Surrender or Starve

FIVE Aid: Rolling the Rock of Sisyphus

Khawaja is a Sudanese Arabic word that means “a white foreigner.” When a British aid worker in Khartoum told a middle-class Sudanese woman that millions of Sudanese were close to death due to a famine in the far west of the country, she exclaimed, “My God, are those khawajas going to have a crisis on their hands!”

As the woman’s reaction indicated, the famine was a crisis of conscience for the West only. The famine certainly wasn’t a crisis for the Eastern bloc. Not a single ruble was collected for Live Aid, of which Dr. Anatoly Gromyko, head of the USSR’s Africa Institute, said he never heard. (Moskovskii Komsomolets, a widely read Soviet youth publication, described Live Aid as a “tele-cosmic concert” on behalf of peace; the paper never mentioned the word famine.)

But from interviews I conducted in fall 1985 and spring 1986, it became clear to me that the famine did not prick the conscience of many Africans who were not starving. Ahmed el-Tigani, secretary of the Khartoum Doctors’ Union, which was instrumental in overthrowing President Nimeiri, explained that Africans saw suffering all around them and therefore were immune to it. “For us, famine is not grossly abnormal. We have no curiosity. We don’t feel a need to see the relief camps.” “Nobody is thinking about famine or desertification,” said Abdel Gadir Hafiz, chief editor of the local news section of the Khartoum daily El Ayyam (The Days). The shocking scenes of mass starvation witnessed by millions of U.S. citizens in their living rooms were not seen by Africans. When a Sudanese government minister saw a video film of the famine at the home of a Western relief worker, the minister was amazed—he said he had no idea it was that bad. This was in early 1986, a year after the start of the famine emergency in Sudan. Osama Fatouta, a twenty-four-year-old Sudanese who was educated in London, said the only people in Khartoum who cared about the dying peasants were foreigners. Fatouta told me he was motivated by shame to singlehandedly create the Sudanese Volunteer Services Association, a famine relief organization composed of young people like himself, wealthy enough to study abroad, who thus were inspired by Western notions of community service. “People I know think I’m crazy. They can’t understand why I’m doing this. I’ve gotten little support,” Fatouta said. Most Sudanese, or Ethiopians for that matter, couldn’t be bothered. In Breakfast in Hell, relief worker Myles F. Harris likened the African middle class “to the aristocracy in prerevolutionary Russia. They could walk down a street crowded with beggars and see only people on it similar to themselves.”

Fatouta, Harris, and others intimately involved in the relief effort knew an awful truth that many in the United States were afraid to face: that although God may cause drought, famine in Africa is caused by the power relationships among Africans. All the relief assistance in the world cannot change the values by which Sudanese and Ethiopians live. This is why although one million died, nothing changed. The Ethiopian death machine rolled on. Not one truly significant agricultural reform took place. In fact, the same production methods responsible for the 1984 famine have since been expanded through resettlement and villagization. Because the population of more than 42 million is increasing at a faster rate than is agricultural production, the conditions were ripe for an even greater famine catastrophe in the 1990s, according to a 1986 report by USAID. In Sudan, meanwhile, merchants continued to hoard grain, and peasants were forced to borrow money for seeds at exorbitant interest rates. As in Ethiopia, there had been no significant reforms of any kind.

Few relief workers I met in either country were ignorant of these realities. Like Sisyphus, the mythical king of Corinth, they labored in the hot African sun rolling a rock up the hill, knowing in advance that it was going to roll back upon them. “There are no solutions,” said John Richardson, who worked for the United Nations in both Addis Ababa and Khartoum. Even successes were hard to gauge in the statistically unverifiable reality of Africa. Yet millions were saved, if only for the time being. As Martin Fletcher, of the NBC News Tel Aviv bureau, remarked in Addis Ababa, “If you can extend a child’s life for even six months, what’s wrong with that?”

It almost doesn’t matter that in the process of saving millions in Ethiopia, the West may have salvaged Africa’s most chillingly brutal regime, thereby giving it the wherewithal to ruin the lives of even more millions during a long period of time. Graphic images of starving children simply couldn’t be ignored. To ignore the starvation, even if it meant a long-term benefit for the population, would have entailed so harsh and painful a calculation that only the Eastern bloc—if the shoe were on the other foot— would have been capable of it.

