Bananas, avocados and other fruits and grains used to flourish in its dark soil, but today the only signs of farming are tiny, half-tended plots dotted around stick and wattle huts. Once the breadbasket of Somalia, this remote, war-ravaged region is now a place of extreme poverty.
In Faragurow itself some of the poorest and weakest inhabitants live in unimaginable squalor and misery and are close to starvation. “We need help. We had a very low harvest because of bad rains. We informed the world, but nothing happened. People are very hungry,” Haashi Siyad Samriye, the leader of the leper village, told The Times this week.
Mr Siyad Samriye, holding broken old spectacles to his face with a gnarled hand, explained that Faragurow — originally set up in 1925 by Italian colonial administrators as a place where lepers could live in safety and receive treatment — was still home to 700 people, more than 480 of whom have leprosy.
He arrived in 1972 from the Somali-speaking Ogaden area of neighbouring Ethiopia. He said that after independence in 1960 the Somali Government continued to look after the lepers until civil war tore the country apart in 1991.
After the dictator Mohamed Siyad Barre was overthrown, rival clans fell upon each other. Anarchy ruled as warlords and their militias looted all before them and carved up the country into fiefdoms. It has remained without a central government since.
“Those that could ran, but most of us could not. We need medical treatment, we have been forgotten by the outside world,” said Haashi Siyad.
At first sight Faragurow resembles any remote Somali hamlet. Hordes of excited children run out of their homes, shouting greetings. Then gradually, small, hunched figures emerge, hobbling and dragging themselves on sticks to greet the rare visitors.
The village is remarkably intact for a region where virtually every solid structure has been destroyed.
Hassan Gouled, the vice-chairman of the village council, sat on a makeshift terrace outside the white-walled “foot care clinic” and explained that the lepers’ disease spared them the worst of the fighting and pillaging as the young gunmen preferred not to spend time in the place.
Mr Gouled was born in Faragurow. Both his parents had leprosy and came to live with fellow sufferers. Like many of the young children in the village today, it was probably only a question of time until Mr Gouled contracted the infectious disease which, although it cannot be cured, can be prevented.
Now 74, he was 30 when the inevitable happened. “It really affects you,” he says, hitting the stump of a foot which now only has a part of his big and little toes remaining. “We need great support — we need medicine, clothes, food, everything.”
He gestured to two young brothers, aged 8 and 9, both of whom have whitish circles on sallow cheeks, the tell-tale first signs of the lepromatous form of the chronic disease which is caused by a rod-shaped bacterium. If it is not treated, progressive symptoms can include red blisters that look like a bad attack of chickenpox, then the nerve-endings go, the skin rots and limbs, damaged beyond repair, slowly disappear.
“This is their future unless we get help,” Mr Gouled added quietly, waving fingerless hands in my face.
Without care and medical treatment, the lepers — who gradually lose the sensations in the affected limb — can also injure themselves very easily.
“I have some feeling here, but when I walk on hot sands I cannot feel. I lack the strength and energy to farm. I like the action, but just cannot do it,” he adds, demonstrating a ploughing motion. “If someone gives me a hot cup of tea, I can hurt myself. I cannot tell how hot it is.”
Crowds of lepers, some with bleeding wounds on their deformed hands and legs, gather outside the rudimentary village hospital where volunteers from the rest of the community dispense what help they can. Mr Siyad Samriye says that one international charity, World Concern, occasionally delivers medicines and bandages to the village, but says that the support is sporadic and nowhere near enough to meet villagers’ needs. The only fridge in the nearby town of Jilib recently broke down, meaning that medicines quickly become useless.
Sidii Nur Osman, of World Concern, says that the lepers also need medicines for the other diseases prevalent in the area and help in providing clean water from the nearby muddy river.
“They also need education. There are no schools here. The help they receive is inadequate to cater for current needs,” he said.
As we were talking a loud wailing erupted, and out from a crowd of onlookers emerged an old woman clutching a long stick with the fingerless and thumbless remains of two hands. Her “feet” — two solid stumps of flesh — bled as she dragged herself towards us, gesticulating madly.
Hawa Nane Jimale, 50, is one of the worst affected of the villagers. She lives alone and survives by begging for meagre handouts from the others. “I am hungry, I need food, clothes too. This disease is really hitting us now.
“We are getting less and less care. Please go get us help,” she shouted.
DISEASE AFFECTS 12 MILLION
- Leprosy is also known as Hansen’s disease
- There are thought to be more than 12 million sufferers worldwide. Some 3,000 deaths from the disease were recorded in southeast Asia in 2002
- India, Brazil and Madagascar are among a handful of countries that have between two and four recorded cases of leprosy per 10,000 people
- The disease was often believed to have been caused by a divine punishment. In many societies, lepers were cut off in often harsh conditions in island leper colonies
- Today, leprosy is curable by multidrug antibiotic treatment