Suhani Bunglani fans flies away from her two baby girls as one sleeps motionless while the other stares without blinking at the roof of their tent, her empty belly bulging beneath a green flowered shirt. Their newborn sister already died on the ground inside this steamy shelter at just 4 days old, after the family's escape from violent floods that drowned a huge swath of Pakistan. Now the girls, ages 1 and 2, are slowly starving, with shriveled arms and legs as fragile as twigs. More than 100,000 children left homeless by Pakistan's floods are in danger of dying because they simply do not have enough to eat, according to UNICEF. Children already weak from living on too little food in poor rural areas before the floods are fighting to stay alive, as diarrhea, respiratory diseases and malaria attack their emaciated bodies. Doctors roaming the 100-degree camp that reeks of urine and animal manure have warned Bunglani three times to take her children to the hospital, or they will die. The mother says she knows they need help, but she cannot leave the tent without her husband's consent. She must stay until he returns, even if it means risking her daughters' lives. “I am waiting for my husband,” she says, still fanning flies from the sweating babies. “He is coming.” The floodwaters that swamped a section of Pakistan larger than Florida continue to inundate new areas, forcing even more people to flee. At least 18 million have already been affected, and nearly half of them are homeless. Many have been herded into crude, crowded camps or left to fend for themselves along roads. But doctors warn the real catastrophe is moving much slower than the murky water. About 105,000 kids younger than 5 at risk of dying from severe acute malnutrition over the next six months, the United Nations Children's Fund estimates. “You're seeing children who were probably very close to the brink of being malnourished and the emergency has just pushed them over the edge,” says Erin Boyd, a UNICEF emergency nutritionist working in southern Pakistan. “There's just not the capacity to treat this level of severe acute malnutrition.” cont. added by: JanforGore