Compassion, as the famine clearly demonstrated, was both the U.S. weakness and strength. Imagine the public response if the Reagan administration had—for the sake of toppling the regime—refused to give Ethiopia any emergency aid at all! Given the limitations imposed by our morality, we in the West did about all we could, and what we did was blunted severely by the conditions the Western aid worker faced the moment he or she got off the plane in Africa. Sudan, where Marxism cannot be blamed for the pitiful state of affairs, offers a particularly vivid picture of what relief workers were up against: there can be few experiences more jarring than to emerge from the cocoon of a Swiss Air plane, having just been pampered by elegant stewardesses, red Rhone wine, and Vladimir Ashkenazy on the headphones only to be thrust into the hellhole of Khartoum airport. My fifth arrival, in late 1986, was no easier than my first in 1984. Depression sets in even before the descent, when at 35,000 feet the thin air outside takes on a pasty hue and the plane shudders ever so slightly from the thermal winds and dust of the Sahara; a premonition of the defeating, pie-crust emptiness below. In business class, passengers start gulping their drinks down before ordering one final glass. Given Islamic law, it’s likely to be the last alcohol they’ll see until leaving Sudan.

On the final approach, Khartoum resembles a pattern of rectangles etched in sandpaper, bordered by the White and Blue Niles, which are impressively wide from the air, but do not offer any surcease from the environment once the traveler has landed. The Sudanese capital, designed by the British in the shape of the Union Jack, turns its back on the two rivers. Stepping outside the air-conditioned Swiss Air cabin, the dry, suffocating heat of Khartoum grabs the traveler’s lungs in a vise. Even at night, sunglasses are often necessary due to the dust.

On my last visit, prices of food and other basic commodities were up 50 percent from the year before. There were shortages of everything. Water and electricity cuts were more frequent. Making a local telephone call was harder than ever. The drainage system had become so bad that after a five-minute downpour many of the streets were impassable. Khartoum literally looked mean. “All the drought did was expose just how bad the system always was here,” said a Western diplomat.

Because the Western relief community’s worst enemy was the Sudanese government, aid workers put up with the material hardships of the Acropole, where most of them stayed, in order to avail themselves of the services of the hotel’s Greek managers, who dealt with Sudanese officialdom better than any Western embassy staff could. It may be an irony that while hundreds of millions of dollars of emergency assistance poured into Sudan, the only wedge between partial success and a complete breakdown of the relief effort was a trio of Greek brothers from the island of Kefalonia in the Ionian Sea, whose father had come to Khartoum in the wake of British rule. As journalist Edward Girardet aptly put it in The Christian Science Monitor (July 8, 1985), George, Athanasios, and Gerassimos Pagoulatos and their wives ran a fifty-room hotel, arranged visa extensions and interal travel permits, helped clear aid consignments through customs at Port Sudan, dispatched hand-carried documents throughout Europe, and otherwise ran errands for the relief effort all “with the courtesy and aplomb” of captains “of a luxury liner.” Had the Pagoulatos family packed their bags and gone back to Greece in the mid 1980s as they originally had intended, then the Western relief effort simply might have collapsed. Few aid workers were capable of maneuvering through the corrupt and inefficient Sudanese bureaucratic treadmill by themselves. Many required the Pagoulatos brothers to hold their hands.

Emergency Palace was the sobriquet given to the Acropole by senior Associated Press correspondent Mort Rosenbloom. Some compared the hotel to Rick’s American Café in the movie Casablanca. The dining room, usually jam-packed with journalists and relief workers, was decorated with Greek island watercolors and serviced by scowling, turbaned waiters who shuffled around among the tables. The only thing the Acropole lacked was liquor, a sacrifice necessitated by Islamic law. Nevertheless, the conversations that took place over the curried rice, Nile perch, and freshly squeezed lemon juice prepared by “Mummie,” the matriarch of the Pagoulatos clan, had a delirious, intoxicated quality—an effect of the heat no doubt. Because many of the journalists and relief workers in Sudan also had worked in Ethiopia, the entire history of the famine was recorded in the Acropole dining room. When I last arrived at the Acropole in the autumn of 1986, there was only one topic of conversation—the south.

