News on an Indonesia toddler who has been living on brewed coffee for
the last eight months, because her young parents were too poor to
afford formula or cow’s milk, recently shocked millions in East Asia.
Hadijah Haura, a 14-month-old girl from the village of Tonro Lima
Village, in Indonesia’s West Sulawesi province, consume 3 baby bottles
of coffee – around 1.5 liters – every day. That’s more than most
grown-ups. She’s been consuming the caffeine-rich drink daily since she
was just six-months-old, because her young parents couldn’t afford to
buy milk for her. Hadijah has been practically living on coffee for half
her life, but appears to be growing at a normal rate and hasn’t had any
serious medical problems yet. Her parents are aware that coffee is not
fit for a toddler, but claims that they had no choice, because they had
nothing else to give their daughter.
“We have no choice,” the girl’s mother, Anita, said.
Our income is not enough to buy milk for her. We’re forced to give her
coffee every day and she can’t sleep if she didn’t drink her coffee. She
would even throw a tantrum asking for her coffee before bed.”
Anita and her husband, Sarifuddin, earn only 20,000 rupiah ($1.4) a
day extracting copra or dried coconut flesh at a coconut plantation,
which barely covers the daily expenses of the household so they can’t
afford to buy milk or formula for Hadijah. Sometimes they don’t have any
work at all, so the cheap kopi tubruk coffee – made by boiling coffee
ground with sugar – is their go-to replacement. The girl has gotten used
to it, and actually asks for her bottle of fresh brew several times
throughout the day.
After news of Hadijah’s unusual diet went viral in Indonesia, along
with Anita’s statement that she had never received any milk, formula or
any kind of health from local authorities, officials from the Polewali
Mandar Health Agency visited the family and brought milk and cookies for
the toddler. They also advised the parents not to feed her coffee
anymore, because the caffeine and sugar it contains could cause her
serious harm.
Apart from the risk of malnutrition, doctors also warned that the
caffeine is a very powerful stimulant, especially for children under the
age of five, and the girl’s parents admitted that she sometimes stays
up late into the night playing by herself.
