On the front lines of famine

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: on the front line of famine.

Earlier this week we told you about the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s, and how journalists and celebrities helped raise awareness and money for the cause.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: But there were also many Christian aid workers on the ground, helping people throughout the crisis that took hundreds of thousands of lives. WORLD’s Lindsay Mast talked to two of them about what it was like.

LINDSAY MAST: When the BBC aired its initial report on the great Ethiopian famine in October 1984, its graphic images of starving men, women, and children shocked the world.

NEWS REPORT / BUERK: Those who die in the night are brought at dawn to be laid out on the edge of the plain, dozens of them, men, women and children…

The report did not shock 25-year-old Steve Reynolds. He had already come face-to-face with the suffering earlier that year, when he went to Ethiopia as a photographer with a survey team from World Vision. They had gotten word that farmers in the agrarian society were selling their hoes.

STEVE REYNOLDS: They would sell everything else before that, and when they sold their hoe, that was pretty much a sign that they were giving up on ever growing anything again.

He describes his first day at a feeding camp, seeing a snaking line of thousands of emaciated people hoping to receive a ration of one coffee can of the cereal grain sorghum.

REYNOLDS: And they didn't know when they were going to get the next distribution of food.

Reynolds saw children with burn marks on their bodies from parents who thought touching a hot stick to the skin would ward off evil spirits and cure them of their malnutrition.

REYNOLDS: They would pull back the Gabby, the garment from their child, and show me their child and the children, every single one of them was just skin and bones like no muscle left.

It wasn’t long before the work overwhelmed him.

REYNOLDS: I remember sitting down under a tree at one point and not even knowing what to pray…And it was an honest like, this is the most godforsaken place I could imagine being…I felt like that was when God said, Look, this is, this is what the work I've called you to do. And are you serious? You know, do you, do you want to do this? Because if you do, this is what it is.

Steve Reynolds holds one of his photos from Ethiopia. Photo by Lindsay Mast

Reynolds picked up his camera and got back to work. Later, he would show his images to a colleague in Kenya, who shared them with a reporter from the BBC. He says it was part of a chain of events that ultimately brought the British BBC TV crew to Ethiopia. Their report spread news of the famine to the world.

NEWS REPORT: People scrabble in the dirt as they go for each individual grain of wheat. For some it may be the only food they've had for a fortnight or more.

By the time it aired, Reynolds was back in California. But within days, the media blackout of the communist Ethiopian government ended. He returned to help facilitate press visits and document the work.

REYNOLDS: There was just a rush of media at that point when I went back, whereas nobody was there in June of that year, like, you know, we didn't see any journalists or anybody.

Soon relief—much more relief—was on its way. And someone needed to organize the distribution centers.

GHISLAINE BENNEY: It was like setting up a small village where everybody was sick and dying, essentially.

Ghislaine Benney and her husband Chuck arrived in Ethiopia in late 1984. She had just converted to Christianity that year, after a lifetime of atheism. She was 40, with a lucrative career as an executive in Manhattan. But now she and her husband wanted to volunteer their energy and experience helping others. World Vision put them to work.

BENNEY: There was absolutely no infrastructure once you got out of Addis, there was no paved roads, there was no trucks, there was no trains, there was, we had no access to a port to receive goods.

They set up an office in a rundown hotel in Addis Ababa and got to work. He managed logistics; she handled finances, human resources, facilities. She felt guilty sleeping. There was so much to do. When she did leave the hotel, the desperation of the people she saw left her in tears.

BENNEY: They would gather around, asking, begging, whatever was for food or whatever, and it was just, I will never forget that. It seared my soul. It absolutely made me feel how can a nation, how can anybody inflict so much suffering on others?

She focused on doing the next thing she could. Things slowly got better.

In the interim, she says she saw God at work: Christians in Kenya helped drive trucks into Ethiopia when they couldn’t access other routes. She and Chuck once flew back from Kenya with two huge suitcases of contraband Christian material. The normally hyper-vigilant airport security guards simply overlooked them.

She says despite the suffering she saw, the famine didn’t shake her young faith in God. It strengthened it.

BENNEY: And it was very obvious that the pain was caused by people, not by God. The fact that Christians were there to help was more of a testament to the effectiveness of God's power in the lives of his people.

She says by mid-1985, their team had established 12 relief camps and 135 development projects, and was feeding about 2 million people.

REYNOLDS: And you can so almost see the desperation on the father's in the father's eyes, he can't really do anything for his family, so he waits.

Four decades later, Steve Reynolds looks back on pictures he took those first days in Ethiopia. The memories can still be emotional: sadness at hundreds of thousands who died. But also delight, remembering believers in Ethiopia:

REYNOLDS: They showed me what real faith looks like when there's nothing else, you know, to fall back on. Their faith sustained them. They worshiped God at risk to their own lives in many cases.

Aid continued to come in, and rain fell again in Ethiopia in 1985. Reynolds went on to do aid work around the world. Ghislaine Benney had a long career with Mission Aviation Fellowship. Both recognize those difficult days in Ethiopia helped save lives. Reynolds once again:

REYNOLDS: The enemy thought he had won in Ethiopia. He thought he had just destroyed these people. But then God came along and said, No, no, no, you're not destroying anything. Let me show you what I'm going to do in the hearts of people who actually believe in Me.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lindsay Mast in Greenwood, South Carolina.

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