Two Meals a Day: MALIYETU’s Fight to Keep 16 Children Fed
August 24, 2026, Kalehe DRC- She watched the waters of Bushushu sweep away her home, her belongings, and more than 5,000 lives in 2023. One year later, she fled the gunfire of clashes in Kalehe, her son burned on the head, her husband unemployed, and her sixteen children, ten of them orphans of her sister, reduced to a single meal a day. Yet MALIYETU, 37, has not given up. In a region of eastern DRC where insecurity, epidemics and natural disasters relentlessly target the most vulnerable, her story is a cry, but also a hope. She is the face of thousands of families that WFP and World Vision food aid keeps afloat, meal after meal.
The weight of inheritance and exile
In her shelter provided by OCHA, MALIYETU lives surrounded by sixteen children.
"In my household, I live with 16 children. I take them all as my children, but only 6 of them are biologically mine, because I inherited my sister's home after she passed away. In my culture, it is very common and it is normal," she confides.
But this customary normality collided with a brutal reality: in 2023, mudslides wiped her former village off the map, causing the loss of more than 5,000 people. Then, in 2024, the conflicts in Kalehe forced her into displacement, an experience she lived as a heartbreak.
"It was hard to go through because we lacked food, we were crammed into a makeshift house, and my son Bavon burned his head during that same period," she recounts.
To scrape together a single daily meal, she and her older children worked in the fields of local farmers. Upon their return, after a month of refuge in the valley, desolation awaited: "I found the house empty, and part of the house had been used as firewood by people I do not know."
The turning point: when war kills jobs and schooling
Her husband, SAFARI, formerly a clerk at the Kalehe prosecutor's office, lost his job after the war. With four children in secondary school, MALIYETU found herself helpless in the face of school fees.
"That is why I started each of them in a small business. Some sell second-hand shoes, others sell sugary drinks, and others sell eggs," she explains.
But these income-generating activities are not enough to feed sixteen children. The family went from three meals a day to just one. "For the youngest ones, it becomes very complicated because they cannot cope."
Food aid: a vital lifeline
Today, thanks to WFP and World Vision rations, the children eat twice a day. "If the youngest had continued to eat only once a day, I believe they would have fallen into malnutrition," she says with a gravity that chills. Beyond dry rations such as rice, peas and refined oil, she receives ready-to-use therapeutic foods for children to prevent malnutrition. "This aid is vital because we produced nothing last season."
She sees this assistance as a breath of oxygen to prepare for the future:
"These efforts from WFP and World Vision over these 6 months will allow us to adapt and focus on this new farming season, in the hope of producing enough to feed ourselves next season."
MALIYETU grows soybeans, maize and groundnuts, when security permits. She embodies that peasant resilience that humanitarian aid does not replace, but supports.
A large-scale project serving the vulnerable
From January to June 2026, World Vision distributed more than 5,138 tonnes of food in the single province of South Kivu alone, and its actions extend to North Kivu, Tanganyika and Kasai. Behind these figures are women like MALIYETU, children like Bavon, entire families who, thanks to a bag of rice and a bottle of oil, regain dignity and hope. Because here, eating twice a day is not a luxury: it is a victory over oblivion.