Africa: A Day in the Death of Somalia

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9:35 a.m. A boy of five with a red bracelet has passed out in the crowd. Two workers rush over, hoist him by his spindly limbs and lay him down beneath a shade tree on the far side of the courtyard. The boy is suffering from severe dehydration, and the nurse hastily inserts an intravenous tube, hooking the bottle to a branch. It is too late. As the boy's eyes roll back beneath fluttering eyelids, an older woman gently presses them shut. The boy came from the village of Malwuen, 34 miles away, where both parents and eight of his brothers and sisters succumbed to starvation in the past six months. Four days ago, he set out for Bardera with his last sibling, an elder brother, who now rocks quietly weeping by his side.

11:15 a.m. The equatorial sun is beating down hard now, and many of the 1,000 people still waiting in the exposed courtyard have propped aluminum pots on their heads in a vain attempt to shield themselves from the heat. Others have tried to squeeze into the pool of shade offered by a scraggly tree. A teary- eyed little girl, throat dry with thirst, slips by the guards and pleads for a jug of water. She is angrily rebuffed. Workers have grown accustomed to the desperate, and few have pity, any longer, to spare.

Noon. As the gruel is doled out, cooks keep the six vats brewing, boiling dense brown river water to purge at least some of the bacteria, then stirring in the Unimix with wooden poles. One cook estimates that it will take 80 vats to feed everyone here this day. At least, he says, there is enough food. Two weeks before, inadequate supplies stirred the crowd into a frenzy. Mothers tore pots from starving children to feed their own. "It was terrible," recalls Dr. Ayub Sheik Yeron, the UNICEF representative who set up this feeding center last month. "When people have not eaten for three or four days, they lose control."

2:10 p.m. Two skeletal men, discovered semiconscious on the outskirts of town, are carried into the compound and laid side by side underneath a tree. The friends had collapsed after walking for three days and two nights to reach this place from their home village 31 miles away. A nurse slips intravenous tubes into barely visible veins and covers each man with a gray blanket. With stomachs too cramped to tolerate food, the men ignore the cans of gruel placed at their side. The nurse predicts that neither will survive to evening.

3:15 p.m. He is correct; they die quickly. A man with a gimpy leg, evidently the center's undertaker, expertly wraps these two bodies and four others -- the day's dead -- in rags and burlap sacks discarded from rations that came too late. He puts the bundles into a blue wheelbarrow, wheels them out of the compound and down to the banks of the Juba, where they are lowered together into an open grave.

4:15 p.m. Shadows begin to lengthen across the courtyard as one last child, a small cross-eyed boy with no parents to wash the red dust out of his matted hair, has his gourd filled and wanders distractedly out the gate. Moments later the iron doors swing shut.