But here in West Timor, it is a quiet crisis. At posyandus, the village health posts usually filled with the happy sound of babies crying and children playing, the scene here is of chronically malnourished children, listless, tired – still able to stumble on, but the damage is being done. Chronic malnutrition leads to stunting, poor performance in school, and, in the worst cases, death.
“For a severely malnourished child, everything hurts. They don’t even cry, because it hurts so much to breathe,” said Dr. Maubere.
For most children at the Therapeutic Feeding Centre, the road to recovery is simple, and inexpensive: a steady diet of High Energy Milk, a mixture of oil, water, sugar and milk powder. As children get stronger, they can start to eat solid food like porridge or protein biscuits. While their children recover, mothers like Lodia learn how to make nutritious meals using the food they have available in their villages.
Sadly, not all children make it – on average, one child dies every month, usually within days of arriving at the centre.
“Sometimes, it’s just too late. I have seen 10 children die, and I remember them all,” said Maria G.D. Baria, who has been working here as a nurse for the past year.
“One girl was five years old. I treated her like my own child. She didn’t speak the whole week. She could only point to parts of her body when we asked her where it hurt. She died without uttering a word.”
She paused, and looked over at her own young son, healthy and chubby-cheeked, playing nearby.
With luck, Soviana will be one of the survivors, and she should be able to go home in two months. Already, she has gained half a kilo – which may not sound like much, but for Soviana, it is one-fifth her entire body weight.
“When we first arrived, there was nothing on her but skin. But now, you can see some fat on her again,” Soviana’s mother said hopefully, pulling down her daughter’s pants to pull at a flap of skin stretched tightly across the child’s bottom.
Soviana will go home, but unless the next harvest – already delayed by more than a month – is a good one, she may be one of the countless children who end up returning to the Therapeutic Feeding Centre, stuck in a painful trap of poverty and malnutrition.
