I CLOSE MY EYES, pretend to sleep. Maybe I am sleeping. In Africa itās hard to tell. Coiled in a dirty sheet, sweat-soaked, my hair matted with the dayās dust and grains of sand in my mouth, I dream about work, storylines, plots; I edit pictures in my head. I wake gasping for breath, unsure where I am. Niger. Rwanda. Somalia.
In Africa there are too many pictures, too many contrasts. You canāt catch them all. Itās like sticking your head out of a fast-moving carāyou suffocate; itās too much to take in. Amputations. Executions. Empty beds. Shuttered stores. Crippled kids. Wild-eyed gunmen. Stripped-down corpses. Crashed cars. Mass graves. Handmade tombstones. Scattered ammo. Half-starved dogs. Sniper warnings posted like billboards. Buses and boxcars stacked at intersections. Old men in boxy suits walking to jobs that donāt exist in offices that arenāt there. It all blurs together. Desert. Mountain. Rice paddy. Field. Farmers bent over. Heads rise as you pass. Eyes follow eyes. Little kids run to the road, stand frozen, not sure if they should be happy or scared. They keep their weight on their heels so they can run back at the lurch of the car, the crack of a shot. Houses, whole towns, nothing but rubbleāroofs blown off, walls burnt out, crumbled. Desiccated, eviscerated, gutted, and flayed.
At some point though, the disorientation fades. You put it behind you; go on. There is an adventure waiting. Life happening. Itās not your life, but itās as close as youāll get. You want to see it all.
One minute youāre thereāin it, stuck, stewing in the sadness, the loss, your shirt plastered to your back, your neck burned from the sunāthen youāre gone, seatbelt buckled, cool air cascading down, ice in the glass. You are gliding above the earth, laughing.
IāM IN MARADI, Niger. Itās late July 2005. A few days ago, I was in Rwanda with friends on vacation. Iād gone to see the mountain gorillas and to tour the new genocide museum. Not everyoneās idea of fun, perhaps, but Iāve never been very good at taking time off. I burn on beaches, and get bored really quickly. I had a couple of days left in Rwanda, and was watching TV in my hotel room, when a short report came on about starvation in Niger.
āAccording to a report by the United Nations, 3.5 million Nigeriens are at risk of starvation, many of them children,ā the news anchor said, then moved on to something else.
I called CNN to see if I could go. My travel companions were pissed off, but not all that surprised. They were used to my bailing out on them at the last minute.
āWhy would you want to go to Niger?ā one of them asked when I told him of the change of plans.
āWhy wouldnāt you want to go?ā I responded.
āUm, because Iām normal,ā he said, laughing.
I wished I knew how to explain it to them. Itās as if a window opens, and you realize the world has been re-formed. I wanted to see the starvation. I needed to remind myself of its reality. I worry that if I get too comfortable, too complacent, Iāll lose all feeling, all sensation.
The next day, I was on a plane, on my way. Iād been relieved of the burden of vacation. I was in motion once again, hurtling through space. Nothing was certain, but everything was clear.
BY ALL ESTIMATES, Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world. Ninety percent of it is desert, and even in good years, most people here barely get by. The average Nigerien woman gives birth eight times in her life, and one out of every four children dies before he reaches the age of five. One in four. Itās a staggering statistic, but not hard to imagine when you see how poor Nigeriensā diet is, and what little access they have to medical care.
Even for adults, the summer months between the planting of crops and harvest is a difficult time. Nigeriens call it the hungry season, when they rely on grain stored up from the previous year to get by. In 2004 there was a drought, followed by an invasion of locusts. Crops were decimated, devoured, so now itās 2005, and thereās no grain stored up. People are foraging for food, eating leaves off trees.
When you land in Niger, by the time you reach the end of the runway, Niamey International Airport is nowhere to be seen. On either side of the tarmac, sand and scrub brush stretch to the horizon.
The gin-swilling British businessman sitting next to me on the plane stares out the window and bursts into tears. āThey have nothing,ā he mumbles to no one. āThe children are dying.ā
āWhatās your problem?ā the Air France flight attendant asks as he saunters by.
āPeople are dying,ā the businessman repeats.
āI know,ā the attendant says. āPeople are dying every day, all over the world.ā He was tired of dealing with drunks.
It is hard to see the hunger at first. In Niamey, chauffeur-driven Mercedes glide down potholed streets. Businessmen and bureaucrats shuttle about, car windows firmly shut. A layer of dust seems to coat everything.
