Wajir diary: Why classrooms are crowded

Oxfam aid worker Brendan Cox is writing a daily diary during his short trip to Wajir in north-eastern Kenya, where failed rains have left millions without food.

Click here to read the previous diary entry

WEDNESDAY, 25 JANUARY

My new double mosquito net proved impregnable and I had a decent night's sleep at last.

To have access to food, children are attending school again

First stop today was a meeting with our colleagues from Merlin, a medical charity focusing on helping malnourished children.

They told me that the malnutrition rates are already triple their normal levels and that the huge numbers of kids currently classed as 'moderately' malnourished could, within weeks, move to being severely malnourished. It would be at this stage that the mortality rates would soar.

The local hospital here is already full of severely malnourished children. In Wajir clinic alone, one child a week is already dying and that figure is increasing all the time.

The scenes on the ward are those that we all hoped Africa had left behind in the 1980s - distended bellies, children teetering on the brink of death and mothers waving flies away from their children's eyes.

I try to imagine how I'd feel if my young nephews were in this situation. It's hard to contemplate how powerless you must feel not to be able to protect those who mean most to you.

Some of the children look extremely vulnerable and it's unclear if they'll make it through.

Later on the local Oxfam team took me to a school where I met Mohammed, its eloquent headmaster.

He said that around a month ago, half of the primary school children had stopped attending classes. He explained that the drought was so severe that families had to take their cattle many miles away in search of pasture, making attending school impossible.

Now however, school attendance is higher than it ever has been and the classrooms I saw were packed full of kids.

My relief on at last hearing some good news was cut short when he explained that the only reason they have come back to school is because they no longer have any livestock to look after, and attending school is the only way they can get food.

The situation is so bad that even people in their late teens are trying to enrol in primary school.

Talking to an Oxfam food crisis expert this evening, it's clear that this really shouldn't be happening in Kenya in 2006. It's by no means the poorest country in Africa and it has an excellent early warning system designed to prevent this sort of thing before it's too late.

Many children now no longer have any livestock to look after

In fact the alarm bells did start ringing months ago but the Kenyan government was slow to react and the international community failed to supply the extra resources needed.

It's that double failure to intervene early that has compounded the effects of what is by any standards a severe drought, and sent the area spiralling into the worst food crisis for many years.

Sadly the question now is not whether people will die - but how many.