"When you are hungry, cold is a killer, and the people here are starving and helpless." Not many of us can relate to such a statement, but millions of ‘starving and helpless' people throughout the Horn of Africa know fully the pain of elderly Somali mother, Batula Moalim.
Moalim, quoted by the British Telegraph, was not posing as spokesperson to the estimated 11 million people (per United Nations figures) who are currently in dire need of food. About 440,000 of those affected by the world's "worst humanitarian disaster" dwell in a state of complete despair in Dadaab, a complex of three camps in Kenya. Imagine the fate of those not lucky enough to reach these camps, people who remain chronically lacking in resources, and, in the case of Somalia, trapped in a civil war.
All that Batula Moalim was pleading for was "plastic sheeting for shelter, as well as for food and medicine."
It is disheartening, to say the least, when such disasters don't represent an opportunity for political, military or other strategic gains, subsequently, enthusiasm to ‘intervene' peters out so quickly.