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Show 2G The Salt Late Tribune Sunday, December 8, 1985 Morgue Is Empty and the Feeding Lines Are Dwindling By Blaine Harden Washington Post Writer A year ago KOREM, Ethiopia stretchers were dispatched every morning in this famine camp to collect bodies. They were brought to the morgue tent, washed and wrapped in shrouds fashioned from food-aid bags. Outside the morgue, mothers, sisters and wives sat in the dirt morning after morning and wept. Last week the morgue was empty. Scores of stretchers, which once had borne as many as 100 corpses a day, lay on the floor of the morgue, gathering dust. Just outside, children played and sang, joyfully oblivious to the past. The one-yetransformation of Korem from a burgeoning famine camp where doctors felt helpless to a shrinking feeding center where doctors are bored is testament to a worldwide relief operation that in the past year has defanged, if not yet defeated, Ethiopias great famine. A year ago, relief food reached only one out of 10 of the 7.9 million Ethiopians threatened by starvation, according to United Nations figures. Now, after the emergency importation of nearly 1 million metric tons of food and the expenditure of about $1.3 billion, the U.N. estimates nine out of 10 of those people are being fed. What we have done is save the lives of most of the 7 o million who were at risk. Some have died, but it is in the hundreds of thousands, not the millions. It is one of the world's great success stories," said Fred C. Fischer, the U.S. coordinator of emergency relief in Ethiopia, speaking of the combined efforts of 35 countries, several U.N. agencies and 47 organizations. At the height of the emergency last March there were 43 famine camps feeding about 1 million people. The remaining 23 camps now feed fewer than 70,000. Ethiopians walk away from the camps nearly every day. To a journalist who passed through Korem last year, the changes wrought in 12 months are astounding. In the camps four hospital sheds, Ethiopians last year slept six or seven to a bed, shivering in rags in the highland cold. In those sheds last week, they slept one or two to a bed, wrapped in thick wool blankets. The cholera isolation ward where 228 people died in one month last spring is now closed. Flies no longer crawl in the eyes of children too weak to shoo them away. Last year the camps stick-lik- e children impassively submitted to a weighing procedure in which they were put in a harness and hung from a hook attached to a scale. Last week many of them refused the harness and grabbed onto the hook as if to do a chin-uWhile being weighed, many giggled. Yet, despite the smiles of the children and the optimism of their parents, who say they are eager to farm again, the Ethiopian famine still presents an imminent threat of mass death. Like tens of thousands of Ethiopians who have left the famine camps, most of the people leaving Korem this week will not be able to feed themselves for at least a year, relief officials said. On their farms, many of which are perched on inaccessible ridges in the northern highlands, they will be just as dependent on outside food aid as they were this past year at Korem. These people are going to have to live for the next year or so on the . milk that we take grain, oil and skim out to them, said Hugo Slim, admin-- ' center at istrator for a Korem, which is run by the British chapter of Save the Children. child-nutritio- n Plentiful rains and a good harvest in much of Africa have ended the food emergency in 16 of the 21 countries affected by drought this year, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. I Such chronically arid nations as Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Mauritania are not expected to need outside food in 1986. Good crops have cut relief needs in Sudan, the second See G-- Column 1 Collector Keeps His Driftwood In a Safe Place By Jeff Barnard Associated Press Writer BANDON, Ore. Bill Magness stepped carefully around the gnarled and weathered pieces of redwood burl, bubbly maple, and quilted fir that crowded the dimly lit shed. If we ever get that driftwood museum, itll have to have lots of room, said Magness, blowing the dust off a big piece of redwood that had been water-blastesanded and waxed to show off intricate swirls of rich dark grain. If you put these pieces too close together, they will compete and youll have just one. Before he dies, Magness wants to see the driftwood he has collected over the past 25 years preserved in a museum. If I kick the bucket, this wood will all be scattered around, and there isnt any more, he said. They grow new people all the time, but they dont grow any more good driftwood. "I have to consider the fact of who in the hell is going to do this if I dont get it done, he added. I dont have any family interested in it or who knows anything about it or cares about