Today, I can't help remembering my Christmas 30 years ago, in 1985, half a lifetime ago. I was living and working in the Ethiopian refugee camps in eastern Sudan during the Great Famine of 1984-86. I was put in charge of the public health and sanitations programs at the Fau refugee camps managed by the International Rescue Committee (IRC, a U.S.-based NGO). When I returned from the Sudan, I wrote and published a first-hand account about the famine, Fau: Portrait of an Ethiopian Famine. It's out of print now, but used copies are still available at amazon and barnesandnoble.com and other online sites. (I get no royalties from the sales.)

I thought I would share here several excerpts from the book to give my friends at onlineliterature.com a sense of what happened and what was accomplished at that time:

p. 40 Tuklebab. Other places presented similar horrors - Wad Kowli and Wad Sharife refugee camps in the Sudan, Korem and the other feeding stations and the devastated villages in northern Ethiopia - but only Tuklebab was known as “The Cemetery.”

p. 43 In the mornings at Tuklebab, the refugees awoke half-buried in the sand and dust that blew during the night. The dead were carried out to the graveyard in an early morning ritual. Days were spent fighting the dull, soft ache of hunger and the desperate, piercing agony of thirst. Women watched their children die. Men watched their women mourn. The only sound was the interminable coughing of those who were dying. The entire spectacle seemed as though it had been conjured by some demon as a vision out of hell.

Medecins Sans Frontiers did not even try to establish a medical records system; no statistics such as mortality rates were ever monitored. Estimates of the number of people who died at Tuklebab in the four months of its existence are guesses at best. Figures offered vary from 2000 to 8000, but the numbers don’t begin to tell the story of what happened here. That story is told in silence by the refugees; they wear it on their faces and in their eyes.

p. 50-51 Ethiopians wrap their dead in a mummy-like shroud before burial. With so many people dying at Fau, the supply of cloth used in preparing the burial shrouds soon ran out. The COR, in an effort to maintain the refugees’ cultural dignity even in death, forbid IRC workers to bury the dead without wrapping the bodies first and the performance of religious ablutions. Corpses began to pile up behind the clinic, and the clinic, with the dying on the inside and the dead stacked up on the outside, became a charnel house. One old man was found lying next to a pile of bodies on Christmas Day. He had come there to die, he said. He had seen the bodies and thought that this was where he was supposed to go to die.

p. 62 “…They keep the kids’ heads shaved except for a tuft of hair on the top. I asked one of the people who speak English the purpose of the custom. He explained that the tiny tuft of hair is left for the angels to pull the children up to heaven when they die.”

p. 78 I still remember the satisfaction we felt at Fau II in April the first day that there were no deaths reported. We knew a milestone had been reached, and we congratulated ourselves, but at the same time we couldn’t help questioning our effectiveness. Couldn’t we have been faster? Couldn’t we have done more? But in camp a whisper circulated among the people as if carried by the wind, “No one died today.”

p. 98 I was familiar with a $30,000 donation made by a church group which stipulated that the monies be spent exclusively on medical and sanitation supplies [and]... were not to be used for rental properties or for local workers’ salaries. Many donors, afraid of waste or mismanagement, put similar restrictions on the use of donated funds. At the time this particular donation was made, our storerooms were overflowing with medical and sanitation supplies, but we were having problems negotiating rent on the Gedaref field office, and we were laying off local workers as funds for local salaries were wearing thin.

p. 116-117 In late November, I found a one-page document on the common dining room table at the Fau II compound. It read as follows:

MESSAGE TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

From the Shamagalis (Elders) of Fau II Ethiopian Refugee Camp:
Thanks to the American people for their contributions. Now we are in good health. Now and forever, don’t forget us. We don’t forget you. Before we came here, we are on the way to death. But now we are alive. Don’t forget us and we don’t forget you, you are good…Hence, hereafter, and in the future, we will have good hope.

p. 123-124 On the morning of February 25, 18 Bedford lorries appeared at Fau I. The local Sudanese police joined REST and COR in overseeing their loading. While the sun was still low in the sky and before the daytime heat had conquered the coolness of the night, the lorries, one by one and each carrying 50 refugees, labored onto the bumpy washboard road that led out of camp. Twenty minutes later they had passed by Fau II within 50 yards of the tents there. The refugees at Fau II cheered as they saw the lorries roll by, and the children jumped up and down in excitement. Their friends were going home, and they knew that they would be soon to follow.

p. 126 In the morning, just as the first grey streaks of dawn lightened the eastern skies, the refugees, in groups of 20 to 50, slowly departed from the staging area, walking toward the dawn. Leading the groups were the men with walking sticks in hand, white shawls pulled over their shoulders, and pride of purpose on their faces. The women strapped sleeping babies to their backs and followed. The children, still too sleepy to cause much commotion, marched along quietly. In a short while, the refugees from Fau had disappeared into the hills and forests leading to Tigre. Very few turned to look back.