Inside Afghanistan’s child malnutrition crisis

Sadly, I was personally affected by this. My mother became very sick during the fighting, but the route to the hospital was cut off by the clashes. It took days of driving for her to eventually reach treatment in Herat on the other side of the country. She died ten days after falling ill. It was a terrible time.

In Lashkar Gah, now that the security situation is more stable and people can travel again, we are seeing double the usual number of patients in the feeding center: In May, we admitted 250 children, but recently it’s been over 500 per month.

Our main concern now is that we’re running out of beds. At the moment, it’s two families—one mother and one child—to every large bed. We work hard to be flexible, but we can only admit the sickest. This means triaging patients is really important, and we make sure that those we can’t admit are seen elsewhere in the hospital.

Despite this, it is calm inside the feeding center. Although many mothers are anxious, they are happy that they are here and that their children are receiving high-quality medical care.

The family was poor and struggled to find food while the young mother was pregnant. This is the situation for many families now—there are no jobs and everything in the market is very expensive. People also have very limited access to information on health or parenting, so when their child is severely sick, they sometimes don’t know what to do or where to go.

When the baby was born, the young mother became very weak and couldn’t breastfeed. The baby girl was malnourished from the very first day of her life.

Although we treat many patients for about three weeks, this child has now been with us in the feeding center for three months. She is still weak, but we hope she will improve with our care.