Word: compounded
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...friend Marty and I dug through his bathroom cabinet in Grays East frantically looking for detergent, or a bottle of Windex, or even a non-dairy whipped topping. Anything that contained an organic compound with a chemical structure we could identify...