The famine relief story in the Horn of Africa in the mid 1980s had three parts to it. Acts One and Two were northern Ethiopia and western Sudan. Act Three, which in this case was the denouement of the drama, was the south of Sudan. As in Shakespearian and Greek tragedy, it was the part of the play when the protagonists—the journalists and relief workers—attained full awareness. The problem was that by the time they did so, the public was barely paying attention. The theater had emptied out before the final scene.

With one million square miles of territory, Sudan always was more like a vast subcontinent than an individual country, and of all its remote regions—western Darfur included—none seemed as remote as the jungles and savannas of the equatorial south. Even by African standards, the south was in the middle of nowhere, cut off from the rest of Sudan by the Sudd, the world’s most formidable swamp, and bordering such dangerous, disease-ridden, and underdeveloped places as the Central African Republic, Zaire, war-racked northern Uganda, and Kenya’s Turkana desert. A netherworld of violence and chaos, roamed by armed bandits and disaffected Ugandan soldiers, the south was a heartland of unreported atrocities as well as a breeding ground of leprosy, elephantiasis, and Green Monkey disease. Just the lost and vacant ring of the towns in the region (Yey, Tarakaka, Pibor Post) evoked distant planets and gave one the feeling that the south really was in deep space. It had no roads to speak of, and because of the civil war, planes flying into the region always were shot at and occasionally were shot down. On every trip to the south, Western relief workers literally took their lives in their hands. When I asked a U.S. diplomat how to get to a certain area of the south near the Ethiopian border, he gave me a mad look and said, “Parachute, I guess.” Admitted an official of Sudan’s Ministry of Information, “Nobody ever really knows what’s happening down there.”

Southern Sudan never had a chance. In the nineteenth century, Mohammed Ali and later Egyptian khedives gradually annexed the area to their Sudan holdings in a crazed attempt to control the headwaters of the Nile and expand their empire. The British, employing their usual divide-and-rule tactics—but also motivated by an instinctive realization that for the non-Moslem, African south to “work” it would have to be separated from the Arab north—did everything in their power to keep the south free of northern influence. Tribal consciousness was promoted. Arabs were excluded from the area, and Greeks and Armenians were brought in instead to run the shops. To encourage Christianity, the Verona fathers, an Italian Catholic order, were allowed in to proselytize. The cleavage soon became too deep to correct. As Michael C. Hudson indicated in Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy, of all the minorities in the Middle East, the black Africans of Sudan always have been the least assimilated, less so than even the Jews in Arab countries, who, unlike the African southerners, spoke Arabic and were racially similar to the Arabs.

The Moslem Arabs in the north and the pagan and Christian Africans in the south were entirely in different orbits. Khartoum’s Arab politicians wanted to own and exploit the south without having to do anything for it—they didn’t even want to think about it. “To the Arabs, the southerners are just a bunch of spear-chucking heathens,” said a Western official. When it dawned on the Arabs that the oil and hydroelectric resources of the region might never be utilized due to the civil war, voices were raised, beginning in late 1986, about it not being such a bad idea if the south were to formally split away. If Sudan had “less of a government than any other country on the continent,” as the chief of United Nations Emergency Operations in Khartoum, Winston Prattley, told me, then southern Sudan had even less than that.

Neither the northern Arabs nor the southern Africans had any respect for the humanity of the other. So when years of fighting between the Khartoum government and the south’s SPLA ignited a famine, neither side could comprehend why the khawajas were kicking up such a fuss.

Journalists and aid workers knew less about the south than about anywhere else in famine-stricken Africa. The south was less safe, less accessible, and involved greater physical hardships than was the case in northern Ethiopia. Even those who managed to penetrate the area only were able to see an outpost or two. The going aid agency figure of those affected by famine was two million, but nobody really had any idea. Anthony Suau, a Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer on assignment for National Geographic, told me he had a feeling that the whole southern famine might be a hoax insofar as only tens of thousands might be threatened instead of millions. Still, while knowing and seeing less, by 1986 journalists and aid workers had learned a lot about famine in Africa, and consequently they had a more accurate insight into the realities of southern Sudan and other hunger-hit regions than they had about Ethiopia in 1984 and early 1985.