āThis isnāt a famine, itās a sham-ine,ā I hear one European reporter mutter in the hotel, concerned that the images heās gathered arenāt going to be what his bosses back in the newsroom are expecting. Thatās how TV works: You know the pictures you want, the pictures youāre expected to find. Your bosses will be disappointed if you donāt get them, so you scan the hospital beds, looking for the worst, unable to settle for anything less. Merely hungry isnāt good enough. Merely sick wonāt warrant more than a cutaway shot.
The hunger is there, of courseāyou just have to look close. On the drive from Niamey to Maradi are fields of corn, sorghum, and millet. Crops are planted, but harvest is a long way off, and thereās little food to get families through until then. Adults can live off leaves and grass; kids need nutrients, and there are none to be had.
āItās not so bad,ā I say to Charlie Moore, my producer, and as soon as the words come out of my mouth, I wish I could take them back.
āItās bad enough,ā he responds, and of course heās right.
Itās bad enough.
āITāS PRETTY BAD out there,ā the air force officer said as I was gathering my things. āWhere are you staying?ā
āI donāt know!ā I shouted, and it came out sounding scared.
āWhat do you mean you donāt know? You canāt just go to Somalia. Who do you work for?ā I was worried heād take my phony press pass, so I told him I was staying with an aid agency; I just wasnāt sure of their exact location. The truth was, I didnāt have anyplace to stay, and I didnāt really work for anyone.
It was early September 1992, and Iād just landed in Baidoa, Somalia. I hadnāt been to Sarajevo yet. Burma was the only fighting Iād ever seen. After Channel One bought my Burma footage, I lived in Vietnam for six months, taking language classes in Hanoi and trying to shoot more stories. When my visa expired, Channel One still hadnāt offered me a full-time job, so I had to come up with another plan.
I was twenty-five, two years older than my brother would ever be. A day might go by when I didnāt think about his suicide, but then Iād be walking on the street, and a stain on the concrete would remind me of blood, and Iād run into a nearby restaurant and throw up in the bathroom.
I used to see my brother in Vietnam. Someone would round a corner or catch my attention in a crowd, and for a few seconds I would think it was Carter.
One evening in Hanoi, a crippled beggar stopped in front of me while I was in a cafĆ©. He stretched out a twisted limb, asking for money. I glanced up and saw Carterās face. Something about the gentle look in his eyes, the cut of his hair, the looseness with which it fell from the side of his head. The thought stunned me.
The beggar left, and I wanted to run after him, talk with him in case it was Carter trying to reach out to me. I didnāt move from my seat, however. It was a crazy thought, and I never told anyone about it. I was embarrassed, worried that even thinking it was a sign of delusion.
It wasnāt just people who reminded me of Carter. Once, I was eating at a food stall near my apartment in Hanoi and I noticed that the ceiling was made of pressed leaves. It looked just like a box covered with tobacco leaves that Carter once gave me for Christmas. The texture and color were the same. For a moment, I remembered him so clearly: the shape of his body, the color of his hair, the delicate thinness of his fingers. It had been four years since his death, and still nothing about it made any sense. Vietnam hadnāt filled in the shadows I saw when I looked in the mirror, or eased the sadness that seemed to flow through my veins. I was hurting, and needed to be around others who were hurting as well. I wanted to dangle over the edge and remember what it was like to feel. I also needed a job. Somalia had seemed like a logical choice.
Famine was sweeping the Horn of Africa. Tens of thousands of people had already died of starvation, and millions more were threatened. Somalia had no central government to deal with the drought, just competing warlords with private armies and countless guns.
The famine hadnāt yet become a major story. In some three months, the U.S. military would send troops, the American public millions of dollars in aid, and the broadcast networks their anchors. Hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved, but after that, things would get out of control. They often do. It started off being one thing, and ended up as something else. Peacekeepers became peacemakers. A humanitarian mission became a hunt for a Somali warlord. A Black Hawk went down. U.S. troops got killed. The whole thing turned to shit.
It started, though, with the starving. Thousands dying every day: mostly kids and old people, the ones without weapons or money, or families to fall back on. Roving bands of teens armed with guns and grenade launchers rode around in tricked-out ātechnicals,ā pickups with machine guns mounted on the back.
I hitched a ride on a relief flight that the U.S. military had just begun operating out of Mombasa, Kenya. In Baidoa as many as a hundred people were dying a day. The United States was shipping in sacks of sorghum on lumbering C-130 Hercules transport planes. The bags of grain were stacked on wooden pallets, kept in place by mesh netting attached to the planeās floor by cables. On my flight, a half-dozen young men with high-and-tight crew cuts lay sleeping on top of the sacks of grain.
