhagxan Yo Caado, at the border of Somaliland and Ethiopia. All the animals were dead. People were dead. The few who had survived moved to the nearest internally displaced people’s camps inside Somalia, but the camps were getting very overcrowded, and, at that time, I remember, there was a civil war between the north and the south in Somalia.

So, it was becoming increasingly difficult everywhere.

Left behind

There were six boys.

My parents decided to take the youngest boy. They decided what they’re going to do is leave me and the other boys behind, and they would take the youngest and walk to the nearest camp.

Later, I learned that from there, they decided they were going to go to Uganda.

I had two uncles who had moved to Uganda during a previous famine, so they at least had family members there. And at that time, remember, there were no telephones or anything like that, so our family in Uganda didn’t know if anyone survived.

It took them months to get from Somalia to Uganda through Kenya. Again, you see, there was no border between Uganda and Somalia, so you got the rights to travel by relatives and whatever you can find.

My parents didn’t read, so traveling between boundaries was very difficult. They didn’t speak Swahili, or the local languages, so they were at the mercy of strangers trying to help them and guiding them to where they wanted to go.

They had to go all the way to Uganda, my mother and father and my youngest brother.

I learned that later.

The rest of us were left behind, four boys, and pretty much left to die.

The smell of death

One of the things that I still remember is the smell of death.

I still remember the path when my parents left me behind, because I was among the last to see them depart. They had to tell each one of the children what they were doing and that they were leaving.

When they left me and they were carrying our little brother, I still remember the footpath they took. The sun had just come up, and they were, you know, bidding me goodbye. I still remember.

I remember that and the smell of death, destruction, all these carcasses everywhere. Dry air. Vultures.

That’s what I remember.

There was nobody left. Maybe five or ten households there, so we were fending for ourselves, eating whatever we could find.

We were basically homeless. We all went to different places to try to survive.

The way I was surviving was going into a camp in a small town and scavenging whatever I could find. The camps were not as organized as they are today, where you have, you know, agencies taking care of the children who don’t have parents or things like that. It was just, whatever you could find, just literally scavenging. But at least there was food some days, so maybe at least you could have something to eat.

I didn’t know whether any of my other brothers had survived.

A reunion, somehow

We never expected my mother to come back. Two years later. The famine had passed. We thought we had survived the worst. We, the boys, were all in different places, but she found us all and brought us together. She brought us back to Uganda. All of us.

I don’t remember much about it, honestly. I remember more about the day she left us.

But she found us and brought us to Uganda. Even in Uganda, it was difficult.

The relatives that we came to in Uganda didn’t have much, so again, we had to be separated. We went with different relatives in Uganda.

I had to go to a small city called Nabilatuk, which was in northeastern Uganda, with one of my mother’s uncles, and then later, I had to move to another relative between who lived in northern Uganda, the border of South Sudan and Uganda, a place called Kaabong primary school, which was a missionary school.

I lived there. That’s where I went to my first primary school, Kaabong in northern Karamoja area, close to the border of South Sudan.

And then, as if that was not enough, Idi Amin was overthrown, in 1979.

Civil War

There was a civil war, so again, we had to run.

The families that survived during the war, they ran. Everybody was running for their lives.

We were trying to get to Kenya from Uganda.

We weren’t driving a car, we had a dump truck and the road was blocked by stones.

The young boys and the men got out of the tractor and started clearing the road. The women and children and everyone else, the older ones who couldn’t move, were left on this tractor. It was a big tractor.

As we were clearing, we were attacked by the tribes that lived there.

 

They killed everybody except the few men and boys who were clearing the road.

 

 

I was separated from my family, it was only me and my uncle, we were among those clearing the road ahead, and we saw maybe three or four hundred meters away, there was a really dark forest, a big forest, and so we ran as fast we could. We went into the forest, and we wandered for seven days in that forest.

Fortunately, we met this local tribe from the other side, a tribe that was hostile to this other tribe that attacked us, and they came to our rescue. They collected us together.

They told us everyone who was in that vehicle, in the dump truck, died. Everybody. They killed pregnant women, children, and elderly people. Everybody. Only the people clearing the road survived.

Going to school to eat — and also to learn

This local tribe was very kind to us. We stayed with them for a few days, and then they moved us to the next border in Kenya to the nearest police station, called Oropoi. The Kenya Police took us from Oropoi to Lodwar Police station, in norther Kenya. We were kept in this police station for about a month or two. I can’t remember very well….

