BAIE D’ORANGE, Haiti — It was late afternoon, and the young mother was hiding in the kitchen of her banana-thatch shack, lighting a cooking fire that she hoped her neighbors would not see; she gets food aid while they must scrounge to eat.
Her 4-year-old daughter, whose sunken eyes drew worldwide attention in an Associated Press photograph that showed her dangling limply from the strap of a scale, grinned in anticipation.
It has been a month since little Venecia Louis got emergency treatment for malnutrition, and now she is walking and playing and even has a pinch of baby fat on her cheeks.
Venecia was among dozens of children suffering from severe malnutrition who were airlifted from this remote region in Haiti’s southeast to hospitals in Port-au- Prince after 26 children died from starvation. As a result, Venecia and her family now get just enough food aid to scrape by.
Venecia smiled last week as her mother, Rosemen Saint-Juste, prepared a can and a half of rice that would be dinner for six people. She has gained some weight, and her arms are plumper after treatment with antibiotics, anti-worm medications and enriched milk. But she is by no means cured from her life-threatening bout with malnutrition.
The child’s 30-year-old mother hoards what she can to protect her children’s health but says she must give away some to the hungry families who live nearby or risk their revenge, by physical attack or the voodoo spell she thinks they might cast to kill her children.
“The food I have is going to last for three days” instead of four, she said after giving away some of her rice. “If I don’t share it with my neighbors, the devil will eat my kids.”
Little attention had been paid to the villages around Baie d’Orange, located on a muddy plateau 6,000 feet above the Caribbean, until doctors from nearby cities alerted the international aid groups Terre des Hommes about deaths and severe malnutrition there.
U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., cited the AP report in urging the U.S. Agency for International Development to search for any children in danger of starvation and pledged to follow up with the Haitian ambassador and President Rene Preval.
Two church congregations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania that raised $18,000 were among many groups moved by the children’s plight.
In response to the children’s deaths, aid groups have stepped up their work in this isolated pocket that in some places lies just over a peak from the capital’s richest suburbs — but a six-hour trek away over a circuitous mountain highway, washed- out bridges and unmarked goat paths.
The U.N. World Food Program now feeds 5,000 people here every two weeks, delivering food primarily by helicopter. USAID has increased its nutrition programs by $4.5 million nationwide.
Medical aid organizations Doctors Without Borders and Medicins du Monde have set up clinics as they scour the region for more pockets of hunger.
Still, the donations are merely a stopgap measure. Residents say that what’s needed the most is support for rebuilding their fields so they can feed themselves.
On Thursday, volunteers from the U.S. distributed food and other aid to about 600 people in Baie d’Orange. People rushed a balcony to grab peanut-butter- and-jelly sandwiches, rice, beans and canned fish.
Venecia — the little girl whose image had inspired their generosity — was just a few miles away. Her mother did not know a distribution was going on.
