Word: matchstick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That is more or less the question that bedevils Western officials as they face the horrors of another famine in the Ethiopia of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam. All too clear in the public memory are those televised pictures from 1984-85 of starving children with their matchstick arms, their swollen bellies and their huge, staring eyes. The public may also remember reports of relief shipments being taxed $50 a ton to help finance Mengistu's 225,000-man army, the largest in black Africa, and of sacks of Western grain rotting on the docks or disappearing into the black...
Their wide, staring eyes and matchstick arms are the all too familiar icons of hunger and despair. The Third World's starving millions are truly the wretched of the earth, and in recent years the affluent West has lavished billions of dollars in efforts to feed them. Yet famine relief is a very small part of the roughly $1 trillion in aid that rich nations have given poor ones since World War II in the largest voluntary transfer of wealth in human history. Throughout the world today, thousands of public and private organizations are spending some $35 billion a year...
Like the animals from which they came, the fossils are tiny, many smaller than a matchstick. Says Krishtalka: "One rarely finds small specimens preserved so exquisitely." Animals that have been identified include bats, monkeys, iguana-like reptiles, a possum-like marsupial and salamanders. The scientists have yet to label the new species but have linked them to the lizard and shrew families...
...never suspected, of course, that these were social problems. It was a frightening new experience in which I no longer recognized myself. Drugs were only an aid in the conscious cremation of talent and possibility. Many of us, I think, lived in the light of a flame passed from matchstick to matchstick...
ETHIOPIA. The long lines of gaunt, potbellied children with matchstick limbs are dispiritingly familiar. During the 1973 drought, 200,000 Ethiopians died; this year's disaster is even more pervasive. Gondar province, once known as Ethiopia's grain basket, has become a shriveled wasteland. Where rain has fallen, there are no seeds to plant; where it has not, there is no wood for building, and nothing but straw and dung for fuel. In addition, the remoteness of the area makes communication difficult and the provision of supplies almost impossible. In some camps refugees must either wait 36 hours...