In April, 1991, I was reporting for this newspaper from a refugee camp on the Iraq-Turkey border. The Kurdish minority, encouraged by the first President Bush, had staged a revolt against Saddam Hussein, but the expected US help never came. Deaglán de Bréadún, Foreign Affairs Correspondent, reports.
They ended up fleeing Iraq en masse into neighbouring Turkey and Iran, swimming rivers and clambering over mountains in their desperation to avoid the dictator's revenge.
There was almost no water or food at the Kurdish refugee camp in the Turkish village of Cukurça, and conditions were so bad that even reporters became ill. But among many heart-rending sights, one that still stays with me, is a young couple, their child dying in their arms, pleading in what was probably their only word of English, "Doctor! Doctor!"
Even 14 years later, I can see the haunted look in their eyes, an equal combination of terror and misery.
I saw that look again last month in Ethiopia. A mother with suspected HIV/AIDS had travelled for two days by bus to bring her sick and underweight child to a clinic at Latchi, outside the city of Mekele, run by the Daughters of Charity order. The child lay in her arms, eyes closed and face an alarming yellow pallor.
Just like in Ireland, word gets around about the places where good medical care is available.
The staff of 10 at Latchi includes two qualified nurses and a lab technician, but no doctor, and facilities at the clinic are limited. But you don't need to be on the premises for long to appreciate the skills and sensitivity of people such as Sister Alemush or the regional co-ordinator, Sister Medhin. Whatever may be lacking in material terms, there is no shortage of warmth or humanity.
The Latchi clinic costs €25,000 to €35,000 per annum to run. It's a minimal sum by Irish standards, but the staff put some 25,000 people through their hands each year. Some of the money for this and other clinics is raised in the north Dublin district of Finglas. Another contributor is the British-based Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) which has now joined forces in Ethiopia with the Irish agency, Trócaire.
It cost a mere €15,000, or the price of a decent second-hand Audi, to install a new water pump in the mountain village of Bajie, located 20 kilometres from the city of Dire Dawa.
A total of €180,000 for this and similar projects in the area is provided jointly over a two-year period by Development Co-operation Ireland, the aid division of the Department of Foreign Affairs, and Trócaire.
Up to now, villagers such as grandmother Kedia Adem had to trek to the spring and queue with their neighbours. She tells me the whole procedure took several hours each day and there were also health risks associated with taking water from an open source. "We used to drink unclean water with worms," she tells me, through an interpreter.
It's like a Biblical scene to watch the whole community turning out to celebrate its wonderful new facility, chanting and clapping and beating plastic oil-drums. In addition to meeting the needs of about 200 households in Bajie and the surrounding district, the water is also used for livestock and irrigation for vegetable-growing.
But this is a modest project compared with what's happening in the district of Hintallo Wejerat, in Ethiopia's Tigray region. Many will remember Tigray as one of the locations affected in the notorious famine in the mid-1980s which so moved the rock star Bob Geldof that he organised the Live Aid concert to raise funds.
Tigray remains a parched landscape where people and animals can quickly dehydrate in the tropical sun. Local development worker Mehbrahtom Fekadu says that, without water, the only options are death or migration to another area where there may be some relief for a time. "The final fate is death," he explains, in a matter-of-fact tone.
But Fekadu and his colleagues in REST (Relief Society of Tigray), a locally-based development organisation, are working to ensure that the inhabitants of the area don't have to make these hard choices. With the aid of €1.4 million in funding from the European Union and additional contributions from Trócaire, CAFOD and Christian Aid, a network has been established to guarantee a water supply that includes dams, artificial lakes, aqueducts and solar-powered pumps.
The trick is to trap the water during the rainy season as it flows down the hills and mountains or else to draw it up out of the ground, which is where the solar pump comes into play. The rains are supposed to continue for up to three months, but last year they only lasted one.
You know they are doing a good job when you see ducks in the area's Shelanat reservoir. There are six of them, paddling away with as much aplomb as if it were Surrey or Sligo, instead of the hotlands of Ethiopia.
