Word: gruel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
Bush paid a high political price in exchange for this thin gruel. By pressing Tokyo to commit itself to purchase specific quantities of U.S. products, Bush abandoned his long-held free-trade principles for less competitive "managed trade," in which governments agree to pressure private industries to meet preset goals. Trying typically to have it both ways, the President repeatedly warned that any departure from free trade would damage the U.S. economy, which has become increasingly dependent on sales of American exports. Arriving in Washington on Friday, he denied that the Tokyo accords were tantamount to protectionism...