These six-foot-high huts littered the hillsides, and although small, kept out the wind and provided shade from the scorching sun. The people were extremely thin and in a pitiable condition. Some had discharges from colds oozing from their eyes and infections on their emaciated bodies. Flies were everywhere. Before I left the States I saw the BBC film that shocked the world with its unimaginable images of starvation in Ethiopia. These images stuck in my mind, and now, at this first camp, they came alive; suffering eyes staring right into mine. We interviewed one woman who could barely move and huddled with her child under a skimpy rag blanket in the hot sun. The child looked about two months but turned out to be two years. His cheekbones protruded from his gaunt face as he lay there by his mother’s shrivelled breasts, flies walking all over his lips and eyes. She said, in an almost inaudible whisper of a voice, that they had walked for two weeks to get to the camp and had been there for almost two months. Her neighbors told us that she had not been able to get up for the last five days. After we talked, two men carried them off on a stretcher for medical attention. There was a poorly equipped medical hut, and a hut for the feeding of mothers and children, but it was hard for them to get there in their weakened condition. All I could think of when I looked at these people were the images of liberated concentration camp survivors from World War II. But these people’s liberation had not yet come. Later we flew to a large village where relief workers were desperately trying to keep the villagers from leaving. Once people leave their villages, it becomes doubly hard for them to return and grow crops again when the rains start. If relief supplies can be brought to the villages and wells dug to provide water, they can continue to work and prepare the ground for eventual planting. Here relief workers and villagers were valiantly trying to plant seedlings grown in a small nursery fed with water from a recently dug well. Forestation is a long-term method for preventing soil erosion. Trees keep moisture in the ground and provide shade, lumber and firewood. Workers and villagers also cultivated a vegetable garden to augment their meager relief rations. The garden looked pitifully small compared to the number of people it had to feed. And while we were there, drought victims continued to arrive. We also wanted to film positive aspects of Ethiopia. We spent two days filming in and around Gondar, an area rich in religious culture and not too severely affected by the drought. This area, like the rest of Ethiopia, is predominantly Coptic Christian, but there also existed (until their recent evacuation to Israel) a substantial number of Felasha Jews and Muslims. We filmed a Christian ceremony in an ancient stone church protected by a circular stone wall. We similarly filmed at two Felasha villages. The villages seemed unchanged since the days of Moses. In one village, among the dirt-floored wattle houses, the synagogue was distinguishable by a Star of David on the roof. Inside we filmed and recorded children singing songs that would be familiar to Hebrew schoolers anywhere, and a rabbi reading and chanting from a Bible that looked hundreds of years old. These people were very poor but very friendly. It was fasClinton St. Quarterly 53
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