Cattle are drinking at the bank. It's the epitome of normality. The by-products of a secure water-supply include a new small town of about 50 houses at Hiwane, close to the Shelanat reservoir.
Meanwhile, a local farmer, Girmay Kalayu (47), recalls the famine period 20 years ago. "It was a very shocking time." The crisis was exacerbated by the war going on at the time between Tigrayan rebels and the military dictatorship which ruled Ethiopia at the time.
Peace reigns, more or less, in Tigray these days, although there are recurring tensions between Ethiopia and the neighbouring state of Eritrea, which borders on Tigray. Heading north through the town of Adigrat to the Eritrean border, it is hard to see what makes the territory in this barren, dried-up zone worth fighting for. At the border in Zalambessa, a UN peacekeeping contingent is interposed between the two sides.
Despite improvements in regions such as Tigray, you still see very few old people in Ethiopia. Average life expectancy is only 41 years and the HIV/AIDS pandemic hasn't helped in this regard. The country was listed as 170th out of 177 countries by the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) last year in its Human Development Index, a measure of comparative economic and social progress; Ireland came 10th from the top. Despite Ethiopia's impoverishment and lack of facilities, I met a fair number of tourists, attracted by the country's amazing cultural and ethnic diversity, and rich archaeological heritage.
There are small signs of hope and progress in Ethiopia but a recurrence of its military conflict with neighbouring Eritrea would put soon paid to those. A peace treaty was concluded on December 12th, 2000, but tensions have risen again recently.
The territory they fought over is hardly a prize: at the Eritrean border, the land is so dry that the cattle are reduced to eating cacti and other desert plants to survive. The danger is that people will be forced to sell the family's only cow to get food for today, but will have nothing left for tomorrow.
Rather than straight cash hand-outs, a cash-for-work programme offers modest sums in return for manual labour on basic infrastructural projects such as small irrigation dams or a new stretch of road. People use this money to buy grain or other basic foods.
The spectacle of 300 impoverished Ethiopians building a road in the midday sun is an evocative sight for anyone from a country that was stricken by famine. I am told there are 21,000 people employed on cash-for-work schemes over a four-month period in the Tigray region. Five development agencies have combined to provide a total of €550,000, including Trócaire, which supplied €100,000.
The Ethiopians clearly appreciate the help but have trouble with the pronunciation so, instead of "Trow-kirr-eh" they call it "Trow-care". Ethiopia is the focus of Trócaire's Lenten fundraising campaign, which starts tomorrow.
As it happens, 2005 will also be the occasion for a five-year review of progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
These targets for poverty reduction, disease elimination and universal education were adopted at the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000. "Ethiopia is a good example of all the issues the MDGs are trying to address," says a Trócaire spokeswoman.
Partly due to the drought-ridden state of Ethiopia, much of the country's livestock is raised and tended by pastoralists, semi-nomadic farmers who make up about 12 per cent of the country's population and move from one area to another in accordance with climate conditions. Two sisters from a pastoralist family, Bedada Kule (16) and Dansa Kule (six) from Dirre, in southern Ethiopia, have been chosen as the human faces of the Trócaire campaign.
The money raised in the Lenten campaign goes to all of Trócaire's projects worldwide, although the organisation is involved in a wide range of activities in Ethiopia, in partnership with CAFOD. These include the Ethiopian Gemini Trust in Addis Ababa, headed by Dr Carmela Green-Abate, which cares for impoverished families with twins. Other Irish agencies also carry out important work in Ethiopia.
Rwanda was the focus of Trócaire's Lenten campaign last year, which raised €11.7 million. This year there is an imponderable factor, namely, the huge fundraising effort for the countries affected by the tsunami disaster.
Whether people will continue to dig deep for Ethiopia remains to be seen, but development workers stress that other needy areas of the world should not be forgotten despite the focus on south-east Asia.
Credit card donations to Trócaire's Lenten Campaign can be made online at www.lent.ie or by telephone to Callsave 1800-408-408 in the Republic and Freefone 0800 912 1200 in Northern Ireland. Cheques can be posted to Trócaire, Maynooth, Co Kildare
