Chapter 1: The Child in the Ethiopian Famine 1 The Child in the Ethiopian Famine Across the north of Ethiopia runs the great massif of highlands and mountains that, rising to four thousand metres, form the fabled Roof of Africa. Everything about the land appears stark, remote, dramatic, and timeless. Life exists, precariously, across sun-seared plateaus and atop flat buttes, the jagged gorges in deep shadows and the isolated terraces dotted with the grass-roofed huts of subsistence farms. I have returned to this land many times over four decades to cover human struggles for survival and humanitarian efforts to save lives. My connection there is precious to me because no other story ever affected me so deeply. The reason I first flew into Ethiopia for CBC TV in the fall of 1984 was to investigate alarming rumours of a giant famine advancing across the northern highlands--not just widespread hunger but a full-force famine that could kill millions of the world''s most vulnerable people. True famines are rare, arising not just from drought and harvest failures but from the combination of major calamities in severely misgoverned lands and involving failed rains, insect infestations, soil overuse, environmental collapse, extreme poverty, and some form of war as well. When such a famine occurs, oppressive governments not only try to hide it but may even collude in promoting it to curb the growth of troublesome populations.
Several times during my first reporting from the famine epicentre in northern Ethiopia that year, I made a point of visiting one particular relief centre early in the mornings: the St. Vincent de Paul Clinic, which sat isolated on a flat, burnt-out plain outside Makelle, the capital of Tigray province. A line of dull-green eucalyptus trees along its side broke up the monotone browns and greys of the surrounding fields, giving it an oasis-like air from a distance. It was anything but calm when you reached the gates. The clinic lay on the path of one of the largest mass famine migrations and was daily overwhelmed by refugees seeking help. Still more would arrive through the night and quietly line up waiting for the gate to open. The clinic was run by the Catholic order of Sisters of Charity, who had operated the mission among the poorest of Tigray regions since the 1920s. Because it was situated on a road leading into Makelle, it took some of the first brunt of the migration as increasing waves of starving and sick people trekked down from the farms in the highlands.
The Sisters, both Ethiopian and foreign, offered what medical aid they could for the sickest and helped families bury the dead with dignity. They understood that a score of diseases, from meningitis to typhoid and pneumonia, were surging among people so malnourished that a cold could be fatal. The individual stories told by the refugees increased fears that an apocalypse was building: however bad it was here, far worse realities were spreading in the trackless hinterland. Once families had exhausted everything they owned, they left with only a small pouch of grain to trek over barren and bitterly cold ground for days, past human and animal corpses. Through the terrors of the night they huddled together to sleep, only to find more dead around them in the morning. Most feared were the hyenas shrieking in the dark, attracted by the smell of death. Whole villages tended to leave together, so if one died, there would be others to bury them. Sometimes they walked for weeks, passing through ghost villages depopulated in the panic.
Death was everywhere, the stench overwhelming; a common sight was mothers still carrying a dead child in their arms, reluctant to leave it behind to such horrors. When my CBC news team and I arrived at the clinic around nine one morning, we were already emotionally battered after a week covering the hardest-hit region and still had weeks to go on just our first assignment here. With me was my hard-driving, tireless producer Tony Burman, who had fought Ethiopia''s bureaucracy for months just to get us here; our lanky and brilliant cameraman Phillipe Billard, experienced in filming crises of every kind but shaken now by what his lens captured; and sound technician John Axelson, a last minute addition to the team, fitted in well despite brutal circumstances. We weren''t surprised to find that the crowd already covered the entire stony courtyard or that both the staff and the refugees looked exhausted. A modest stone-and-concrete administrative building stood in the centre, surrounded by a few corrugated iron huts used as temporary shelters. A nurse nodded when we asked to record interviews, so, half crouching, I started down a line of parents and infants slumped along the main wall. Several had already lost one child, and their eyes pleaded as they held other sick infants. Almost immediately I noticed a short, lean man in the customary shawl who was trying to comfort a girl about three years old who looked barely conscious.
