13 Jun Four hours to save four million children
Andrew Wander, AlJazeera
Graves come in two sizes in Kenya’s impoverished North Eastern Province: large for adults, small for children. You don’t need to be a statistician to see that rates of child mortality are high here; a simple visit to the graveyard in the desert village of Hadaja reveals as many small mounds as large, as well as an open grave (size: small), yet to be filled.
Villagers say that most of the children are dying from preventable diseases; pneumonia is a prime suspect for many of the deaths, malaria for others. “If it’s coughing, we think it’s pneumonia,” says Abdullah Duale, the village elder who offered to show me the graveyard. “If it’s fever, then it’s malaria.” There is no hospital in Hadaja, so that’s about as advanced as diagnostic medicine gets here.