GOUDOUDE DIOBE, senegal — It’s 10 a.m., and the 2-year-old is still waiting for breakfast. Aliou Seyni Diallo collapses to his knees in tears and plops his forehead down on the dirt outside his family’s hut.
Soon he is wailing and writhing on his back in the sand. A neighbor spots him, picks him up by one arm, and gives him a little uncooked millet in a metal bowl. The toddler shovels it into his mouth with sticky fingers coated in tears and grime. The crying stops, for the moment.
Each day is a struggle for the women of this parched village in north Senegal to keep hungry children at bay, as they search for food. Aliou’s mother can recall only one time in her life when it was worse — and that was more than 20 years ago.
“I start a fire, put a pot of water on it and tell the children I am in the middle of preparing something,” said Maryam Sy, 37, and a mother of nine. “In reality, I have nothing.”
Here are the two most-alarming things about Aliou’s story: He lives in the richest country in the Sahel, a narrow band across Africa just below the Sahara; and the worst is yet to come.
More than 1 million children under 5 in this arid swath of Africa are now at risk of a food shortage so severe that it threatens their lives, UNICEF estimates. In Senegal, which is relatively stable and prosperous, malnutrition among children in the north has already surpassed 14 percent, just shy of the World Health Organization threshold for an emergency.
Since late 2011, aid groups have been sounding the alarm about how drought is once again devastating communities where children live perilously close to the edge, but not enough donations have come in.
“If you don’t get certain nutrients, your brain is damaged and you can never recover,” said Martin Dawes, West Africa spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency. “You are then obviously far more vulnerable to a reduction in your food bowl turning into acute and severe malnutrition.”
Already the signs of damage are there. Aliou’s 3-year-old sister Fatimata and 8-year-old sister Kadja have orangish hair growing in at the roots — a telltale sign of the protein deficiency. The girls are neatly dressed, but their clavicles poke through their tops like hangers.
The U.N. World Food Programme serves lunch at school, but the Diallo sisters don’t go. Their parents can’t afford the school supplies.