“War, Not Drought, Cited as Key Threat to Africa” was the headline in the March 28, 1986, International Herald Tribune for Washington Post correspondent Blaine Harden’s dispatch. “It is no longer drought but rather war that has become the major factor in a continuing famine,” wrote Harden in the lead paragraph. Another Tribune headline, on July 1, 1986, read: “War in Southern Sudan Heightens Food Crisis, Hampers Relief Effort.” Underneath, Washington Post correspondent Jonathan C. Randal wrote: “The increasingly violent ‘hidden war’ in southern Sudan… has unleashed rival armies, marauding militias and bandit gangs and displaced hundreds of thousands of destitute and hungry civilians. Waged across an inaccessible area larger than France, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria combined, the fighting is destroying crops and livestock on an increasing scale.”

Although it is true that drought was much less of an issue in the lush south of Sudan compared to northern Ethiopia, the primacy of human factors in the southern Sudan famine was not the only reason for the media’s focus on the war there. In terms of size, strategy, and outside political relevance, it was a less interesting war than the one in Eritrea. Yet the media virtually ignored fighting in Eritrea, which was easier and safer to visit, while concentrating heavily on the bush battles between Sudan’s regular army and John Garang’s Ethiopian-backed SPLA.

Despite all the difficulties inherent in the terrain, the Western relief community in the summer of 1986 was prepared as never before for this famine. Northeastern Africa had just had a record harvest: 18,000 tons of food were available in northern Sudan and neighboring Kenya, with sixty trucks, painted in white with the U.N. emblem, all ready to roll into southern Sudan from the Kenyan border. Medical supplies also were in abundance. On account of increased stability in Uganda, following the coming to power of Yoweri Museveni in Kampala the previous January, a truck route from that country was open as well, and the World Food Program was ready to transport 90,000 tons of food into southern Sudan from there. Unlike Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and western Sudan, there would be no bottlenecks plaguing the emergency effort this time. Wrote columnist Jonathan Power in the International Herald Tribune, “This time, everything is in place— waiting.”

It was practically all for naught, however, because it was not in the interest of either side in the civil war that people be fed. On June 1, 1986, twelve Kenyan truck drivers bringing food into the south from the Ugandan border town of Nimule were ambushed, presumably by SPLA rebels. The drivers were bound by ropes to their steering wheels, and then grenades were lobbed at the trucks. This put a virtual halt to the World Food Program’s overland relief operation. Only 600 of the 90,000 tons had been delivered. Churches, private relief groups, and U.N. agencies appealed to both the SPLA and the Sudanese government for a truce in order to let food in. The calls went unheeded. On August 15, the SPLA banned all flights over southern Sudan, claiming that the government was using the Red Cross as a cover to resupply its army. (A Red Cross official called the claim “ridiculous.”) To press the point, on the next day, the rebels shot down a Sudan Airways plane after takeoff from Malakal, about 425 miles south of Khartoum, using Soviet-made SAM-7 antiair-craft missiles. All sixty civilian passengers on board were killed. The Khartoum authorities grounded all flights into the region. Now no food could get in by air either.

“We are not repentant,” SPLA leader John Garang told Blaine Harden (The Washington Post, September 19, 1986). “We warned that the airspace over War Zone I is closed.” Garang, sporting a revolver and a knife along with an AK-47 assault rifle, said that too much publicity had been given to food shortages in government-held towns such as Wau, where 170,000 starving refugees were reported to be besieged by SPLA troops after being driven out of their villages by cattle raiding gangs called marahlin.

While the SPLA was starving the towns, the Sudanese government was starving the countryside. Red Cross officials reported that hundreds of famine victims had testified to government brutality. Particular targets of the regular Sudanese army were villages occupied by Garang’s Dinka tribe, which accounted for 40 percent of southern Sudan’s population. Western diplomats said that whole Dinka villages were burned to the ground by government troops and their allies. Khartoum had fallen back on the old British colonial method of arming local tribes hostile to the Dinka, specifically the Messariya, Baggara, Murle, and Acholi. The Messariya and Baggara were Arab herders and nomads, known for their military prowess. Many of the Acholi were deserters from the army of former Uganda presidents Apollo Milton Obote and Tito Okello Lutwa, who a few months earlier had been defeated by the National Resistance Army of Uganda’s new president, Yoweri Museveni. Because these Acholi deserters also were launching attacks across the border in Uganda, Museveni retailated by banning relief shipments into southern Sudan, a move that further crippled the relief effort.

