By Brian Carroll

THIS past week has been the strangest of my life. Around midday today, Sunday, I will be on Eamon Dunphy’s Newstalk radio show, reading live on air a letter I wrote to Osman, a seven-month-old baby, whom I helped to bury eight days ago.

Osman died of starvation in Dadaab, the world’s biggest refugee camp. Osman is just a statistic. Technically we never met, because he was already dead when I arrived into his mother’s hut, made of tree branches and bits of plastic for a roof. But to me, he’s as alive in my mind as my own two children. But for the piece of fabric wrapped around his dead eyes, he looked like he was just sleeping. He was tiny, so small I could make out the birdcage of his ribs, and the death-ring discolouration of the skin about his neck. Osman reminded me of when my first-born Molly nearly died when she was six weeks old. She too was discoloured then, an awful yellow. So we rushed her to hospital, where she was diagnosed with a rare skin disorder. She was on the verge of septicemia and death. The doctors gave her antibiotics and within 48 hours, she was herself. She’s now eight years old. Osman’s mother had only her breast-milk to give him, and she herself was starved. He had diarrhoea and persistent vomiting, and without antibiotics, he died. We buried him in the Bula Bakti – the Carcass Dump – where he lies with scores of other children who died fleeing famine in Somalia. Ten children a day are joining Osman in shallow graves.

I would ask you to bear with me and read the following paragraph.

There are 12 million people in the Horn of Africa who are in danger of death and starvation following the worst drought in 60 years, and the first declaration of famine this century.

I must have read those statistics a dozen times in newspapers before I even thought of going to Dadaab. The figures washed right over me. It’s not that I didn’t care – or perhaps that you the reader don’t care – it’s just that you and I have enough problems in Ireland, with record unemployment, a generation facing emigration, hospital closures, the sacking of special needs teachers, universal social charges, negative equity, bastard bailed out bankers with their €11,500 retirement watches. We have the government sticking their hands in our pockets for a property tax on our homes – homes now halved in value, but still weighing like a lead foot on our necks for the rest of our working lives, which for most of us now will stretch into our seventies. So Africa, starving Africans, again! You must be joking? They had my sympathies but not my euros. How many more famines do there have to be before they learn to govern themselves, I thought, and still do. Osman, however, has changed my perspective and, I hope, the opinions of a few others.

There isn’t the space here to re-create the letter for Osman, but perhaps you can read it on-line. Our sister paper, the Irish Daily Mail, used the letter to launch its Face of Famine campaign. The reaction has been extraordinary, and people are donating in significant numbers. A civil servant friend told me the Irish Daily Mail’s campaign – and in particular the donation of 10c of every copy sold last Wednesday – would make a big difference. I got texts from strangers, vague acquaintances, colleagues, and relatives, all saying they were in tears, and would donate. When cynical and experienced journalists and editors call you to tell you they cried unashamedly reading the letter, you have to stop and reconsider the good that media outlets can still do, even in this age of hacking scandals and celebrity obsession.

Osman was the dead son of Mumini, who sat opposite me with Osman’s surviving twin, Kadida, nestled against her breast. It was 12.45pm on Saturday July 31. Kadida had beautiful big brown eyes that flicked between her dead twin, her mother and me, retaining the same scared expression. Kadida had shared the journey from the womb with Osman, and after five months living in Dinsor in southern Somalia, their parents decided to flee. So mum tied her twins about her, took three of her other children, all aged under seven, and walked over 700 kms, in 40C heat, with just a small amount of maize for food. Her husband and two older sons aged 10 and 12, stayed behind to eke a living from the few goats that had not yet succumbed to drought.

For 11 days Mumini and the children walked barefoot through bush-land and desert, hoping to get water every two to three days at ancient watering holes but many of these have dried up. They walked the length of Ireland, sleeping in the open, trying to evade the bandits who would rob or rape them. The rapists were out there, because I met one 18-year-old girl who had been gang-raped the night before as she reached the Kenyan border with her three children. As Osman got sicker along the journey, his mother must have been faced with the incomprehensible choice between losing both her twins, or perhaps saving the stronger of the two. They both made it to Dadaab, but only Kadida escaped the Carcass Dump.

I still believe that African poverty is caused more by the failings of African government than by drought and Acts of God, but we can’t stand idly by with innocent Osmans dying daily in Dadaab.  Osman shouldn’t be held responsible for his leaders’ failings, any more than Irish children for the gross political defects here. The situation isn’t helpless. I witnessed the lives of other children being saved in Dadaab through the heroic work of countless aid agencies, including unheralded Irish ones. No matter whether the euro collapses or the US defaults; no matter whether the stock markets rise or fall, and we are all plunged again into another debt crisis, our children will not starve. We will still, most of us, have enough money to educate them, and feed them to adulthood. Tomorrow morning, I’m taking my two girls to a bank to donate money. My daughter’s bodies don’t need feeding, but maybe their souls do.