World Food Program issues call for assistance to help poor suffering from drought
U.S. Water News Online
JOCOTAN, Guatemala -- The U.N. World Food Program is calling on the international community to help feed thousands of Guatemalans suffering from hunger and malnutrition following a four month drought in Central America.
The World Food Program estimates that 65,000 people across Guatemala are suffering from life-threatening malnutrition after the drought wiped out corn, coffee, and bean harvests they depended on to make ends meet. The lack of rain left more than 366,000 people malnourished across Central America, the group reports.
During September alone, 15,900 more Guatemalan families began to suffer from malnutrition while they waited for food to arrive, said Celeste Bonilla, spokeswoman for the World Food Program's Guatemalan operations.
Bonilla said a boat carrying 90 tons of cooking oil and more than 800 tons of corn has arrived in Guatemala City, but that this country still needs more than 1,000 tons of basic foodstuffs to properly feed those left starving in the drought's wake.
Napoleon Gutierrez said help may arrive too late to save his 6-year-old child, who was rushed by authorities to a nearby hospital suffering from severe malnutrition.
``He was very weak,'' Gutierrez said.
The children authorities left behind weren't much better off. Half-naked and covered with mud from their shack's dirt floor, five children under the age of 10 stood around a small stove cooking five tortillas that would serve as the family's dinner.
While official statistics are not available in Roblarcito de Olopa, a hamlet near this country's mountain-dotted border with Honduras, locals say a lack of food after the drought killed 94 people &endash; and that as many as eight in 10 of those victims were children.
Hospital officials say many children arrive to the hospital so malnourished that simply feeding them won't save their lives.
``They are just too sick,'' said Yadira Escobar, a hospital official in the Jocotan's Tatutu neighborhood, where hunger has claimed 20 victims.
While hundreds of families in this region have slowly begun to receive food donated by international aid groups, many here say they will continue to suffer unless international coffee prices rebound.
``We want them to bring us other crops that fetch a better price,'' Mansilla said, adding that coffee harvests that used to feed his family for a year now only buy enough food for a few months. ``The aid is arriving ... but we don't want to go back to work for nothing.''
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