Somali Refugees crowd a camp outside the city of Baidoa

The Hercules is a Symbol of Hope. Children flock to meet the airplane in Sudan.

A mass feeding center in Sudan. The barrel is full of mush made from corn meal, cooking oil, and sugar. Not much to look at, but nutritious.

Some Sudanese children come to greet us in Thiet, Sudan

A Somali woman at the refugee camp in Baidoa.

You cannot truly understand Africa unless you know what it smells like. There's the smell of woodsmoke and rich roasting coffee beans in the cool mornings of the Ethiopian Highlands, and the clean, dry aroma of the hot Kenyan desert broiling in the heat of the afternoon sun. But, there are also unpleasant smells, like the smell of human misery and civil war.

Disasters have their own unique stench.  You can read stories about squalid shanty-towns, you can look at photographs of starving children, you can watch video of refugees on the move, but you can not understand unless you know what despair smells like.  Once whiffed, the smell of despair, like the smell of death, lingers in your nostrils, can’t be washed away and can never be forgotten.

It’s the smell of smoke from the cooking fires for which every tree for 10 miles around has been felled; the sharp smell of hot metal from a fuel drum perched on a ring of stones above an open fire; the musty smell of dirty river water being boiled with maize meal and barrel scum into a foul mush; the sour smell of too many unwashed bodies crowded together under the merciless equatorial sun; the smell of vomit and faeces and fever, all blended together into a miasma of hopelessness.  I know that smell all too well.

Poverty has nothing to do with money.  It is a condition of the soul.  To be truly impoverished is to have given up all hope, to devoutly wish that there will never be another tomorrow.  Only a miracle can bring those who have embraced the inevitability of death back to the circle of life and sometimes miracles happen

 

 

 

A Postcard From Africa