Seán Moncrieff: You’ve seen pictures of starving kids. But nothing prepares you for the up-close reality

Telling people that I was off to Somalia prompted a range of responses. Why? – in an are-you-mad tone of voice. One person, before correcting herself, blurted out “Oh, lovely!” Another said: “Are you going there on a little holiday?”

Understandably, people are reluctant to admit they don’t know that much about the place. Most people, I would guess, couldn’t pick it out on a map. That’s not a judgment: we can’t know everything about everything. It’s more that Somalia blends in with our image of other dysfunctional African states. Desperately poor. Violent. Hopeless.

When I was invited to travel there, I had to look it up too. And what I knew was largely based on what I’d gleaned from Hollywood films. Black Hawk Down about the battle of Mogadishu. Captain Phillips about Somali piracy. Then I did some reading: and it was enough to give me pause about going at all: especially as the invitation came from Unicef. I didn’t know if I had the mental fortitude to witness human depravity visited upon children.

That little girl ended up in hospital due to a web of events that began long before she was born

Within hours of landing in Mogadishu, there it was, in a hospital stabilisation centre: a two-year-old girl, wasted by malnutrition and a host of other infections. Swathed in tubes, she lay on her back, every breath a sawing effort. Her limbs were like twigs, the skin on her head had shrunk back, pushing out her eyes and teeth. A little boy in a similar condition had cardboard taped around his hands: to stop him pulling out the feeding tubes.

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You’ve probably seen pictures of starving kids. But that’s mediated through a screen: the movie version. Believe me: seeing the real, withered flesh of a baby is a shift into a different sort of reality.

That little girl was lucky. She made it to a hospital, and I was shown plenty of other children there who were brought back from the edge of death. But what got her there in the first place is down to interconnecting forces, some of which we witnessed in the hospital that morning. Even though we were told there was nothing to worry about, we had to wear flak jackets on the way there, while accompanied by armed guards. The hospital was surrounded by armed police while inside. There were even more armed guards employed by the hospital. Guns are everywhere.

[ Somalia: More than 1m people displaced since beginning of 2023 ]

There’s a been a civil war in Somalia for decades, the result of a bitter stew of oppressive regimes, corruption, incompetence, religious fundamentalism and repeated military incursions from neighbouring countries and the US. The fighting only caused more fighting, which in turn displaced millions of people. Then there were years of drought, causing more displacement, and this year massive flash floods, sending even more people in search of safety. That little girl ended up in hospital due to a web of events that began long before she was born. She lives today in one of the poorest countries in the world. She lives in a country that’s one of the most vulnerable in the world to climate change. And when she’s a little older, there’s a 90 per cent chance she will undergo female genital mutilation.

Aid agencies such as Unicef do extraordinary work there. They keep people alive and safe, but they know – the Somali government knows, everybody there knows – that what’s needed is a more fundamental change. Everybody knows what that might look like, more or less. How to get there without doing even more damage is the tricky bit.

On the day we arrived, there was a flood in front of the airport. Passengers were stranded on the pavement, so the airport workers used the baggage trolleys to ferry people through the water to dry ground. Because they have to be, Somalis are a highly innovative people, and despite everything I’ve described here, rather jolly too. I want to believe they’ll make it. There’s no other option.