International

MARADI, Niger - Nasseiba Ali is the face of hunger in Niger. The 20-month-old girl weighs just 12 pounds, and her eyes are clouded at night, one of the symptoms of her chronic malnourishment.

Nasseiba may survive because her grandmother was able to get her to a feeding center. But aid groups despair that so many other children are dying because the world was slow to respond.

''I thought we would not make it safely,'' Nasseiba's grandmother, Haoua Adamou, said in Hausa through an interpreter after walking several hours with the baby on her back to the emergency feeding center at Maradi, some 400 miles east of the capital, Niamey.

She sat Saturday fanning flies from Nasseiba's face.

The aid agency Oxfam warned last week that about 3.6 million people, about a third of them children, face starvation in this West African nation devastated by locusts and drought. The U.N.'s humanitarian agency estimates some 800,000 children under 5 are suffering from hunger. The United Nations first appealed for help in November and got little response. An appeal for $16 million in March generated about $1 million. The latest appeal on May 25 for $30 million has received about $10 million.

Nasseiba dozed fitfully in the intensive care tent of the emergency center erected by Doctors Without Borders in Maradi, where 55 other chronically malnourished children were receiving care. Her mother, who is three months pregnant, and her father stayed behind to work their farm.

Nasseiba tried several times to pull out the tiny feeding tube securely taped to her forehead and running down into her nose. She found sleep after several meager mouthfuls of enriched formula and what looked like a long, cold stare, sign of her troubled vision that leaves her blind at night.

Just a few steps from the critically sick, another ward sheltered children who have almost recovered.

Two-year-old Tsclaha weighed just 13 pounds and will need days to reach her target weight of 16 pounds before being declared cured.

Tsclaha, barely able to stand, happily munched a ready-to-eat, highly nutritious peanut butter mixture. Tsclaha wore a red bracelet, signaling doctors had decided to admit her.

Nearby, 40 women carrying children waited for them to be weighed and for doctors to decide which ones would get red bracelets and which ones would get orange or yellow bracelets signifying that they, while malnourished, were well enough to be sent home.

Outside the center, new tents are being set up to ease the burden on the already stretched facility, where nurses work round the clock.

A 16-ton shipment of oil, sugar and nutritional paste arrived in Maradi from France on Thursday, and several more shipments were scheduled, the U.N. World Food Program said.

''It's the worst I've seen,'' said Hassan Balla, a primary school teacher in Tarna, a village just outside Maradi.

``What is happening is really ugly. I've seen people eat leaves . . . live like animals.''

Balla, however, is optimistic.

''The world is generous,'' he said. ``Our friends heard our cries. Do you think they will let us suffer when they are living comfortably?''

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