title: Recovering from severe malnutrition in Yemen
text: HODEIDAH, Yemen (Reuters) - Smiling and sitting down to bread and milk with her family, Yemeni teenager Saida Ahmed Baghili is barely recognizable a year on from the photo of her emaciated frame that came to symbolize the country s humanitarian crisis. Baghili now weighs 36kg (80 lb), according to her father, more than triple the 11kg she weighed last October when Reuters first met her at the al-Thawra hospital in Sana a, where she was undergoing treatment for severe malnutrition. There the 19-year-old was unable to talk, let alone carry her ghostly, skeletal frame, which is now stronger after weeks of specialist care and time at home.  Saida s body got better because she s eating better, but she s still having trouble swallowing,  her father Ahmed Baghili said at their home in Hodeidah this month.  She can only eat milk, biscuits and juice.  Baghili s plight reflects that of many families in the Arabian Peninsula s poorest country, where a two-and-a-half-year war between a Saudi-led Arab coalition and the Iran-allied Houthi movement has claimed 10,000 lives. A quarter of the 28 million population are starving, according to the United Nations, with half a million children under the age of 5 severely malnourished and at least 2,135 people killed by cholera. Ahmed Baghili is only able to supply the basics for his family of 10, who live in a parched village on the Red Sea coast. Saida, whose illness began before the war, is able to help her father tend to a farmer s cattle in exchange for milk, with their income boosted by Ahmed making deliveries on his motorcycle and donations from humanitarian organizations.  However, he says he doesn t have enough money to send Saida for further treatment and still fears for her health. Her last appointment with a doctor was in December.  We re worried she might relapse and then we wouldn t be able to do anything because we have nothing. We don t have the transportation fee, we don t have the fee for anything,  he said. Click on reut.rs/2gxeJkK to see a related photo essay 