Crisis in Somalia: 'Only God can help'

A doctor applies skin cream to a child showing symptoms of Kwashiorkor, a severe protein malnutrition causing swelling and skin lesions. Photos: AP

No mother should have to lose her child. Owliyo Hassan Salaad has watched four die this year. A drought in the Horn of Africa has taken them, one by one.

Now she cradles her frail and squalling three-year-old, Ali Osman, whom she carried on a 90km walk from her village to Somalia’s capital, desperate not to lose him too. Sitting on the floor of a malnutrition treatment centre filled with anxious mothers, she can barely speak about the small bodies buried back home in soil too dry for planting.