FEEDING THE HUNGRY IN DROUGHT-STRICKEN ETHIOPIA

Field Report from CHRF Board Member (June 2006)

This is my first extended trip to Ethiopia. We have come here to oversee and participate in the distribution of food in Angacha and Gibbe - two areas hard hit by the drought that has devastated large portions of Eastern Africa.

Thanks to the generosity of people like you, we were able to provide over 85 tons of food relief to local victims. This translates into some 423,500 life-saving meals over the next two months. The average cost per meal ranges from $0.09 (for basic survival rations) to $0.15 (basic meal + beans). The high nutrition value meals are more expensive - around $0.25 per meal - and we save these for the most at-risk children.

Distributing food in crisis situations like this is an indescribable experience. Watching the people's faces light up as they receive the food, listening to their words of gratitude, and seeing many of the elderly recipients weep as they walk away with their food - it's incredibly moving. I try to focus on that - what we could do to help. Otherwise I can drown in the grief of what we weren't able to do - the people we weren't able to help.

What we provided today will only last two months. Then there will be nothing to eat until October. Unless people like you and me send - what is for us - a few extra dollars, many of these people will die.

When There Isn't Enough for Everyone

In seeking to distribute the food to the most desperate, Elias - our man on the

ground - went out to the areas where we would be working and began discussions with the village leaders. With painstaking patience these men would go household by household, assessing who were the neediest. Usually, this was predicated on things such as the presence of disease, a single parent household, and dying children.

The painful reality was that a majority of these people needed help, and we couldn't help them all. As we wanted to witness first hand the assessment process, Elias arranged a gathering for us: A gathering of about 300 mothers, all with infants.

Nothing can prepare you for this level of human misery. Nor can I adequately describe what we saw and experienced. Some scenes were so miserably awful that it would be inappropriate to even take a photo, much less send it along to you.

From around 100 yards away, as I walked toward the people, I was overwhelmed with the stench of rotting flesh, the smell of death.

You would think that 300 mothers with babies would be creating quite a din of noise, but there was an eerie silence. The babies were too weak too cry.

As we walked from mother to mother, they poured their hearts out to us. One child, who looked 1-year old, was actually 6-years old. Many of the children had edema - an accumulation of fluid between cells in the soft tissue of the body. Edema is an early warning sign for illnesses such as AIDS, cirrhosis of the liver, congestive heart failure, diabetes, and other diseases. We were told that some of these little ones would not live to the end of the week.

We each held some of the children. How could we not? I wanted to will my health into them, pray God's mercy upon them, to say in some small way, "I care. I grieve with you, for you. And there are so many people back in the US who feel the same way.who sent me to say that we care, that we want to help."

What made this even more painful was that each mother clearly believed that if she could tell us her story, if we held her child, if we took a photo of them , then relief would be assured and their child would be saved.

Tragically, we didn't have enough to help all of them, and for many of them it was already too late.

Yes, we intend to go back, and we intend to do whatever we can to help these mothers and their children.  

It costs around $20 a month to provide two high-nutrition meals a day to an at-risk child. It costs around $9 a month to keep the child's mother alive.

It's not very much, really, to save a life.