She seemed to be the most serious case there, and I kept glancing their way as I continued my interviews. Suddenly, the child slumped into a heap on the pavement. I called to a nearby nurse, and she rushed forward, picked up the girl, and raced her inside to an examination room. The father ran after them and we followed, camera rolling. As we entered, the girl lay on a table. I was struck by her face as her glazed eyes appeared locked on something far in the distance and her rasping breath slowed. In my emotional state I saw her face as a tragic symbol of Ethiopia''s countless children denied hope, robbed of life, beseeching the distant world for justice. A tired-eyed Irish sister said softly: "The child will die very soon--she has pneumonia and is very malnourished.
She will die here, maybe within fifteen minutes. There isn''t anything we can do at this point." We left to allow her to die with whatever dignity the situation could provide. Stumbling outside into the glaring light, we learned she would be buried later that afternoon in a grave being dug for the most recent dead. We drove away, not speaking much, and almost by rote continued on through the day collecting scenes of other relief operations swamped by huddled masses of the sick and dying on grounds with no hygiene, little food or shelter, and fading hope. How could we show an individual tragedy among this sea of desperation? I began mentally scripting the news item that would focus on the child''s death, the searing power of that tragic face and those last breaths. We would need the burial scene for our report, so around 5 p.m.
we drove back to the clinic. We were finally talking freely among ourselves about how emotionally upsetting that scene with the child had been, so painful to witness the end of her life. Someone seemed to speak for all of us when he said angrily that her agony drove home just how bloody hellish, unjust, and utterly depressing was everything we saw here: "Bodies after bodies of children, just bundles. Bloody hell, where''s the aid?" I hoped that viewers would identify with her and see how real people, not just vague images, were being destroyed by a famine the world could stop if it had the will. As we pulled into the courtyard, there was a bustle of activity and the shock of seeing real smiles on faces. One of the Ethiopian staff ran up, saying, "You must come!" We scrambled out and followed her toward a small crowd of people who were also smiling and clustering around the same Irish nun, who held a bundle in her arms. I approached--it was the girl, awake, alive, safe. "Sister, I see we had a little bit of luck today," I stammered.
She smiled more: "Yes, we felt a surprise pulse and we gave her one last shot and rehydration, and she will survive." She was still very sick, so the nuns would keep her in the clinic for as long as she needed to recover. The father, standing nearby, appeared dazed by the sequence of events, from doom to deliverance. I asked her name and someone replied, Birhan (Light). Her last name was Woldu. Ten days later, we returned to the clinic when we heard that Birhan was ready to be released. At the door of her shelter, the father emerged with the child standing beside him and her younger sister, Silas, in his arms. Birhan was shy of strangers, but it was a wonderful scene of survival that once more touched us all.
I finally had a brief chance to talk to the father, Woldu Menamano, who stood barely five feet tall and appeared all lean muscle and bone, so weather-beaten he seemed ageless (he was thirty-six). He had spent his life battling hardscrabble poverty through many droughts and at least two famines. Any notion of pity, however, would have appalled him, for he was an immensely proud man who insisted that, in their remote highland village of Lahama, the family''s conical, thatched, mud-and-dung-walled hut had been a loving home and a happy place when Birhan was born. Given any decent rain, he was skilled at growing crops on small plots and had built up holdings of two oxen, a donkey, and some goats. He had sold the best honey and yogourt around. In good seasons, when it rained, the highlands could be lush, but now there was only death. Though he''d never been to school, Woldu was an intelligent and vivid talker. After three years of drought, he said, the crops didn''t grow and the rivers were dry.
His wife had died of an illness and, to feed his three daughters, he''d had to sell everything, even his farm implements and the cooking pots. They had only the clothes they stood in and a few handfuls of grain. How could he not flee? I have rarely heard a better personal description of why famine is different from other calamities. Neighbours were "falling like leaves," h.