Headline September 17, 2017/ ''' SOMALIA -SIMMERING- SOMALIA '''

''' SOMALIA 

-SIMMERING- SOMALIA '''

SOMALIA IS ALL SODDEN IN POVERTY  & misery and corruption. It could most easily break up and up, and backside slide into total inferno.

Organized crime has begun springing up. Much of the Somalians wretchedness is going to scale up by criminal networks formed by battle and civil-war and strife tested veterans.

*A journey away from one's private space in Somalia renders one as vulnerable as a clay pigeon, ready to be shot at, writes researcher Professor Nuruddin Farah and then continues........

Friends in Mogadishu, where I was visiting from Capetown, where I currently live dissuaded me from travelling to the camps outside the capital.

Mr. Murkaawi helped me meet some displaced families at his office, close to my hotel.

Again and again during our conversation I heard the refrain that the famine had been at work for months before it was being talked about, that the international response had been slow-

And that disease and child malnutrition and early deaths intensified as the famine spread across southern Somalia, more particularly in the territories controlled by AI-Shabaab.

*Moreover, the dysfunction of the Somali estate, its inability to improve the economy and meet its people's needs, the long war and the corruption of the political class had forced the Somalis to place greater trust in the international community*.

There was a clear sense that the current famine was more lethal than the one in 2011. 

''We lost a third of the beasts we owned in 2011,'' a man said. ''Now the devastation is more severe.  We've lost all our cattle. No water, no food and no seeds to plant.''

People took the only option open : They left.

Each family in the camp receives $70 from the aid groups to feed and support themselves.

I met Faduma Abdullahi, a  36 year old mother of eight, who had come to the the displaced people's camp outside Mogadishu from a village in the Kurtunwarey District in southern Somalia, about 100 miles away.

She and her sharecropper husband owned a farm and a house and survived the 2011 famine by bartering the essentials. 

This time they abandoned their farm and house because nearly everything they had was gone. The couple feared that they and their children would starve to death. 

''We borrowed the bus fare and came to the camp,'' she said. From the $70 an NGO gives them, they pay a fee for villager to look after their house.

Nobody from the Somalia government or a foreign organization had visited their farming village to offer assistance. 

I had heard of  Muslim charities working in the area near her village. I wondered if they ever helped.

''We never set eyes on an Arab,'' Ms. Abdullah said 

Many villagers -like a farmer and a teacher whom I shall call Mohammed Mahmoud Mohamed, for his safety.....  -were willing to survive on little and stay, but threats and fear of enforced recruitment by AI-Shabaab made them leave.

Mr. Mohammed, a 43-year-old father of three, ran a Quranic school with 60 students in his village. He farmed and raised cows when he wasn't teaching.

Mr. Mohammed had no more milk to sell. His cows died in the famine. His classroom began emptying as the students left with their parents.

The absence of rain, water and food forced him and his family to debate whether they should join the exodus. 

Mr. Mohammed said he wanted to stay and find a way to survive. Then AI-Shabaab began seeing him -a teacher of the Quran -as a man worth recruiting for their cause. Mr. Mohammed and his family left. 

I spoke to Mr. Mohammed about the tale of the  goat and the baby. He was not surprised. 

''It doesn't shock me,'' he said.: ''Terrible famines change the nature of both humans and animal behavior.''

The United Nations Security Council was told by the top officials in March that $2.1 billion was needed to reach 12 million people in several African countries and Yemen with lifesaving aid, but the member states and donors had delivered a mere 6 percent of that amount.

Mr. Markaawi was worried about the gap between what governments and donors pledge and what they eventually deliver.

He narrated a fold tale in which a starving woman hears a cow's moo coming from the heavens and she prays to Allah to bring down the cow so that she can feed her starving children.

The cow, when it presents itself to the woman, turns out to be a hyena. I ask him to interpret the folk tale:

''I would say that no aid whose main aim to provide stopgap emergency humanitarian assistance is good enough to do the job.''

The World Students Society thanks most humbly researcher and author Professor Nuruddin Farah, and sincerely hopes to welcome him on !WOW!:

With respectful dedication to the Leaders of the free world, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW!  -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Woe & Wars '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless