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Tripletssparedcertaindeath

The infants had only days left before getting help at a feeding center.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 19, 2006

EL FASHER, Sudan - Myriam Ibrahim thought she had seen it all: three years of violence during which her Darfur town was invaded twice; days in hiding as gunmen roamed the fields, preventing her from planting crops and making her family dependent on food relief.

But she faced a new calamity last month, when triplets doubled her children in number.

"I wasn't expecting it; it was so difficult," she said, recalling spending nearly 24 hours in labor in her hut, assisted only by a midwife.

Stress and hunger left her with no milk for the newborns. They were beginning to starve when a doctor with the U.N. Children's Fund found them two weeks ago in their town, Mellit, and brought them 30 miles south to a feeding center in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.

When they were found, Fayrous weighed just over 5 pounds. Her sister, Fardous, was smaller. The smallest, Fawzia, weighed just 3 pounds, 5 ounces. Her head still looks huge in contrast to her tiny trunk and twiglike arms and legs covered by distended skin.

"At least one or two of them would have died of malnutrition within a few days if they hadn't come here," said Afaf Briena, a UNICEF nutritionist who is monitoring the babies' progress at the government-run clinic.

More than 180,000 people have died in Darfur since 2003. Most were women and children killed by conflict-related malnutrition and disease, aid workers say.

At El Fasher's feeding center, with about 40 beds for mothers and their emaciated infants, the effects are already apparent. "Our number of cases has more than doubled since early May," said Jamal Abdallah, the Sudanese doctor who runs the clinic. "There isn't a single free space."

In the ward with the most serious cases, a large painted Mickey Mouse smiles from the wall at babies who lie in a deep sleep next to their mothers or sit motionless, eyes staring emptily.

"Hunger has sucked most of the life out of them," the doctor said, explaining the eerie silence in a clinic full of babies.

A mother walked by, distributing dried dates to nurses and the other mothers to save for a token gift to clinic personnel when their babies are ready to be discharged. "On average, only one baby dies each week," the doctor said.

The triplets stayed in a separate room for infants under 6 months old, the age when they are particularly vulnerable to disease. All had gained sufficient weight over two weeks and were ready to be discharged.

"I have to go home soon. I have three other children to look after," Ibrahim said.

She said her husband married a second wife and stopped supporting her.

Margaret Schenkal, a Swiss nurse at the feeding center, said she would get the mother a goat so she could give the milk to the triplets.

"It should do for the first six months," the nurse said. "But what will they eat after that?"

[Last modified June 19, 2006, 05:49:24]