One of them, Fana Ali, was 6 months old but weighed only 12 pounds, her skeletal frame convulsing with each breath. She wore a tiny, bright yellow dress and she had big brown eyes. A doctor fed her sugar water through a syringe. She locked her lips around it.  Less than an hour after she arrived at the clinic, health workers decided Fana needed to be evacuated to a hospital with electricity and more medicine. Xavier Henry, the local coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, called the Cameroonian military for an escort. This is still a war zone, and access to roads is largely dictated by the armed forces in the region.  But the request was rejected without explanation. Thirty minutes later, Fana died. She had malaria and severe acute malnutrition.  The baby’s aunt carried the body back to their two-room home. Fana’s mother, Adama Adam, wept, the tears streaking onto the blue headscarf wrapped under her chin. She was only 15, her skinny arms mostly hidden under flowing clothes.  “We never have enough food,” said Jeme Bukar, Adam’s cousin, who lives in the same house.  Male relatives washed Fana’s tiny body and placed it in a wheelbarrow. Then they picked up shovels and axes, walking toward the packed cemetery just outside the town.  “I tried to call for the escort,” said Henry, shaking his head, his voice cracking.  His last posting was in Yemen, where yet another hunger crisis was unfolding. But the desperation and the scale of the problem in Nigeria have leveled him.  “I’ve never seen anything this bad,” he said.
More than 3 million people displaced and isolated by Boko Haram are facing one of the world’s biggest humanitarian disasters.