The situation had gotten desperate enough in southern Sudan for tens of thousands of Ugandan refugees of the Madi tribe to come back home. When I visited northern Uganda in mid 1986, the Madis already were building new huts and cutting the spear grass in preparation for planting maize near the banks of the Albert Nile. A Verona father, who had returned with the Madis, told me that utter chaos now reigned in southern Sudan; Acholi deserters were on the rampage in refugee camps “mutilating” their former Madi enemies, who had fought against the Acholis in Uganda’s own, just-concluded civil war. Cruelty was being piled on cruelty in an obscure and complex tribal free-for-all that only the Western relief community was trying to stop. It was noteworthy that the refugees spoke only about the suffering of their own tribe and when prodded about the fate of the others evinced little or no sympathy.

Near the end of August, M. Peter McPherson lent his voice to the call for a food truce. “As the condition of large numbers of innocent people continues to deteriorate rapidly, I call upon the government and the SPLA to allow desperately needed food to reach those in need” (The Washington Post, August 29, 1986). At this point, the only supplies not in short supply in southern Sudan were salt, sweets, liquor, and cigarettes, which until a few weeks before—rebel antiaircraft fire notwithstanding—pilots had been willing to fly in on account of the high prices these items fetched. Grain just brought in too small a profit for a pilot to risk losing his life.

Fighting continued and neither side agreed to a truce. No amount of diplomatic pressure seemed to work. Finally, U.N. officials and others decided to shame the Sudanese authorities and the SPLA into opening up the air space over the south. A $1 million, thirty-day shuttle service, dubbed Operation Rainbow, was announced with much fanfare. The government-held towns of Juba, the capital of Equatoria Province, Malakal, the capital of Upper Nile Province, and Wau, the capital of Bahr el Ghazal were to be reached by flights from Khartoum. Yirol, an SPLA-led outpost in Bahr el Ghazal, was to be supplied by flights from Kenya. The foreign press corps in Nairobi was alerted and encouraged to proceed to Khartoum to cover the departure of the first flight.

The Khartoum authorities immediately objected to the relief plan because it included rebel-held areas. So before even getting off the ground, Operation Rainbow was scaled down to include government areas only. Still, crews from the three major U.S. television networks, among other media personnel, packed into the Khartoum Hilton for the lift-off of the first relief consignment. Then the delays started. By the time Sadiq el Mahdi’s government gave its permission, the SPLA raised objections. Then the government objected to the SPLA’s objections. For several days in a row, the departure was called off at the last moment. There also were reported problems with the company insuring the plane. Few journalists were willing to take part in the operation because who could be sure that some lone SPLA outpost, in spite of an agreement not to shoot, wouldn’t try to shoot the plane down anyway? In the end, a flight managed to take off in early October, with only enough grain to feed one decent-sized town for one day.

Through sheer doggedness, the Sudanese—the Arab government and the African rebels both—had managed to blockade an entire Western relief effort. A flight here and a truck there got into the south with badly needed supplies. But that was all. Because so little out of so much made it to its destination, even the most filthy and poorly equipped feeding center in southern Sudan was considered a “humanitarian showcase.” Columnist Jonathan Power wrote that relief officials were “crazy with anger.” (A similar situation ensued in late 1987 and early 1988 when actions by the Ethiopian government, the EPLF, and the TPLF prevented food from reaching hungry peasants. Unfortunately, in this case, despite an exemplary human rights record built up during many years, the EPLF’s behavior was little better than the SPLA’s.)

How many starved to death because of Sudanese intransigence? Who knows? Maybe tens of thousands, maybe more. Or maybe photographer Anthony Suau was right, and the whole thing was blown out of proportion from the start. In a region where a visit to just one lonely outpost could mean a life-threatening situation, who was keeping count? Remember, this was a crisis for the West only. The only crisis for the Sudanese was how to get the relief agencies off Sudanese backs.

None of this escaped the media, which duly recorded the frustrations experienced by the relief community. Network crews had to justify their expenses at the $120-a-night Khartoum Hilton, so they recorded what was not happening rather than what was. The short burst of television coverage that accompanied the non-lift-off of Operation Rainbow in October 1986 constituted the very last mini-event of the great 1980s famine in northeast Africa. By 1987, the famine story had moved south to Mozambique, although by the end of that year, famine again reared its head in Ethiopia, thereby resulting in renewed media attention. In addition to television, some newspapers, particularly The Washington Post, provided detailed and colorful coverage of the relief nightmare in southern Sudan. But most of these stories ran on inside pages and, like the television spots, had limited effect because the general public had long before switched its attention to other foreign news stories.

