Kenya's starving children call to New Zealander

Renzo Benfatto

What does it feel like to slowly starve? When food runs out, you eat anything you can get your hands on - grass, insects, the bark from trees. Then your body begins to eat itself. Organs such as the liver and intestines shrink. Your skin becomes thin, inelastic, pale and cold.

Your hair becomes dry and sparse and falls out. Your heart becomes inefficient; your pulse slows and blood pressure falls. Your breathing capacity decreases. A slump in body temperature leads to death - if diarrhoea, malaria and other diseases haven't claimed you first.

This is the situation facing 4 million Kenyans after years of drought in much of central and northern Kenya and consequent crop failures. Even camels and zebras are dying, says Italian-born Kiwi aid worker Renzo Benfatto, who leaves his Waiheke Island home today to fly to Kenya's capital, Nairobi, where he will co-ordinate the distribution of food aid for ChildFund, a 68-year-old international child development agency.

Working through early childhood centres, he will help get food to nearly 30,000 families, the priorities being orphans, vulnerable under-5s, elderly people, and pregnant and breast-feeding mothers.

Mr Benfatto, 50, who is married with two children, has been an aid worker for more than 20 years in countries such as Sudan (where he met his Japanese wife), Iraq, Rwanda and Turkey. He led a ChildFund team into Sri Lanka after the December 2004 tsunami and will spend two months in Kenya. Part of his role is training locals to help themselves: "You have to link emergency aid to development".

Why this work, with its frustrations and sadness? "It's very interesting to be where the action is, and you have a sense of doing something useful. Plus I'm a bit of a gypsy."

ChildFund was known as the Christian Children's Fund but was rebranded in September to escape misapprehensions that it was a faith-based group. It was started in 1938, set up to help Chinese children after the Japanese invasion.

Mr Benfatto was in Kenya assessing the situation when the "dog food" debate broke early this month in Kenya's newspapers. He says that dog food manufacturer Christine Drummond, who offered to send 42 tonnes of high-protein supplement powder, was "a naive but good soul". But in general, he says, the best donations are no-strings cash to accountable agencies.

Those donations need to come now, says Peter Smerdon of the United Nations World Food Programme.

"We don't want Kenya to become another Niger, where in 2005 donations only increased when lots of people started dying," he says.