āWho are those guys?ā I asked the air force officer on board the flight.
āWe call those guys the snake eaters,ā he said, whispering as though he were divulging classified information. āThey set up on the ground and monitor the security of the runway.ā
A month earlier, stuck in Nairobi, waiting for my visa to clear, Iād gone to see a low-budget action movie, Snake Eater II, with Lorenzo Lamas. These guys looked far more businesslike than the muscle-bound star in that film. When we landed, the snake eaters were the first ones out the cargo door. They ran to the side of the airstrip and disappeared into the bushes.
The C-130 wasnāt on the ground more than twenty minutes when it shut its cargo door and took off, leaving behind a few sacks of sorghum, the icy smell of airplane fuel, and me.
On the other end of the runway, a handful of aid agencies had parked their pickup trucks. On top of one of the trucks, a young Somali sat straddling a heavy machine gun. In the back, gnarled men in soiled T-shirts stood around grinning, gnawing on small green twigs that Iād soon learn was khat, the favorite pastime of Somali menābesides arguing and shooting one another. Khat is like an amphetamine. Chew it all day, as many do in Somalia, and youāll end up edgy, strung outājust the kind of qualities you want in a Somali gunman. Only a few flights of relief food were getting into the country, but dozens of planes packed with the bitter stimulant were able to land at airstrips every day throughout the starving nation.
That day I arrived a couple of Western aid workers waited for the food sacks to be loaded up. They all ignored me, and I was too shy to approach them. Journalists, Iād later learn, were considered a pain in the ass. They arrived at a story demanding transportation and food, not to mention information. Relief workers put up with them if they were from a major network, and had big audiences whoād make donations, but if you were just some kid with a home video camera, then nobody really wanted to make the effort.
When the bags of sorghum were loaded onto the trucks, everyone took off, leaving me standing on the side of the runway alone. There are times when the reality of what youāve gotten yourself into hits you like a brick dropped from a tall building. Standing by the airstrip in Baidoa was one of those times. I was in way over my head, and had just realized it.
I had a couple of thousand dollars in cash, a camera, some blank videocassettes, and a backpack filled with cashews, the only food Iād had time to buy before boarding the flight. I had no idea what I was doing or what I should do next.
ITāS LATE JULY 2005. In a makeshift hospital in Maradi, Niger, dozens of mothers sit with their children, waiting to see if they are malnourished enough to be saved. The hospital is run by MĆ©decins Sans FrontiĆØres (Doctors Without Borders), a French relief group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. They are one of my favorite relief organizations because they fearlessly go to the worst places, and they seem far more efficient than the lumbering UN.
The hospital is a few blocks off Maradiās main drag. This is the third largest city in Niger, but thatās not saying much. Even the capital, Niamey, is a backwater, and itās a ten-hour drive away.
To get into the hospital the mothers pass through a small metal gate guarded by two unarmed men. By dawn thereās already a long line to enter. The women are wrapped in impossibly bright fabrics, a collage of color shocking against their desert black skin.
Weeks later, when I return to New York, an elegant lady stops me on the street and puts her hand on my arm. āOh, Anderson, those women in Niger.ā She sighs, pausing to gather her emotions. āI mean, the fabrics. Where do they find them? Those colors. They must put so much thought into it.ā
The morning I arrive at the hospital, there are about a dozen mothers waiting with their kids outside the gate. A naked little boy with skin like an elephantās squats in front of his mother and shits. She wipes his wrinkled butt with a piece of cardboard from a box of medicine.
The mothers watch you enter, watch you come and go as you please, the color of your skin, the camera on your shoulder, the only entry pass you need. In the twitch of an eye, theyāve scanned your clothes, your eyes, read your intentions, your ability to help them. They donāt beg; they know youāre not here for that. They see the camera, the notepad; you can do nothing for them right away. Maybe in the long term you can help, they think, so theyāll let you take pictures; but, really, they donāt care. Their needs are immediate. Liquid. Food. Nutrients. Now.
Inside the compound, just beyond the gates, in the admissions tent, Dr. Milton Tectonidis examines a two-year-old boy clinging to his motherās breast.
āHeās quite dehydrated,ā he says about the boy, gently pinching the skin of the childās left arm. The boyās name is Rashidu. His eyes are wide, and he looks right at Dr. Tectonidis.
āUsually in a kid you look for sunken eyes, and skin that doesnāt come back, skin that stays folded,ā he says, barely pausing long enough to glance up. āIn a malnourished ki...