Photo credit @ Stephen Lock/I-Images/ZUMA Press
The current drought in Somalia will very likely become a famine – this year. More than 2 million people are facing starvation in the Horn of Africa nation that is suffering the effects of repeated rain failures and decades of conflict, according to the United Nations. A pre-famine alert was issued earlier this year, a move that U.N. officials credit with helping to avert a repeat of the 2011 famine. More than half the country, some 6.7 million Somalis still require aid after drought withered crops, killed livestock and dried up waterholes, according to the U.N. And almost 1.4 million children will risk acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF. After three extremely dry ‘rainy’ seasons, the effect has been catastrophic. 60 percent of Somalis depend on farming for survival, but as the dry landscape has caused many small farmers to lose their livestock and in turn their livelihood. While emergency workers focus on safe drinking water and food, the country is fighting its worst cholera epidemic in five years so far over 600 people have died from the disease. It will be the 3rd famine to hit Somalia in 25 years, a rate of starvation that is unmatched on Earth.
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Photo credit:Sterling Munksgard/ZUMA Press/TNS
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Nearly 75,000 refugees and migrants, including an estimated 24,600 children, currently stranded in Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Western Balkans are at risk of psychosocial distress caused by living in a protracted state of limbo, according to a recent report by UNICEF. Macedonia was one of the countries that was majorly affected by the refugee movements towards Western Europe in the second half of 2015 and the beginning of 2016. However, it was not a destination itself, but rather a transit country. On the 8th of March 2016 the “Western Balkan route” was officially closed to the refugees. One of the problems which arose out of this situation was that the refugees were at greater risk of becoming victims of human trafficking, as the majority of them started turning to smugglers in order to reach their final destination. In the Republic of Macedonia, there are two Temporary Transit Centers still open. Vinojug and Tabanovce. The refugee transit centre Vinojug near Gevgelija, just north of the border with Greece and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, looks like a make-shift village. It was opened in the summer of 2015 and has 133 residents now, mostly women and children, stuck between the future they set out to reach and the past they were trying to escape. The residents of Vinojug have little choice but to settle into a routine in their temporary barracks. There’s a set time for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The children go to a temporary school and mothers try to adapt to their new routine, far from everything they know.
Photo credit @Tom Williams/CQ/NEWSCOM/ZUMA Press
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