Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road. Christine Osborne
said Abdi Nuir, a gaunt-faced worker for World Vision who was clearly in need of a good meal himself. Showing me into a hot, corrugated-iron shed, he pointed out the worst cases lying on palm mats and feebly striking at flies.
‘We were expecting blankets with the last aid, but none arrived. As you can see, the children don’t have any clothes and at night the desert is freezing.’
Naked, dusty children with Martian-like heads on skeletal frames lolled around as we walked through the camp. Their bellies were distended by kwashiorkor, the result of long-term protein deficiency and gastrointestinal disorders. All had hacking coughs, almost certainly caused by tuberculosis, and their eyes were clogged with mucus feasted on by flies.
Gode’s only fortune was the nearby Webi Shebbelle river providing water, but at least one child, or a woman filling her water jar, fell victim to crocodiles each month.
Abdi wiped his face with his sleeve. ‘We used to have an American Peace Corps boy helping us, but he went swimming one afternoon, and in two chops he was gone.’
Wherever we went, the refugees—obviously briefed on our visit—burst into applause, making me cringe with embarrassment. Of mainly Muslim persuasion, in normal circumstances they would have refused to let me take their photograph, but dignity had vanished in their new dependence. As our plane took off, the pilot made a low sweep over the tin shed and a few of the stronger children chased after its shadow.
Warder, the second camp, was a wretched settlement of stick-and-bag huts in the bleeding heart of the Ogaden. Its 8,000 inmates were receiving food and sighting the men among us, women made a desperate attempt at modesty, biting a corner of their ragged cotton robes to drag across their emaciated bodies. Their naked children, each clutching a tin, sat in a circle around a pot of high-protein gruel cooking over a fire.
‘It takes more than three hours to feed everyone. When they finish, the round starts again, yet the death rate is still five or six a day,’ said Shimalis, who had four healthy children of his own.
The Grim Reaper was everywhere in Warder. There was no river, the wells were almost dry and non-Amharic-speaking Somali refugees compounded the situation. Only a dozen inmates of this terrible place spoke both languages. One, a thirteen-year-old boy called Korani, followed me about as I endeavoured to protect my camera equipment from the dust.
As in Gode, the weakest cases lay coughing on bags in a corrugated-iron shed. In a corner, a mournful boy sat alone, his long thin limbs folded under him like stork’s legs.
‘Is his third time in camp,’ Korani told one of the dressers. ‘All family dead. He go back to desert, but nothing to eat. Not even ant.’
‘Hungry,’ said a tiny child tugging at my jacket pockets, which I’d filled with sweets from the plane. My intentions had been kind, but with thousands of watching eyes, I dared not hand out a single one.
‘The kids are dizzy,’ emphasised the dresser. ‘With no clothes and no playthings, all they do is sleep. Sure we need food and medicine, but ask your people to send us some balls to play with before they die from boredom.’
Saving the nomads from death was one thing. It was equally important to re-settle them somewhere sustainable, and at Gen, the last stop on our visit, two hundred families who were fit enough to make a start, welcomed us with beaming smiles.
The government had allocated each family a plot on which to grow maize and 100 hectares (247 acres) were under cultivation. We watched men digging irrigation gutters off the Webi Shebelle, and famine widows who had formed women’s cooperatives, were busily weeding the fields. Once peripatetic herdsmen who walked great distances in search of a blade of grass, they were overjoyed by the new green shoots.
‘Why doesn’t it grow more quickly?’ asked one man squatting down and cupping his dusty hands around a tiny bud. Shimalis gently explained that maize needs time to ripen and that providing he never forgot to water it, it would likely yield two harvests a year.
On our way back to the airstrip, the driver lost his way and we spent two hours driving in circles through the sandy wadis. We finally sighted the plane sitting like a giant pigeon on the desert runway. However, fifteen minutes into the flight, the pilot announced we wouldn’t make it back to Addis Ababa before nightfall. Bole International Airport had no night-landing facilities so we banked east and headed for the nearest point of human contact. My heart sank—goddamned Gode.
The army quickly assumed responsibility for our unexpected return. They provided us with refreshments and a soldier was sent out to slaughter a goat. Some time after ten, a cook brought out a platter of wat and injera but in spite of my hunger, I could not eat. It wasn’t its toughness, but the thought of the truly hungry, out in the darkness.
We were four women: from the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, an irritable Frenchwoman from Le Nouvel Observateur and me, the only photographer in the group. We were to sleep on the veranda of one of the late emperor’s houses.
‘One of the many he never used,’ said Shimalis bitterly.
Observing protocol, the soldiers placed our stretchers around a corner, out of sight of the men, but the French woman scornfully decamped and set up her bed between the Telegraph and the Times. And watching me clean my teeth under a garden tap, she let fly a mocking remark: ‘Est-ce que tu portes egalement ta robe de chambre? ’—are you also going to wear a dressing-gown?
I slept fitfully under a cotton blanket and was up at dawn; there was frost on the ground and I learnt that three stiff little bodies had been discovered by dressers on their morning round of the camp.
After thanking the commander of Gode for his hospitality, we boarded our plane and returned to Addis Ababa without further incident. The other press joined connecting flights to various destinations, leaving me with a French reporter, Jean-Emile. Apparently we both had reservations on Tuesday’s Ethiopian Airlines flight to Athens, where I planned to spend a few days en route to London. But before then, I had a mission that would take me deep into the steaming heart of equatorial Africa.
In Australia, I’d been travel writer for the women’s magazine CLEO and on learning of my trip to Ethiopia, its editor Ita Buttrose, had commissioned an article on a child adopted by the magazine through Foster Parents Plan. Conrad Hilton, Julie Andrews and the Boston Symphony Orchestra were some of the famous adoptive parents of the charity, founded in 1937 to provide support for families with needy children in various parts of the world. CLEO was fostering Sisay Bonke, a four-year-old boy. My only information was that he lived in Arba Minch, a town in the remote southwest corner of Ethiopia.
At FPP headquarters in Addis Ababa, I learnt that Arba Minch lay on a ridge of the Rift Valley escarpment at a height of 2,000 metres (6,562 feet). Peasant-farmers, the people cultivated coffee and maize, but life had deteriorated under the new Marxist government and as in other parts of Ethiopia, there was increasing dissent.
A message was dispatched to Lloyd Fineberg, the regional director of FPP in Arba Minch, telling him to expect me on the morning flight. So barely twenty-four hours out of the bone-dry Ogaden, I was flying south, to the wettest part of Ethiopia, the only foreigner on a converted military transport aircraft whose passengers included two goats sliding up and down on the metal floor between our uncomfortable webbing seats.
‘Do goats ride free?’ I asked a man holding a briefcase on his knee who looked like my idea of an Ethiopian civil servant.
‘This is nothing.’ He fingered his collar. ‘I once flew down with a flock of sheep.’
Wearing only a cotton shirt and cargo trousers, I froze as wind whistled through gaps in the perspex windows, but surprisingly for Africa, our plans worked and Fineberg, a fresh-faced, thirty-two year old American, was waiting at the tiny airport.
‘It’s great of you to come all this way to meet Sisay.’ He gave me a warm handshake and a Colgate smile.
‘I hope Sisay will like the pens,’ I said, pulling out a box of coloured biros from my backpack.
‘He’ll love them. Most of the people here