Dying in the dust: a story from Sudan

The F-word is used with caution by charities with a strict definition for what constitutes a true "famine," linked to the number of successive failed harvests, but vocabulary seemed immaterial. In Paliang, it was obvious that people were soon going to die, starting with the youngest.Sprawled on the ground with his face pressed into the earth, the boy looked like he might already be dead.

Naked but for a pair of bangles on his ankles and white dust caking his skin, the four-year-old had collapsed a few steps from a group of starving children sheltering under a tree. It was as if he had been discarded.

Working as a reporter in Africa, it's not uncommon to see people dying. For it to be a child, in a village in southern Sudan, during a drought makes the event even less exceptional. What made this boy different was that just a few weeks before, the world had promised to help.

I'd flown into the Bahr el Ghazal region in late May with a Reuters photographer and cameraman on a quick visit organized by medical organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), who wanted to highlight worsening hunger, starting in the village of Paliang.

It's the kind of place you only know you have found when somebody tells you. Apart from some huts, Paliang's most striking feature is a toppled rig for drilling boreholes, now a rusting climbing frame for children with strength enough to play.

Bicycles imported long ago from China with handlebars dripping garlands of pink plastic flowers qualify as high-tech items.

Southern Sudan is sprinkled with thousands of Paliangs, villages of mud, wild dogs and short lives. Cars are a novelty, particularly for the dogs, fond of making suicidal dashes under their wheels; electricity is unheard of, roads are goat tracks. It is a land that globalization forgot.

Failed rains

Mutterings about drought had started a few weeks earlier. Aid workers were talking about the worst crisis since a famine in 1998 when more than 60,000 people starved to death in the Bahr el Ghazal region, fearing failed rains would force history to repeat itself. I hadn't heard of any other reporters heading to Bahr el Ghazal recently, we wanted to be the first.

The F-word is used with caution by charities with a strict definition for what constitutes a true "famine," linked to the number of successive failed harvests, but vocabulary seemed immaterial. In Paliang, it was obvious that people were soon going to die, starting with the youngest.

Dozens of women cradling children with stick-like limbs had gathered under a tree where Desma, an MSF nurse from Kenya, had set up a table to dish out rehydration sachets for babies in danger of dying from diarrhea.

Her brisk approach and frequent smiles seemed to help lift the malaise as she weighed screaming children in a sling suspended under the branches like a giant catapult, noting down evidence of malnutrition. Numbers weren't necessary: infants wore the faces of old men.

The women waited in the shade with epic stoicism, recounting their ordeals like so many of Africa's survivors with the same casual tone I might use to describe watching the new Star Wars film.

Of course the Nuer tribesmen had stolen our cows, one woman explained. Wouldn't you do the same if the drought had wiped out your crops and left you with nothing to eat apart from water lilies plucked from the marsh? Our Dinka warriors are too weak to fight, they haven't eaten.

Women often go bare-breasted in the heat of southern Sudan, where children run around wearing nothing but waistbands of beads and men carry spears. The ladies under the tree were no different.

"Look, I have no milk for my baby," one said, clutching her withered right breast and pointing the nipple up toward my face. "How am I going to feed my child?"

Peace deal

All this in what should have been a place of celebration. The northern government in Khartoum and the southern rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army had signed a peace deal in January to worldwide applause. On paper at least, Africa's longest civil war was over.

Unlike the relatively young conflict in Sudan's western Darfur region, fighting in the south has raged on an off for almost half a century. But now the country had defied the cynics: peace seemed possible.

Rich countries meeting in Oslo had promised billions of dollars in reconstruction aid only a few weeks before our visit - but where was the money? Not in Paliang.

Emergency warehouses in neighboring Kenya were empty - donors had not been willing to buy the necessary food.

A woman in green beckoned. I followed with Reuters photographer Antony Njuguna and cameraman David Mwangi, watching the back of the willowy figure as she led us past her hut.

Reaching into the branches of a tree, she plucked handfuls of scrubby leaves. Crushing them in a wooden mortar, she placed her haul in an aluminum pot perched on three stones over a fire. A young man named Kerubinyo - the custodian of one of Paliang's bicycles - translated as the water boiled.

His forehead bore the horizontal scars of Dinka initiation rites. "I wish I could wipe them off," he said. "They are useless."

Straining the dark green juice, women rolled the leaves into golf-ball sized clods and popped them into their mouths, chomping slowly and forcing themselves to swallow.

Their children clustered around a second pot: the feast was quickly done.

It was time to go. Unlike in many parts of Africa, Kerubinyo did not ask for a tip for his help, avoiding that moment of awkward eye contact with a new acquaintance that means a few dollars must change hands. He pointed instead to his stomach: "It hurts," he said. "Can you help?"

Heading back to the MSF Land Cruiser I passed the boy lying in the dust. A faint movement stirred his ribs: he was breathing. I realized I had been mistaken - he had not been abandoned - a woman was sitting a few yards away watching.

Mother and son would starve together.