I Am Still Haunted by the Pitiful, Starving Babies I Had to Leave to Die ; the Nurse Filmed On the Frontline of the Ethiopian Famine in 1984 by Newsman Michael Buerk has Gone Back. Here, She Tells Her Story

Summary

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IT was a low stone wall, covered in dust. On one side stood as many as 12,000 desperate Ethiopians, men, women and children, all of them starving, many near death. On the other stood a feeding station run by Red Cross nurse Claire Bertschinger. Each day, throughout the summer of 1984, she was forced to cross the wall and choose just 60 or 70 infants to feed.

Many of those she had to leave behind would not survive the next 24 hours.

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I Am Still Haunted by the Pitiful, Starving Babies I Had to Leave to Die ; the Nurse Filmed On the Frontline of the Ethiopian Famine in 1984 by Newsman Michael Buerk has Gone Back. Here, She Tells Her Story

In a ramshackle corrugated iron building Bertschinger and one other expat nurse battled against the odds to help some of the six million east Africans hit by the worst natural disaster of the 20th century. "In practice," she recalls, "there was only ever one of us working because the other was always ill. We took it in turns: diarrhoea, ulcers on our legs, flea bites, scabies.

We were always falling sick."

The feeding station was just outside the town of Mekele, capital of the Tigray province. Thousands...

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