Africa: A Day in the Death of Somalia

Dawn. As the red sun edges over the horizon, a crowd of frail bodies gathers in the chill morning air outside the UNICEF feeding center in Bardera, a small town in southern Somalia. Each person clutches an aluminum pot or gourd to be filled, they hope, with a meal of brown gruel before the day is over. For four weeks now they have been been arriving at the rate of 150 to 200 a day from villages as far as 125 miles away, camping overnight in abandoned huts and making their way to the center in the predawn hours through the wide, dusty streets.

Most of those waiting are women and children; their men were killed in the endless fighting that has cursedhusband in two months -- "He has another wife," she explains -- and two younger children have died of hunger. Her daughter, naked except for a string of turquoise beads, coughs at her side. Dhaqane snatches the girl to her bony chest. "I will stay here," she says, "until the food runs out."

5:45 a.m. The throng, which has been growing steadily, surges ahead. The red iron gates have eased open a crack, enough to let through a single file of supplicants. Inside, 12 Somali guards dressed in battle fatigues and armed with M-16 rifles issue orders. Wielding 3-ft. wooden switches, they herd the people into neat rows at the rear of a large earthen courtyard. In 30 minutes more than 2,000 people are seated on the ground while others stream in: nomad women wrapped in black shawls, grandmothers in tattered sackcloth, lone children naked but for a makeshift shirt. At one point the crowd seethes forward. Guards, screaming, strike the women on their bare backs. Discipline, of a sort, is restored.

8:15 a.m. A Somali nurse dressed in white coat and rubber sandals picks his way through the crowd to weed out the youngest, most desperate cases. Gathering them together in another part of the compound, he feeds each one a spoonful of antidiarrhea medicine from a rusty thermos bottle. Every child under five receives a plastic bracelet, which entitles the wearer to a protein biscuit in addition to a bowl of gruel. The bands are color coded; blue for severely malnourished; red for those on the verge of death.

8:45 a.m. The feeding begins. Guards select about 20 people from the front rows and steer them toward the food vats, six huge oil barrels cut in half and fitted with wire handles. Working quickly, Somali servers ladle out two large cupfuls of steaming Unimix, a brownish mixture of maize, beans and vegetable oil, for each person. Suddenly, an elderly woman rushes forward, inadvertently knocking the steaming ration from a small girl's wizened hands. The child howls in pain and anger: the gruel is scalding hot (several other children display peeling scars from previous burns), but far worse, the day's only meal is gone. After filling their pots, the refugees file through the gate -- they are not permitted to eat in the compound -- and settle down in side streets or dusty clearings. There they wait impatiently for the food to cool, then wolf it down.