Kevin Sieff, a writer for The Washington Post (May 31, 2017), identified how people within Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan have taken it upon themselves to offer assistance to others even though they themselves struggle to survive the hardships within poverty.

Elijah Karma, who over the past three years has (in addition to providing shelter to 20 members of his own family) been offering his home to 50 people at a time who were displaced by the Boko Haram conflict.

The families of the South Sudanese town of Ganyiel offered portions of their own  food, gave their beds to the elderly, and shared space within cramped huts to some of the thousands of displaced families who had escaped the fighting and possible starvation in nearby villages.

The people of Baidoa “gave and gave, food, clothes, shelter” to Mohamed Iman, a farmer, who now finds himself living as a beggar.

In Maiduguri, “the vast majority of the displaced aren’t living in U.N. camps.”  The residents within this community have opened their doors to the newly homeless – “the poor housing the poorer.”

Sieff notes that these examples of compassion are emerging from “sites of the three largest hunger crises in sub-Saharan Africa. In each country, overstretched humanitarian organizations have failed to raise sufficient funds to feed and house all of these in need. An untold number of people, most of them children, have died of malnutrition and preventable diseases.”