A WORKER of international children’s aid group ACF walks with Mark Real Jay “Emman” Luwas, a boy who was barely alive until the group found and helped nourish him. NICO ALCONABA
ARAKAN, North Cotabato—Mark Real Jay Luwas lives. Four years ago, he was suffering from severe acute malnutrition (SAM). Today, Emman, as neighbors fondly call him, is a shy 5-year-old boy.
“We thought he was going to die,” his day-care teacher Mary Jane Alegarbes said.
The boy’s neighbors in the remote village of Kinawayan, some 10 kilometers from the town center of Arakan, North Cotabato province, had the same thoughts.
“He was so thin. He was skin and bones,” neighbor Mary Joy Magbanua said.
Luwas lost his mother when he was barely a year old.
“She died and I was left to look after four children,” said Rudy, the boy’s father.
Rudy, however, is having difficulty putting food on the table.
2 roles
“I need to tend the farm to feed the children,” he said of his small corn farm.
Food, however, came too little as the children only had boiled cassava, banana and sweet potato as staples.
Busy with farming and with occasional work as a farmhand, Rudy forgot to look after the children’s health, particularly Emman’s.
Emman’s family lived far from the cluster of residents in the village center. So when environment officials ordered a relocation of homes as soil cracks appeared in the old village center, it was only then that people saw Emman’s real condition.
“I realized that his condition was really bad only when health workers checked on him,” Rudy said.
Action Against Hunger, known internationally as Action Contre la Faim or ACF International, placed Emman under its nutrition program.
Plumpy’Nut
Emman ate Plumpy’Nut, a peanut-based paste filled with vitamins and minerals, for six months. This is the same Plumpy’Nut—with 500 calories per sachet—that international relief organizations use to feed malnourished children in countries hit by famine.
After six months of the Plumpy’Nut diet, gone was the old Emman.
“He was no longer pale. He grew hair,” Magbanua said.
All over Arakan town, ACF has attended to 58 SAM patients from 2011 to 2013, while 11 others were treated this year.
In the village of Kabalantian, there were six SAM cases this year. One of those treated was 3-year-old Baby Anton, who was discovered on May 7 while health workers were conducting “Operation Timbang (Weight Screening)” in the village.
Baby Anton, at the time of the screening, weighed only 5.8 kilograms and the biggest part of her arm was only 97 millimeters in circumference when the arm circumference of a normal child her age should be at least 185 mm. She should weigh 8 kg at least.
At four months, Baby Anton was left to her grandmother’s care after her mother left for Manila to work as a house help. Already lacking in nutrients, Baby Anton’s health deteriorated early this year when farms in Arakan dried up due to a lack of rain.
In the second week of her treatment, Baby Anton’s weight went up from 5.8 kg to 6.4 kg. Part of her upper arm reached 106 mm in circumference, near the ideal.
In the third week, her weight was 7 kg and the part of her arm that once measured only 97 mm (barely the thickness of a mobile phone) now measured 110 mm.
Improving health
In the fourth week, Baby Anton weighed 7.9 kg, nearly the ideal 8 kg. Her upper arm that used to be no thicker than a mobile phone now measured 112 mm. She continued treatment until the desired targets—8 kg and 135 mm in upper arm circumference—were met.
When told that Baby Anton would be discharged from the ACF nutrition project, her grandmother, Editha, expressed worry.
“She might go back to being malnourished,” Editha said.
ACF said Baby Anton would be enrolled in the local government’s feeding program to ensure that she remained healthy.
Some 23 km away in the village of Kinawayan, Emman continues to be the healthy boy that he has become after the ACF intervention.
His father, Rudy, still has to go to his farm and leave his children behind. He, however, is confident the children will no longer go hungry as neighbors help look after them.
“I call them when it’s lunchtime. We share whatever we have,” said Magbanua, a mother of six children and a neighbor of Rudy’s.
For Magbanua, Emman should never go back to what he once was.
“How can we afford to feed our pet dog, and not feed these kids?” she said.
“Luwas,” in Cebuano, means “save.” And true to his last name, Mark Real Jay Luwas has been saved.