Children dying of hunger in Venezuela...Fundraising Post # 01

in #life6 years ago (edited)

In view of the crisis that the children of my country are living. I have decided that all the income that I will be able to make this week will be to extend a hand to these children.

As Venezuela collapses, children are dying of hunger
Doctors in the country’s public hospitals say cases of severe malnutrition are soaring

Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death. His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals.
Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected. Aunts shooed away curious young cousins, mourners arrived with wildflowers from the hills, and relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families increasingly depend on amid the food shortages and soaring food prices throttling the nation.

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They gently placed the tiny wings on top of Kenyerber’s coffin to help his soul reach heaven – a tradition when a baby dies in Venezuela.
When Kenyerber’s body was finally ready for viewing, his father, Carlos Aquino, a 37-year-old construction worker, began to weep uncontrollably. “How can this be?” he cried, hugging the coffin and speaking softly, as if to comfort his son in death. “Your papá will never see you again.
Hunger has stalked Venezuela for years. Now, it is killing the nation’s children at an alarming rate, doctors in the country’s public hospitals say. Venezuela has been shuddering since its economy began to collapse in 2014. Riots and protests over the lack of affordable food, excruciating long queues for basic provisions, soldiers posted outside bakeries and angry crowds ransacking grocery stores have rattled cities, providing a telling, public display of the depths of the crisis.
But deaths from malnutrition have remained a closely guarded secret by the Venezuelan government. In a five-month investigation by The New York Times, doctors at 21 public hospitals in 17 states across the country said that their emergency rooms were being overwhelmed by children with severe malnutrition – a condition they had rarely encountered before the economic crisis began.

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Children are arriving with very precarious conditions of malnutrition,” said Dr Huníades Urbina Medina, president of the Venezuelan Society of Childcare and Pediatrics. He added that doctors were even seeing the kind of extreme malnutrition often found in refugee camps – cases that were highly unusual in oil-rich Venezuela before its economy fell to pieces.
Days without eating
For many low-income families, the crisis has completely redrawn the social landscape. Parents like Kenyerber’s mother go days without eating, shrivelling to the weight of children themselves. Women line up at sterilisation clinics to avoid having children they cannot feed. Young boys leave home and join street gangs to scavenge for scraps, their bodies bearing the scars of knife fights with competitors. Crowds of adults storm dumpsters after restaurants close. Babies die because it is hard to find or afford infant formula, even in emergency rooms.

Never in my life had I seen so many hungry children,” said Dr Livia Machado, a paediatrician who gives free consultations at her private practice to children who had been hospitalised at Dr Domingo Luciani Hospital in the capital, Caracas.
The hospital is one of the few still accepting malnourished infants for treatment. Other hospitals often turn them away, telling desperate parents that they do not have enough beds or medical supplies to treat their children. Nearly all Venezuelan hospitals report shortages of basic provisions like baby formula.
President Nicolás Maduro has acknowledged that people are hungry in Venezuela, but he has refused to accept international aid, often saying that Venezuela’s economic problems are caused by foreign adversaries like the United States, which he says is waging an economic war against his country.

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Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. But many economists contend that years of economic mismanagement set the stage for the current disaster. The damage was masked when oil prices were high, giving the government large resources. But when oil prices began a steep fall at the end of 2014, scarcities became common and food prices skyrocketed. Inflation could reach 2,300 per cent next year, the International Monetary Fund warned in October.
The health ministry and the national institute of nutrition did not respond to requests for interviews or official health reports containing malnutrition statistics. But the nation’s political opposition, which has been stripped of its power by the government, continues to sound the alarm.
“We have a people who are dying of hunger,” Luis Florido, a congressman who leads the national assembly’s foreign policy committee, told lawmakers in November, calling the food crisis “a humanitarian emergency that all Venezuelans are living”.

A LARGE PART OF THIS NOTE IS TAKEN FROM THE NYTIMES.

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