In all this time, the debate in the United States about famine had barely changed. Academic blather about development programs and a Western “commitment” to Africa filled up even more space on newspaper editorial pages in 1987 than had been the case in early 1984. Money and agricultural technology still could solve everything. Fingers still were being pointed at the European Economic Community because of the vast mountains of milk and butter it destroyed rather than ship to more needy areas of the globe. The far greater evil of Africa’s own callous and hypocritical attitudes toward its starving millions was much less written about, as if such information were charged and radioactive. Neither U.S. thinking nor that of the African ruling class was all that much affected by the unfolding of events on the ground during those momentous years in the Horn. The actual behavior of African leaders had little impact on the United States, just as U.S. efforts in Africa had little impact on African leaders.

On a late October night in 1986 I said goodbye for the last time to Athanasios Pagoulatos and took a battered taxi to the airport for the 2 a.m. flight to Nairobi. I did not think I would be coming back to Sudan. As the Khartoum dust scoured my eyes, two incidents replayed themselves in my mind that, for me, were emblematic of Africa as I briefly experienced it.

The first incident involved a colleague, Paul Vallely. He wrote a story about it entitled, “Riding the Lifeline Lorry” (The Times, July 26, 1985). To my mind, it was the best single feature story I ever read about the famine. It’s too bad that the U.S. public never got to see it.

As Vallely related the story, so little food was coming into Geneina from Khartoum on account of floods and other difficulties that there was not enough to send onward to Beida, about fifty miles south along Sudan’s western border with Chad. Those dying of starvation in Beida were all Chadian refugees, and the local Sudanese commissioner Sherife was not cooperating in the release of emergency grain. Finally, however, Verney managed to secure 150 sacks of food and seed. Then the head of the Sudanese haulage firm doubled and tripled the price. Verney did not have enough cash on hand to pay for the lorry and in desperation went to the local army brigadier in Geneina, Ibrahim Muhammad, who told Verney, “This is the situation everywhere. No food is reaching the extremities. It reaches the hands but not the fingers. Of course you can have one of my trucks.”

Three hours after leaving Geneina for Beida, the food lorry got caught in a torrential rain. Vallely and the driver whom Verney had rented were stuck for nine hours in the mud; sixty peasants helped to dig the two men out.

Because of Sudanese bureaucracy, Chadians were starving to death with food only a few feet away. The next day, Ali Mansour, the executive officer of the rural council, agreed to distribute the grain. “You will take my photograph,” he said to a news agency photographer with Vallely. “This will be good for me.”

The distribution caused a riot among the refugees. Sudanese soldiers responded by lashing at the crowd with whips in all directions. The news agency photographer started snapping away, even though editors had become bored with photos of starving Africans. The photographer confided to Vallely that starving people being whipped had novelty value that would result in his pictures gaining wide distribution. Sure enough, the photos of the riot in Beida were picked up in Europe.

I arrived in El Geneina a few weeks after Vallely had, and my first stop was at a feeding center for Chadian refugees fleeing civil war as well as drought. My guide asked if I would like to see a newborn baby. I said certainly. Although the population was growing all the time—and even in good years, food production could not keep pace with the population increase—out here I still could think only of new life in the abstract. In the flesh, it was beyond my comprehension under the present circumstances, with mass death all around.

I was taken to a wattle hut. In the corner stood a little Chadian boy, a broomstick-like figure, who was suffering from marasmus. He looked just like so many of the famine victims the U.S. audience had become used to seeing on television. In place of sorghum, his mother was boiling herbs in a pot. Beside her, concealed under a coarse blanket, lay the newborn baby, a boy, who, when the blanket was pulled back, looked astonishingly healthy. A relief worker explained that the effects of the mother’s malnutrition were not visible on the child.

But I couldn’t help wondering what was going to happen to that baby. Would he grow up to be as malnourished as his older brother? If, indeed, the baby lived that long. Chad, Sudan, and Ethiopia all were embroiled in civil wars that had helped spark famines. What could be the future of such a child, trapped in the soft, sandy center of a fragmenting world?