A Day in the Death of Somalia

By ANDREW PURVIS BARDERA

Dawn. As the red sun edges over the horizon, a crowd of frail bodies gathers in the chill morning air outside the UNICEF feeding center in Bardera, a small town in southern Somalia. Each person clutches an aluminum pot or gourd to be filled, they hope, with a meal of brown gruel before the day is over. For four weeks now they have been been arriving at the rate of 150 to 200 a day from villages as far as 125 miles away, camping overnight in abandoned huts and making their way to the center in the predawn hours through the wide, dusty streets.

Most of those waiting are women and children; their men were killed in the endless fighting that has cursedhusband in two months -- "He has another wife," she explains -- and two younger children have died of hunger. Her daughter, naked except for a string of turquoise beads, coughs at her side. Dhaqane snatches the girl to her bony chest. "I will stay here," she says, "until the food runs out."

5:45 a.m. The throng, which has been growing steadily, surges ahead. The red iron gates have eased open a crack, enough to let through a single file of supplicants. Inside, 12 Somali guards dressed in battle fatigues and armed with M-16 rifles issue orders. Wielding 3-ft. wooden switches, they herd the people into neat rows at the rear of a large earthen courtyard. In 30 minutes more than 2,000 people are seated on the ground while others stream in: nomad women wrapped in black shawls, grandmothers in tattered sackcloth, lone children naked but for a makeshift shirt. At one point the crowd seethes forward. Guards, screaming, strike the women on their bare backs. Discipline, of a sort, is restored.

8:15 a.m. A Somali nurse dressed in white coat and rubber sandals picks his way through the crowd to weed out the youngest, most desperate cases. Gathering them together in another part of the compound, he feeds each one a spoonful of antidiarrhea medicine from a rusty thermos bottle. Every child under five receives a plastic bracelet, which entitles the wearer to a protein biscuit in addition to a bowl of gruel. The bands are color coded; blue for severely malnourished; red for those on the verge of death.

8:45 a.m. The feeding begins. Guards select about 20 people from the front rows and steer them toward the food vats, six huge oil barrels cut in half and fitted with wire handles. Working quickly, Somali servers ladle out two large cupfuls of steaming Unimix, a brownish mixture of maize, beans and vegetable oil, for each person. Suddenly, an elderly woman rushes forward, inadvertently knocking the steaming ration from a small girl's wizened hands. The child howls in pain and anger: the gruel is scalding hot (several other children display peeling scars from previous burns), but far worse, the day's only meal is gone. After filling their pots, the refugees file through the gate -- they are not permitted to eat in the compound -- and settle down in side streets or dusty clearings. There they wait impatiently for the food to cool, then wolf it down.

9:35 a.m. A boy of five with a red bracelet has passed out in the crowd. Two workers rush over, hoist him by his spindly limbs and lay him down beneath a shade tree on the far side of the courtyard. The boy is suffering from severe dehydration, and the nurse hastily inserts an intravenous tube, hooking the bottle to a branch. It is too late. As the boy's eyes roll back beneath fluttering eyelids, an older woman gently presses them shut. The boy came from the village of Malwuen, 34 miles away, where both parents and eight of his brothers and sisters succumbed to starvation in the past six months. Four days ago, he set out for Bardera with his last sibling, an elder brother, who now rocks quietly weeping by his side.

11:15 a.m. The equatorial sun is beating down hard now, and many of the 1,000 people still waiting in the exposed courtyard have propped aluminum pots on their heads in a vain attempt to shield themselves from the heat. Others have tried to squeeze into the pool of shade offered by a scraggly tree. A teary- eyed little girl, throat dry with thirst, slips by the guards and pleads for a jug of water. She is angrily rebuffed. Workers have grown accustomed to the desperate, and few have pity, any longer, to spare.

Noon. As the gruel is doled out, cooks keep the six vats brewing, boiling dense brown river water to purge at least some of the bacteria, then stirring in the Unimix with wooden poles. One cook estimates that it will take 80 vats to feed everyone here this day. At least, he says, there is enough food. Two weeks before, inadequate supplies stirred the crowd into a frenzy. Mothers tore pots from starving children to feed their own. "It was terrible," recalls Dr. Ayub Sheik Yeron, the UNICEF representative who set up this feeding center last month. "When people have not eaten for three or four days, they lose control."

2:10 p.m. Two skeletal men, discovered semiconscious on the outskirts of town, are carried into the compound and laid side by side underneath a tree. The friends had collapsed after walking for three days and two nights to reach this place from their home village 31 miles away. A nurse slips intravenous tubes into barely visible veins and covers each man with a gray blanket. With stomachs too cramped to tolerate food, the men ignore the cans of gruel placed at their side. The nurse predicts that neither will survive to evening.

3:15 p.m. He is correct; they die quickly. A man with a gimpy leg, evidently the center's undertaker, expertly wraps these two bodies and four others -- the day's dead -- in rags and burlap sacks discarded from rations that came too late. He puts the bundles into a blue wheelbarrow, wheels them out of the compound and down to the banks of the Juba, where they are lowered together into an open grave.

4:15 p.m. Shadows begin to lengthen across the courtyard as one last child, a small cross-eyed boy with no parents to wash the red dust out of his matted hair, has his gourd filled and wanders distractedly out the gate. Moments later the iron doors swing shut.

8:00 p.m. In the still darkness outside the compound, a handful of women and children shelter for the night beneath a stunted shade tree. They will be the first in line tomorrow. Others have made their way back to roofless, unkempt huts, abandoned during the fighting here, to wait out the long hours until another feeding day begins. Says UNICEF's Dr. Yeron: "I have been in the refugee camps during the Ethiopian famine, and I have never seen such a catastrophe as we have in Somalia." Still, he says, since dry rations became available here two weeks ago, the situation has improved. "Last month we had 40 people dying each day at this feeding center. Today there were just six." The doctor shakes his head. Comfort comes in strange forms in this ravaged land.