Kenya has a large Somali population, so you could technically get into the country. We’re not strangers, so they let us.

We had relatives there and that’s how I went to school and survived all those years, but I will be honest, for me, the only reason I went to school is wherever I went, we had international agencies that were helping people who wanted to go to school.

When in Kenya, there was a small place, a small northern region called West Pokot and we settled at a small border town called Konyao. It’s on the border of Kenya and Uganda.

Konyao, that’s where we all got together as a family, ten years down the road, and that’s where I completed my primary school. We stayed there for a period until again, we were attacked by the local tribesmen, and we had to flee north to the northern Kenya to Turkana District, settling at a small town called Lodwar.

 

All these places we lived, there were people who were pastoralists, like my parents. And because my mother and father knew how to deal with animals, they chose to go to these places, where pastoralist

 

 

Unfortunately, also because we were foreign, they could tell we were very different, not from even within Kenya itself, so that’s why, again, all the time, we never settled. I think for me, as a person, the only time I settled is when I came to the US as a refugee. I’ve never in my life settled anywhere else. I never stopped running until I came to the US.

In Kenya, I didn’t have documents, or anything. When they talk of dreamers, for example, in the US here, all these people, children who are brought here when they were young didn’t have any documents. That was me in Kenya, and that’s where I lived until I came to the US in 1990s.

And here I am today.

Fighting famine, professionally

I am the senior technical advisor for humanitarian food security, nutrition, and livelihoods. Basically, I lead the CARE emergency food security nutrition livelihoods team and based in Atlanta. Been with CARE for the last… I think 10 years. Before that, I worked with a so many different agencies, four UN agencies, three other NGOs, two US government states…

I’ve been dealing with famine all my life. My master’s degree is in disaster management with a focus on famine early warning systems.

Not many people know that I had lived through famine. It’s only come out, I think, maybe three times when we were discussing famine somewhere at a conference or something, and people are discussing famine and I felt that they don’t know what they’re talking about and wanted to set the record straight. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about famines. I couldn’t stop myself, because other people who are talking of things that they don’t know about somewhere sitting in western capitals, talking about famine and how people must die a certain way for them to consider it a famine. So, it’s not an easy story for me.

When I look at that famine, when it happened, I don’t remember the specific agencies that assisted me and my family along the way, it’s the people I still remember.

But I remember when I was going through all these countries — first Uganda, and then we came to Kenya, and then even within Kenya, I think we moved like four or five times. And we were in these very remote pastoral areas I could never have gone to school, but I did because all these schools were being assisted by the international community.

So, I would go to school, not only to learn, but also to get food. Because my parents didn’t have enough food. They would send all of us to school to go eat. And this food was coming from the international community. So, in a way, part of the reason why I am where I am today, is because there was food in those schools.

My life — surviving and coming to school and everything else — has been because of the work of the international community

Now, I believe I owe it to them, to do this work.

Gathering the courage to return. Someday.

I’ve returned to Somalia and Ethiopia, but I have never revisited Dhagxan Yo Caado, the village where I was born. Despite having opportunities and visiting Somalia multiple times, there’s a fear that holds me back. I’ve been in the region for work, but I’ve never managed to take the final steps to return to my birthplace.

I’ve been to Uganda, too, a few times, too. You know, I’ve never been to all these areas where we have gone through, but particularly in Somalia, where I was born, that’s probably the most difficult part for me.

I don’t have that courage to go through the entire process and follow the steps that I took.

But I shared with some of you and my family, I am actually prepared now to retrace everything from where it started. Now, I really want to retrace my steps and face it….someday.

“Let’s not wait for famine”

We, as the international community, are often late in responding to famine crises due to circumstances beyond our control — delayed donor funding, things like that. People think that we have famines because of lack of information. But since 2004, lack of information has never been an issue. But, still, we have always been late in our response, because, in part, we have to wait to hit the official “famine” threshold. It is the “f word” that moves things. And this truly pains me, because the reason why we’ve designed these thresholds in the first place, is to avoid hitting famine.

The only way populations to go by the time they have hit famine, they’re all going to die. So few of them will survive because of the intervention we’re going to give by that time, but those few, of course, matter so much. But we could have done more. We could do more. We would intervene immediately once we see this early warning signs, if we could, but this is just the way it is. We have to accept the weakest link in our response usually is the fact that we respond late.

We need to have a paradigm shift. If we want to help these populations, please, let’s not wait for famine. 

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