"Don't forget about us" – that's the plea from people in southern Ethiopia, where malnutrition rates are soaring to record heights in the southern region, following a disastrous ongoing drought and distracted global attention.
Whenever food does go on the boil, the huts of the village fill with hungry hands and faces.
Most families here are thankful for one meal a day, but define 'meal'.
For most, a bowl of maize is mixed with water and turned into paste, to be shared among five, at least.
The lack of food and the lack of variety in what people are eating in the drought-stricken regions is why so many are requiring life-saving medical care at community health centres.
Children are triaged using a simple measuring system, known as MUAC (Mid to Upper Arm Circumference).
Two-year-old Sabla Indo's arm is measured at just 10.7cm in circumference when it should be above 12.5cm.
Nurses are wide-eyed as they explain the smallest they have measured was just 8cm.
On the mattress next to Sabla, lies an exhausted Suyada. Also two years old, her limbs have started to swell, a symptom of the most severe malnutrition.
For 10 years, nurse Elsa Hailmichael has cared for this community, and in the past six months, the number of new patients she is seeing has more than doubled.
"At least 30 every month," she told Newshub, and she can't save them all.
"There is a mother in this village who has five children and three of them have died here in the past three months," Hailmichel said.
"Every night I go home with a hurting head and heart."
There is a five-point scale used to indicate the severity of food insecurity in different parts of the globe.
Level Five triggers the formal declaration of a famine and several regions across North and South Ethiopia are now at a Level Four emergency.
There is political fear around using the word 'famine'.
But while Ethiopia has not yet met the threshold, in one of the hardest hit areas, Borena, malnutrition rates among children are surging beyond 20 percent - up from just 5 percent before the drought.
"In history, we have never seen it higher than 5 percent. We have never seen it!" said Borena's NGO coordinator, Fitsum Degemu Kore.
The communities here are leaning on each other for survival, but the people are running out of food, energy and time.
Newshub travelled to Ethiopia courtesy of Tearfund for this report.
