Existing comment:
1985 Feature: Ethiopian Famine:
They snuck in with a food convoy, traveling at night, hiding all day from the Ethiopian MIGs that would have blown them up.
It was 1984 when Boston Globe photographer Stan Grossfeld and reporter Colin Nickerson discovered the politics of famine in Ethiopia. The country's drought was in its fourth year. Crops and livestock were dead. People searched everywhere for food. Some 30,000 tons of it, from the United States, had been held up by an Ethiopian government determined to starve the countryside into submission. And starve the people did -- half a million Ethiopians, many of them children so hungry their bodies actually consumed themselves.
"I'll never forget the sounds of kids dying of starvation," Grossfeld said. "They sound like cats wailing."
He tried to be a technician. But "sometimes the viewfinder fills up with tears." At Wad Sharsfin Camp, he photographed this starving mother and child waiting in line for food. Within hours, the child was dead. |