ETHIOPIAN VILLAGE

Food was not just a handout--it was a dignified "wage" earned for making roads through the desert into their villages.

They gathered rocks from kilometers around to lay a roadbed.

Another form of "Food For Work" was building water catchments or dams to conserve water.

That also made future food deliveries easier.

NAZARET, ETHIOPIA

" A Christian response to hunger,"--9,000 tons of it.

It was a great honor to direct a project that imported and delivered this massive amount of food for starving Ethiopians.

ETHIOPIA: ADDIS ABABA AIRPORT

Ingenious!

The wheat to save starving people in remote places had to be air dropped. Germany provided Hercules planes to do the drop.

Here the wheat is being loaded into bags. First a normal 100kg bag. Then that bag was placed in a larger bag. Finally it was all placed in a third larger bag.

When dropped, the small bag would burst spilling the grain into the second bag. And if the second bag broke it would spill into the third bag--no grain lost.

ETHIOPIA DESERT

Water is worth more than gold in the desert.

This lad takes measured sips from a gourd-canteen.

Another thing hard in the desert is photography. Dark skin against a bright sandy background is a challenge to an amateur like me.

ETHIOPIA COUNTRYSIDE

The drought meant meager harvest. This is how they thrashed it--just like Bible days.

PORT ASAB, ETHIOPIA

Russian transport planes are loading up Russian combatants to take them to the interior of the country.

My Cuban guards did not know I took this photo.

ETHIOPIA

A happy parade of once starving people carrying home bags of food from our distribution point--each bag held enough food enough to feed a family several weeks.

ETHIOPIA, FOOD FOR REFUGEES

One of the fleet of trucks we used to carry food to the starving Ethiopians.

Later we learned that government troops were coming in behind us and taking the food away to feed the army.

Worse, they were separating Christian families and hauling them to the south parts of the country to become slaves for the Jesus-haters there.

I had felt like we were doing a good thing by feeding thousands of hungry people at a time. Then I discovered that we were being used to set a trap for them.

At that time the media was largely ignoring the famine and war in Mozambique and the refugee camps in Zimbabwe so we shifted our emphasis to southern Africa.

When you must choose who you can keep alive, you are also choosing who you will let die.

Not an easy decision.

ETHIOPIA BY HELICOPTER

A Canadian television ministry named 100 Huntley Street offered us the use of this Bell 212 helicopter to reach the refugee sites and to deliver food to inaccessable mesas. Interesting: this is the very same air machine used in filming one of the Rambo movies. It retired from Hollywood and went into missions!

ETHIOPIAN MONUMENT

I took this picture in the open countryside of Ethiopia.

It is a silhouette of Africa on a split globe. The monument has intrigued me for years. What does it mean?

One suggestion was that the world will be divided over Africa.