The extreme north of Cameroon is suffering a food shortage exacerbated by climate change and conflict with Boko Haram. Fighting has spread across the borders from Nigeria into the countries of the Lake Chad region creating a refugee and famine crisis. It was once a tourist destination, but now people fleeing violence are housed in unnamed camps where they are lucky to get a meal each day
An exhibition of Chris’s work is at St Martin in the Fields
by Chris de Bode/Panos Pictures/British Red Cross
Ramata Modou, 58, holds a photograph of herself. Ramata is community leader at an internal displacement camp for women and children in Mémé

When armed men entered Ramata’s village her husband suffered a heart attack and died. Her 17-year-old daughter was kidnapped, her three-month-old daughter strapped to her back. When she first fled to Mémé she slept under trees for two months with her six children.

She now lives in a camp for internally displaced women and children. All the women here have lost the men in their lives – husbands, fathers, brothers, sons – to the conflict. They built their own makeshift homes from sticks and thatch. There is a water pump but no sanitation.

Ramata holds her half-eaten lunch of ground red maize, white rice and crushed mango leaves. It is the only meal she and her children will eat today. The food was gathered by going house to house in the village to beg.

“Leaving my village was very difficult. We used to own cattle and sheep, but we had to leave all of those things behind. We had no choice, we had to leave. Even the roofs of the houses have now been stolen.”

People have fled violence in their village, often in the middle of night, leaving with nothing, sometimes not even their shoes. Those who arrive in Mémé are forced to rely on the kindness of new neighbours to provide clothes and food. Most families arrive with nothing, and even a battered spoon is a gift to be treasured.