<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/19/the-summer-of-starvation-amid-trumps-foreign-aid-cuts-a-mother-struggles-to-keep-her-sons-alive/>
"Rose Natabo needs to leave one of her starving sons behind. At dawn, she
squeezes her firstborn goodbye, then wraps her youngest, Santo, to her back,
his legs akimbo at her waist. Taking the hand of her middle child, James, she
hurries away toward help, her pink plastic sandals clapping over the dry dirt.
A couple hours later, the trio are in the back of an ambulance speeding by
soccer fields, slums and footpaths. They turn through an iron gate and into the
only hospital in Kakuma, a sprawling refugee camp in Kenya’s northern desert.
After running from wars and natural disasters, this camp, the third-largest in
the world, is their home. They have nowhere else to go. Rose joins a crowd of
other mothers checking into the pediatric malnutrition ward.
It is July 8. Rose ran out of food less than three weeks ago after the World
Food Program cut rations across the camp. At the hospital, she learns why: WFP
lost its funding from the United States, the program’s biggest donor. What she
doesn’t know is that aid workers and government officials from both the U.S.
and Kenya spent the previous months begging and warning Trump administration
leaders that families like hers depended on that food to survive. But for
months, nothing changed. So Rose and thousands of other mothers watched their
children starve.
Trump’s aides say the funding cuts were necessary to reform America’s broken
foreign aid system, and they’ve begun making new investments into Kenya. “What
you’ve seen right now,” one senior official at the State Department explains,
“is there’s always some period of disruption when you’re doing something that’s
never been done before.”
For WFP, that disruption meant telling 300,000 refugees in Kakuma that a little
more than half of them will receive a meager portion of rice, lentils and oil
some time next month, in August. The rest will get nothing. Rose doesn’t know
which group she’s in. And she doesn’t know if her sons will survive that long
anyway, especially Santo, who is only 2 years old."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
