In the village, we met 3-year-old Abdo Saleh who was emaciated and ill, his fragile body wasting away in front of our eyes. A short walk away, we found 12-year-old Maysa Mohammed Ali, who could not walk or speak and was nothing more than a jumble of bones. In another compound, we found 10-year-old Samy Mohammed Shuee, his arms and legs the size of sticks, who had not seen a doctor in three years.

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And finally, a short drive from Samy’s house, we encountered 4-month-old Rageed Sagheer, who was one of many babies who bore the telltale signs of hunger: tiny frame, distended belly, wrinkled and sagging skin. We offered to take the infant to the clinic, but her father, a beggar, was not home. Her grandfather informed us we needed to have the permission of the father. So we left and later informed the head nurse at the main clinic in Aslam.

As we left Yemen in late December, we wondered what would happen to the four children.

Would any survive?

The odds were stacked against them. After four years of war between the rebel Houthis and the Yemen government supported by a Saudi-led regional coalition, more than 20 million Yemenis, roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have enough to eat. A child in Yemen dies every 10 minutes, according to the United Nations, many of them from treatable ailments.

The last time we saw Abdo Saleh was after he had been brought to the pediatric clinic in Aslam run by Makiya Ahmed Mehdi, the head nurse of the facility. Staff weighed the child on a scale and placed a diaper on him, the first one he had worn in a year.

In the following days, Mehdi told us, Abdo began to gain weight with the nutritional supplements the clinic provided. But the child was also suffering from other ailments brought on by the erosion of his immune system due to months of severe hunger.

"He was affected by the changing weather and started suffering from acute pulmonary inflammation,” recalled Mehdi. “He was coughing a lot in addition to difficulty in breathing. We started giving him oxygen.”

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Mehdi was also worried about Abdo’s other medical problems, including regular seizures. She raised funds to send Abdo with his father to the main hospital in Hajjah. But the doctors had no facilities to treat Abdo’s seizures. So his father brought him back to Aslam.

Finally, a local charity offered to cover the costs of treatment for Abdo at a hospital in the capital, Sanaa. As of this week, Abdo has steadily improved, Mehdi said.

Maysa was brought to the clinic last month and placed on a diet of vegetables and other foods to “treat her malnourished body,” Mehdi said. A local charity provided funds to transport her to Sanaa to help with her constant seizures, aggravated by her weak immune system.

Mehdi said she is still trying to convince Rageed’s father to bring her to the clinic, about a 40-minute drive from their house. But like so many impoverished Yemenis, what little money he has is used to feed his other children. He is unwilling, or unable, to spend for the transport costs to bring his infant daughter to the clinic. Mehdi said she is planning to visit the village soon and bring the girl to the clinic.

As for Samy, he remains in the village. Mehdi said she has been inundated with so many cases at her overcrowded clinic, that she has had little time to see Samy, who is not in a life-or-death situation. But Mehdi said the boy is on her radar, and she will try to help him soon.