Women walk thousands of miles a day so their children don't die

A child, Fati Usman, is lying on a hospital bed in northeastern Nigeria, with no sign of life on his face.
The little boy has trouble breathing and looks very emaciated.
His extremely small size suggests he is only two years old, but his mother says he is actually five years old.
He is just one of several million people who are victims of a massive humanitarian crisis caused by an insurgency launched by the Islamist movement Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria, which has left many families in dire need of food and medical care.

Aid workers say the acute shortage of financial aid is the main reason people are starving, as the Nigerian government relies on support from aid agencies and the United Nations, which is focusing its efforts more on crises in Ukraine and elsewhere.

IDP camps are the last resort for millions of vulnerable Nigerians, but despite this, Borno State, which has the worst affected camps, decided to close all these camps last year, describing them as slums and paying US$200 per family, forcing those families to leave.
When it comes to government finances in the northeast in general, the malnutrition crisis is second only to the fighting in the region.

Aid workers predict that an estimated 1.74 million children under the age of five may suffer from acute malnutrition in northeastern Nigeria in 2022, an increase of 20 percent from the previous year, and 5 children could die in the next two months.
Ms. Othman says her son contracted measles, followed by diarrhea.
“I got some medicine to give him, but his condition did not improve. He has been suffering from diarrhea for 37 days.
After his health deteriorated, she took him to hospital in Damaturu, the main city in Yobe State in northeastern Nigeria.
"I brought him here two days ago," she says.
Five of her children had already died before this crisis and he is one of four still alive.
The 34-year-old mother is exhausted and traumatized. She fled attacks by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in the small town of Maino in Yobe, and moved to a camp for the displaced five years ago.
"We couldn't even take our belongings, not even some food," she says.

Security forces failed to stem the Boko Haram insurgency
Malnutrition has been exacerbated by outbreaks of diseases, including cholera, and agriculture has deteriorated due to attacks by militants.

Mrs. Othman's husband is a cleric but does not live with the family.
She tries to make a living by sometimes helping neighbors sew their tattered clothes in exchange for food. But the neighbors are also victims of the insurgency and have fled their homes, and their livelihoods depend mainly on aid from aid agencies and the government.
Of course, due to the difficult living conditions and the high numbers of people in need of food, there is not enough food supply to support the children, causing many of them to fall ill.
"This area is the focus, so most of the cases that come here are serious," Dr Japhet Odoko, the center's coordinator, told the BBC.
Like many doctors and humanitarians, Dr. Odoko fears disaster and works around the clock, seeing at least 40 severely malnourished children each week.
According to him, some families have traveled more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) from remote communities where medical care is not available. Many of them were living in displacement camps in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, which have closed down and are now unable to get enough food for their children, because they have not been able to farm for fear of constant attacks by the group's militants.
This stage is very critical, because the harvest season has reached its peak, but it is very meager and scarce, and there is a rise in the number of children brought since the beginning of the year, as a result, this facility and similar ones have become overcrowded with patients.
Dr. Odoku told me that his team had just finished administering treatment to a child who had been rushed through a few hours earlier.
“The child was unconscious as a result of suffering from chronic diarrhea for several days, so we had to resuscitate him,” he says.
"We actually have a lot of severe cases of hypoglycemia, shock and the like at this facility," he continued.
The facility is one of the few health centers the BBC has been able to reach in some of the hard-to-reach locations in the northeast, where aid workers are struggling to save the lives of hundreds of children.

Aid workers fear thousands of children will die of disease
At another health facility in the Bama mall in Borno state, health care workers are also racing to contain the rising numbers of cases of severely malnourished children.
100 abducted mothers and children freed in Nigeria
A “royal” wedding in Nigeria
25-year-old Fatima Bokar says she lost three children to malnutrition and traveled 30 kilometers to carry her remaining two children to the camp.
Besides my two children, Fatima, there are 22 patients in a 16-bed ward at the health center in Bama.
Her four-year-old daughter, lying on her side with swollen cheeks, cries intermittently as her mother turns to care for her other emaciated one-year-old.
On the opposite bed is another child crying while her mother tries to turn her over to make her sleep on her back, most of her body up to the neck as if it were burned.
This is the result of what doctors call third degree edema, a skin disease that occurs when there is severe swelling in the body. When the swelling begins to subside, cracks appear in the skin, making it look like a burn.
This is one of the effects of severe malnutrition, says Dr. Ibrahim Mohamed, who is in charge of the centre.
"We see a huge influx of severely malnourished children every day... and many of them live in Bama camp," he added.
Without a rapid increase in food aid, aid worker John Mukesa says, many children will die or become disabled.
Since assuming power in 2015, President Muhammadu Buhari's government has repeatedly promised to address the country's security and humanitarian catastrophe, but has largely failed to deliver on those promises.
However, it is trying to defend its image, claiming that it has achieved great success in the fight against Islamic militants, and says that the voluntary surrender of thousands of militants in the north-east is part of this success.
But the devastated communities across this region are not convinced by the successes the government is talking about.
Ms. Othman says she fears the worst is yet to come.
“Since our village was attacked, we have witnessed many tragedies. Our children are dying of diseases and this may continue for a long time unless there is a serious intervention to save our lives