Inshallah THE FAMINE IN ETHIOPIA
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOUG MENUEZ
Inshallah The Famine in Ethiopia
Photographs & text by
Doug Menuez
In the Spring of 1985 I was sent by a Newsweek to cover the famine in Ethiopia which had just burst onto world headlines. I traveled with a group bringing food and supplies from San Francisco which they packed into a rented DC-8. We landed in Khartoum and crossed the Sahara to the new refugee camps along the Sudan/Ethiopia border and found a human disaster on a scale not seen since the Biafran war. I was on my first overseas assignment and wholly unprepared for the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of Eritrean refugees arriving in ill-prepared camps, most dying quickly from starvation, disease and exhaustion. Forced out of their villages by drought and war with Ethiopia, masses of villagers were coming down from the hills in search of safety, food and water. Upon my return, the famine was bumped from the news by other dramatic stories. These photographs were never published and wound up in storage for decades. The recent tragic reprise of war and drought in the region has led to another massive famine which in turn led me to dig out these photographs and finally finish the assingment. The phrase Inshallah means “God willing”in Arabic and was often the reply to any question I might ask a local about the famine or anything else. How else, I thought, to explain a catastrophe of this magnitude other than God’s will? Doug Menuez
menuez.com