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Mothers, Babies, and Food

Northern Ethiopia, 1985

By Barbara Jo Shipka

March 9^th, 2015

I had arrived in Addis Abba from Khartoum the day before. At the time, I was working in The Sudan with refugees who were arriving daily from Ethiopia. I knew they faced both war and drought. Still, I wanted to better understand where they were coming from and what they faced.

I went to the airport for an early morning flight to Bahar Dar…with its grass runway. From there, I would go by car to a major food distribution point. Food was being flown into the area by British Flying Fortresses and put on trucks that, as you can see, carried their own petrol. Just from the landscape I saw from the DC 3, I began to understand more of why people walked to The Sudan.

A DC 3!? As the ticket agent checked me in, he chuckled at the surprise on my face. “Yes,” he said, “These days in the US you probably only see this kind of plane in a museum like the Smithsonian.”

The women, mostly mothers with babies on their backs, walked once a week from villages all around. I was there all day and saw some of these women patiently waiting for the whole time. The ‘price’ they paid to receive food was allow their babies to receive a weekly medical check-up.

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