Saving Lives in Niger
Tuesday, 1 November 2005
Saving Lives in Niger
Caroline Hickson, Concern's Fundraising Director, recently returned from Niger
Last week I sat in the back of a land rover that was rushing a critically ill baby to hospital.
I wasn’t supposed to be on a mission of mercy. As Concern’s Fundraising Director, I was accompanying a number of funders to show them the work of our education programme in Niger.
But next to a school we were visiting was one of Concern’s 17 nutrition centres, so we stopped to visit. Lines of women queued anxiously with their children. It was searingly hot. I was nervous. Only with Concern for a year, I was familiar as we all are with the dreadful television pictures, but I had never seen the reality.
At the beginning it didn’t seem so bad. The women chattered. The children seemed thin but not skeletal. But as we progressed through the tents, we reached the sickest babies. Lying on mats, listless, lolling, their bones stretching their skin, their tiny wrists that I could circle with my forefinger. It doesn’t matter how many pictures you have seen, it will never prepare you.
Carmel, the Concern nurse, rushed up to us. She didn’t gloss over the situation. After three months of intense work she looked weary. “It’s really bad”, she said. “These babies are so sick. It’s three and a half hours bumpy drive to the Concern hospital and sometimes I don’t know whether it’s more dangerous to send them or not to send them. The mothers ask me ‘will my baby survive the journey?’, and I have to tell them that I don’t know.’ Yesterday she sent 40 to the hospital, this morning one full land rover has already left crammed with 20 mothers and children.
“Can you take a baby back with you?” she asks. “Another land rover will be leaving soon, but this one can’t wait.” So we travel back with mother and baby. After a few listless cries, the baby is quiet. I suddenly realise that was what was wrong with the last tent. Maybe 20 babies, but no noise. They haven’t strength to cry any more.
The Concern emergency hospital, or stabilisation centre, is a series of long buildings with brick sides and canvas roofs. Anita Ennis, a long-time Concern emergency staffer, runs it with enormous efficiency combined with an obvious tenderness and concern for the tiny babies in her care.
She takes us through admissions and into the intensive care building. A line of beds on either side are hung with mosquito nets. Mothers hold the tiny skeletal forms of their babies. A grandmother spoons liquid into a child’s mouth. Anita gently tells her to feed the baby more slowly. Local nurses and doctors quietly go about their business. Again, an unnatural silence reigns.
But as we progress through the buildings, things begin to get more cheerfully noisy. Anita shows us the charts where graphs clearly show the babies gaining weight. Treatments for malaria, anaemia and other ailments are listed. Mothers smile at us, and some of the babies shriek with fright as strange white faces come too close to goo and gurgle.
Outside the final building, mums once again queue up with their babies. But this time, it is to get their food rations to take home with them. Their children are on the mend and they laugh and chatter as I take their photo.
Three months ago I was approving copy for fundraising letters and advertising for our Niger appeal. I sat in the post room for a day when the response to the appeal was so great that all hands were called on deck to open mail. Now I see for myself the end result and I am proud to work for Concern.
But I also know I can never sit on my laurels. The little mortuary at the side of the compound is enough to remind me of that. This is a complex emergency, only affecting the weakest children. There have been food problems certainly, but they are compounded by severe health problems like malaria which must be urgently addressed. And the question must be asked, in a country where every year one child in four dies before their fifth birthday, is this really an ‘emergency’ or did the media cameras simply unearth a chronic, ongoing child mortality problem that stems from some of the severest poverty on this earth?
I know Concern will continue to respond whenever an emergency hits. I know people like Anita and Carmel and our other staffs will selflessly and tirelessly work under the most gruesome of conditions to save lives. But I also know, that to save children’s lives in Niger, we must continue to grow our long term programmes. We must defeat the grinding poverty that costs thousands of children’s lives every day in Africa. So, for my part, I will continue to fundraise as much as I can. And I hope our supporters will understand our urgency and continue to accompany us as we strive to make the world a more equitable place for all.
