The Mother in the feeding center
*flashback*All I can remember is the tiny fragments of metal flying through the air and piercing his chest.
We had escaped from the soldiers in our old small village in east Somalia, but my husband had died on the way there. He got shot. Protecting me and our son. I was on my own with my five-month-old child who was slowly dying from the lack of clean water and food.
How does it make me feel being a mother that can’t even support my own son?
I wanted to give him a home, an education, a healthy life. He did not even have a father anymore.
What was I going to tell him when he grew up?
Would I live to see him become a man?
All I saw when I looked down at him was a frail and defenceless little boy that had no idea what was going on. Surrounding us was a room filled with crying children and distressed mothers, our
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The decaying scent choked the air, I took a ragged breath and looked around trying to see what the smell was.
A strange man
This is not the way I wanted my child’s life to start, but that is the way it had. I was blessed to be somewhat safe though it was hardly paradise. I was so grateful for the extra food we had received, but it was hard to be happy when you were surrounded by malnourished children that looked like walking skeletons. Their angular bones cutting through their dry leathery skin. When the volunteers came in to hand out food there was a deafening sound of chatter and movement.
The barbarism I was surrounded by was atrocious. They held their spoons clutched tightly in their fists, shovelling spoonfuls in their mouths, their faces just inches from the plate. The silence broke after the first baby cried, one I would surely remember. That time it wasn’t a baby it was a Mother’s. She had just lost her baby. When I turned around she was holding the little bundle close to her chest and she was mourning into