May 22nd, 2015
Via
n early October, after the main rainy season, Ethiopia’s central Rift Valley is a study in green. Fields of wheat and barley lie like shimmering quilts over the highland ridges. Across the valley floor below, beneath low-flying clouds, farmers wade through fields of African cereal, plucking weeds and primping the land for harvest
IIn the paved and wired developed world, it’s hard to imagine a food emergency staying secret for long. But in countries with bad roads, spotty phone service and shaky political regimes, isolated food shortfalls can metastasize into full-blown humanitarian crises before the world notices. That was in many ways the case in Ethiopia in 1984, when the failure of rains in the northern highlands was aggravated by a guerrilla war along what is now the Eritrean border.
Senay, who grew up in Ethiopian farm country, the youngest of 11 children, was then an undergraduate at the country’s leading agricultural college. But the famine had felt remote even to him. The victims were hundreds of miles to the north, and there was little talk of it on campus. Students could eat injera—the sour pancake that is a staple of Ethiopian meals—just once a week, but Senay recalls no other hardships. His parents were similarly spared; the drought had somehow skipped over their rainy plateau.
That you could live in one part of a country and be oblivious to mass starvation in another: Senay would think about that a lot later.
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