I’ve covered humanitarian emergencies for two decades. I’ve seen the aftermath of war, famine, and natural disaster. But nothing — nothing — prepared me for what I saw in the Horn of Africa in early 2025. Families who had walked for weeks, their livestock dead along the trail, arriving at relief camps with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the dust in their hair. Children so malnourished they couldn’t cry. Elderly people who had simply given up, lying down under acacia trees to die. And yet, in the midst of this horror, I also saw something else: ordinary people doing extraordinary things to help each other. A 70-year-old woman sharing her own ration of rice with a stranger’s child. A teenage boy carrying an injured toddler on his back for three kilometers to reach our clinic. That’s the part the news cameras never show.
When the World Didn’t Show Up Fast Enough
By March 2025, the drought had become the worst in 40 years. Five consecutive failed rainy seasons had pushed 23 million people across Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan into acute food insecurity. Over 7 million children were malnourished. Hundreds of thousands had been displaced. The international community was slow to respond — bureaucratic delays, funding gaps, the usual machinery of hesitation. But local communities could not wait. Children cannot wait. Our team launched an emergency appeal on March 14, 2025. Within 72 hours, we had our first trucks on the road. Within a week, we were distributing food in 30 villages. We didn’t wait for permission. We just moved.
The Numbers That Keep Me Up at Night
Over the next six months, Peace League’s emergency response team delivered 1,400 metric tons of food aid to 84,000 people across 160 villages. We deployed 12 water tankers to communities where wells had dried up completely, distributing 4.5 million liters of clean water. Our mobile health clinics treated 18,000 cases of malnutrition, 6,000 cases of diarrhea, and 3,000 cases of malaria. We distributed 15,000 emergency kits — each containing a month’s supply of food, cooking utensils, soap, mosquito nets, and water purification tablets. And we did it all with a team of just 85 staff and 400 volunteers. But numbers can’t capture what I witnessed in a village called El Dera. A mother named Halima arrived at our distribution point after walking for 12 days. She carried her 18-month-old daughter on her back. The baby hadn’t eaten in three days. Halima hadn’t eaten in five — she had been giving her tiny portions of porridge to the child. When our nurse handed her a fortified biscuit, Halima didn’t eat it herself. She crumbled it into water and fed her daughter first. “She is all I have left,” Halima whispered. “My husband and my three sons are gone. She is all I have.”
The Hardest Part of This Work
The logistics of delivering aid to the hardest-hit communities was a nightmare. Roads were impassable. Fuel was scarce. Security in some areas was precarious. Our logistics coordinator, a quiet man named Moses, once drove 14 hours straight to deliver water to a community that hadn’t had a drop in three weeks. When he arrived, the elders surrounded his truck and started singing. Moses, who never shows emotion, sat in the driver’s seat and cried. “I’m not a hero,” he told me later. “I just drove a truck. They’re the ones who survived.” But here’s the truth: emergencies don’t end when the rains return. They end when communities can feed themselves again. That’s why our emergency response is always linked to long-term programs — agriculture recovery, water infrastructure, health systems. We don’t swoop in and disappear. We stay.
What You Can Do Right Now
The next emergency is already brewing. The next Halima is already walking. Our emergency reserve fund is critically low after the 2025 response, and without it, we won’t be able to deploy within 72 hours next time. A gift of any size goes directly into that fund — pre-positioned supplies, fuel for trucks, salaries for our rapid-response team. $50 provides emergency food for a family of five for two weeks. $100 keeps a water tanker on the road for a day. $250 supplies 50 emergency kits. Please don’t wait until the next crisis is on the news. Help us be ready before it starts.