|PIC1|On 22 March, mothers the length and breadth of the UK are opening ‘thank you’ cards, unwrapping boxes of their favourite chocolates and soaking up the fragrance of fresh flowers – typical gifts from appreciative children on Mothering Sunday. But for some mothers in the world, 22 March is a day like any other: a day of struggle simply to keep their children healthy and, more importantly, alive.

On Mothering Sunday alone, around 30,000 children under the age of five will die from preventable causes. That amounts to around 11 million children in a year, according to the UN. Awut Madut Yout of Luac, of Southern Sudan, is determined that her baby daughter will not become another statistic.

When Thial Mangiong was born she refused breast milk and was too young for cow’s milk. With no clinics nearby, Awut tried feeding Thial Mangong a solution of salt and sugar for the first seven days but knew it was not enough to keep her baby alive for very long.

“I was worried … I thought my child will not survive,” she said. Awut had every right to be concerned. In Southern Sudan, the infant mortality rate stands at 150 deaths for every 1,000 live births.

With no clinic in Luac to care for the baby, Awut and her husband had no choice but to move to Thiet, where World Vision runs the Community Therapeutic Centre (CTC) for malnourished children. Normally CTC only accepts babies that are at least six months old, but at only seven days old, Thial Mangong’s condition was already so desperate that she risked being malnourished.

The baby was admitted and fed with powdered milk for the first few weeks before being moved onto a nutritional feed given to severely malnourished children. Her condition stabilised and she was able to return home, with World Vision supplying the family with a goat to provide milk. Now the family have settled permanently in Luac so that Thial Mangong and her three siblings can stay close to the CTC.

Says Awut: “I cannot go back to Luac. My children are well off here…I need to be here so that my children will continue benefiting from the World Vision support.”

Sylvia Sasai knows all too well of another threat to millions of children across the African continent: malaria. In Narok, southern Kenya, where she lives with her seven children, the rains are a mixed blessing. Without them, the crops would fail but in the stagnant water and long grass, the malaria-carrying anopheles mosquito thrives.

Sylvia’s son Lemashol is seven but still at nursery school. The malaria that has plagued him for most of his life leaves him weak and unable to leave the home for days, sometimes weeks.

“Malaria makes my body feel weak, I get a fever and my body feels very hot, like it is on fire,” he explains. “I don’t feel like eating when food is brought. Malaria makes me feel very dull, so dull that I cannot even go outside and play with my friends. I can’t even go to school and sometimes, I go for even two weeks without going to school. I don’t eat much. I just stay at home in pain.”

|PIC1|Lemashol receives medicine from the local dispensary but it does not cure him completely so the malaria always returns. Taking him to hospital for treatment has also been expensive, Sylvia adds.

Malaria is the biggest killer on the African continent, with 90 children in Kenya and across sub-Saharan Africa dying from the disease every day.

World Vision is distributing mosquito nets to help stem the rate of infection and constructing dispensaries to offer treatment to those already suffering from the disease. Yet more needs to be done before the African continent has seen the last of malaria.

Mary Kisio, the Kenyan Government’s Public Health Officer in Narok, says dispensaries still need laboratory services so that proper diagnoses can be made. There also needs to be indoor residual spraying for the next five years coupled with an intensive distribution of treated mosquito nets if the malaria-carrying mosquito is to be totally wiped out, she adds.

Africa’s next big killers are HIV and Aids. Many of the victims are children who have inherited the virus from their HIV-positive mothers because the drugs that could have prevented it from being passed on during pregnancy are available to only nine per cent of the HIV-positive women in poor countries.

That’s why aid agencies are pressing governments to meet the Millennium Development Goals to halve global poverty by 2015. The goals include pledges to reduce the child mortality rate and halt the spread of HIV and Aids.

For Johannes Gadaba and his wife Medhanit Tessema, it’s hard to watch their adopted son Mamush grow up with HIV. The five-year-old joined the family when his mother and father – Johannes’ brother – died three years ago. Mamush tested positive for HIV not long after their deaths.

“We are the only two people in this village who know about Mamush. If our neighbours knew, they wouldn’t allow their children to play with him,” Johannes said.

But Johannes and Medhanit, both Christians, have vowed to raise Mamush in spite of his uncertain future and the frequent drought that makes feeding the family, including their other children, even more difficult.

“Even when his father was alive we loved Mamush,” Johannes said. “And we love him now -- just as much as our other children. Every day is a struggle for our family but we pray that Mamush will live for many years, for as long as we can continue to care for him. We pray to God to give us the strength, even when there is nothing to eat.”

Mosquito nets are just one of the ethical gifts available from World Vision’s ‘Must have gifts’ catalogue for Mother’s Day at www.musthavegifts.org. To find out more about World Vision’s international development work, visit www.worldvision.org.uk