Title: Drought in The Horn of Africa
Est. Value: $1,000

Barbara Davidson is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photo journalist. A Canadian, Barbara is currently a staff photographer with the LA Times who worked previously with the Dallas Morning News and the Washington Times.

Back story on a ‘haunting’ image of famine in Africa

I was on assignment in Africa for six weeks. The famine was not a story that we had originally planned to cover, but when I arrived in Kenya and read about the plight of the Somalian refugees who walked some 200 miles looking for food and safety, I contacted my editors who agreed we needed to tell their story. After a couple of weeks of “permit”-gathering, a drill the Kenyan government makes all visiting journalists go through, I was on a plane to Dadaab, near the border of Kenya and Somali, home to the world’s largest refugee camp with 372,000 people, more than four times its original capacity.

The front page photo of Hawa Barre Osman looking for a signs of life from her 1-year-old severely malnourished child, Abdi Noor Ibrahim, was made inside the small Médecins Sans Frontières therapeutic feeding center at their Hospital in the Dagahaley refugee camp.

The day before I made this photo, the hospital was off-limits to all journalists after a photographer had gotten into a physical confrontation with a refugee over her picture being taken without her consent. When I arrived on the crowded, sweltering ward, all I heard was a chorus of sick children crying out in pain. Some were too weak and malnourished to even move and lay lifeless in their desperate mothers’ arms.

It was here, in this place of despair, where I met Hawa and her child. Through my translator, I learned that she was the mother of nine children, four of whom had died in Somalia along with her husband, who died from an unknown illness. She had walked for a month with her five young children to the refugee camp to escape the famine in Somalia. Her son Abdi was in the hospital for a month and was suffering from acute malnutrition. His emaciated body was covered in a painful rash. I asked if it would be OK to photograph her as she tended to her son. I explained to her that people in the United States needed to see the devastating effects of the famine. She said it would be OK.

Médecins Sans Frontières is treating more than 2,400 acutely malnourished children in its outpatient therapeutic feeding program, 130 of whom are at risk of death in its inpatient therapeutic feeding center, and 5,047 moderately malnourished in its supplementary feeding program.