it. Ive just turned 74 and Ive had four heart attacks. Magness started collecting driftwood when he left the timber business around Roseburg and moved to the southern Oregon coast to cross rhododendrons with the native azalea. The hybrids didnt pan out, but the beachcombing did. I was the only one collecting it, he said of the driftwood that fills his house, yard and a shed where cabinetmaker Mike Smith turns some of it into finely crafted furniture. The beachcombers collected it just to sell to me. I never bargained with the beachcombers. That way Id get first qrack at the good pieces. Bandon is located in a natural scoop formed by Cape Arago that grate things out of the Pacific Ocean as storms drive through from the South and west. But the good pieces just aren't washing up on the beach the way they used to. So much of that good wood is culls from sawmills, Magness said. They cant sell it for regular lumber. So theyd just toss it. 1 But hard times hit the timber economy that built Oregons south coast, forcing many of the mills to shut down and drying up the springs of driftwood. Stumps grubbed out of bottomland by farmers and dumped into coastal rivers were a prime source of driftwood, too, but environmental laws prevent that now. The flood of 1964 was too much of a good thing. The driftwood piled up on the beach reached from the high bank out to the water, Magness recalled. "They logged in it for two years. Unfortunately, it brought all that wood out at the same time. There is no more coming out." Magness learned to value things others threw away while growing up poor in Dayton, a Willamette Valley farming town. "When we picked potatoes, they always left the little ones for us to take home, he said. They made better eating than the big ones anyway. Magness divides people into two kinds. The upper 10 percent, who appreciate really fine wood, and the lower 90 percent, who don't. ' "If there was a museum, I'd have to stay out of it, he said. So many people would be saying, 'Whats that supposed to look like? Some people think it has to look like something else and that always Irritates me. I tell them its supposed to look like a damned piece of wood. Magness relishes getting the driftwood as much as having it. There was one old guy, he and his drinking buddies had run out of beer money and he called me up and asked If there was a piece I wanted picked up somewhei e," Magness said I said there was one up on the road to Charleston. They about knocked down a telephone pole getting it. A deputy sheriff Stopped and he talked the deputy into flagging traffic for him. The thing was 13 V feet across. He said, Boy, if there had been any hitchhikers, we'd have picked them all up. Hundreds of pieces are spread around Magness' yard, soaking up the rain. White cedar lines the driveway, th roots splayed out flat from trying to grow on the coastal sand plain Some of it is stored with friends. Including a piece he turned down $3,500 for about 10 years ago. 4 3 9 t I i 1 4 The pains were just unbearable.?'3'-- ' walk from here to the kitchen without starting to get real spasms Sot long ago, Judy Bale learned that a back injury can be a real pain. And in Judy's line of work, it meant time off work for recovery. But became of IHC Care, the health care benefits program available through her employer, the time off has less of a burden. "You know, you can do without paychecks you can manage, as long as you know that at the end of the road sou can go hack to work and you don't have eight or nine thousand dollars worth of hills you have to pay for" treated by IHC Care is as important to Judy as the treatment she received. The way she's ' "It was wonderful. You didnt hase to stand there and fill out an) papers. Everything is already That was all done for me by the time I got to the couldn't ask for an)onc nicer to take care of vou. Everyone I came in contact with at the hospital was just more than friendly and helpful . . '. .The doctor is concerned with getting me well, you know that is first and You hospital foremost, and since I dont hase to worry about the bills, it can be first and foremost with me also. Judys employer offered several health plans. For a lot of reasons, Judy (hose IHC Care. ". . it seemed like the best . . .To be able to go in An Intermountain Health Care Company 533-828- 2 More than you expect and get a physical for $5 is pretty darn good . . .and to be able to go to the doctor and just hand them $5 and thats the end of it, you know, everything else is taken care of . . . IHC Care just tops the list as far as Im concerned. IHC Care is everything Judy expects in a health plan, and more. Its made a difference in her health. And in her life. I was in so much pain before I went into the came out of surgery, my daughter hospital said, Mom, you look so good ... I TyT dont believe its you! And I said When I y llOW 1 feel so good, the pain is gone. . |
