Dadaab , Kenya ( CNN ) -- When I was in the third grade , a classmate of mine died of leukemia . None of us knew he was sick , only that his mother had n't let him attend school in a while . More than 30 years later , I still remember the awful day my mom told me my friend had passed away . I made a card for his mother , and walked to their house to deliver it . She was too overcome to take any visitors , but thanked me and took the card . I can recall her broken up face when she shut the door . Over time we lost touch , but during the holidays a couple of years ago , I stopped by her home to pay a visit . She recognized me right away , smiled and invited me in for a cup of coffee . And then , while hanging my jacket , she began to tremble and cry . So many years later , the sorrow was just under the surface . The experience left an indelible impression on me , one that I better understood after becoming a parent myself . It violates a natural order of life to bury your own child , and I am not sure the grief ever goes away . Impact Your World : How you can help . That 's the position 30,000 Somali parents found themselves in this summer . And , 600,000 more children may be buried before the end of the year . In just about any other place on Earth , those numbers would scream out from international headlines , but not here in East Africa . Inside the Dadaab Refugee Camp , a mass burial site sits within walking distance of the close cluster of tents . Amin Hassan took me to see the tiny burial site of her 1-month old daughter , Addison . It was nearly lost among all the other shallow , hastily dug graves . Small sticks mark these raised plots of dirt with nothing else except bits of colored plastic trash stuck in the ground and blowing in the wind . There are no nameplates , no flowers and no reminders of their lives . People here just vanish . Misery in world 's largest refugee camp . `` She was perfectly healthy when she arrived , '' Amin told me . They had left Somalia in search of food and water , and felt relief when they finally reached the camp . It may have been contaminated water that caused little Addison 's intractable diarrhea and vomiting or an overwhelming infection . Pertussis or whooping cough is something they see quite often here . `` And measles , '' one of the doctors told me . Many of these infections are wildly contagious , especially among the hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated kids in these camps . Saving Ahmed from starvation . As I stood and spoke to Hassan , with all those tiny burial sites around us , I could n't help but think of my friend and his mother . I thought of that unnatural order of parents burying their children . I thought about Hassan 's lifelong grief . Amin Hassan dug the grave for her daughter by herself . Watch Sanjay Gupta MD Saturday and Sunday at 7:30am ET . For the latest from Sanjay Gupta MD click here .
Jack 's visit with Somalian families brings back memories . He recalls the grieving mother of a boyhood friend who died . Thousands of Somalian parents have buried their children this way .