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On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent de Brian Stewart

On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent

Autor Brian Stewart
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 23 oct 2025

A powerful memoir revealing the pressures, joys, and traumas of witnessing history up close and personal, from one of Canada’s most prominent and decorated foreign correspondents.

Brian Stewart is a trusted voice who brought stories of the world home to Canadians for decades on CBC’s The National.

He saw it all firsthand—triumph and ecstasy; carnage and unspeakable suffering—and bore the responsibility of shining a light on the most exciting and most horrifying moments of the late 20th century, including the Gulf War and the Ethiopian famine, reporting from sandstorms and shootouts, palaces and embassies. He spoke with the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and Nelson Mandela; with armed militants, activists, aid workers, and more.

Now, for the first time, he is sharing his experience of the cost, both personal and professional, of bringing truth home from around the world. Reading like a whirlwind trip through the highs and lows of modern history from one of its most passionate students, On the Ground brings politics, war, and social change to vivid life.

An arresting tale of courage, curiosity, and empathy from a time when the news media held the public’s trust, Stewart’s honest and balanced storytelling is not only the fascinating tale of where one man’s quest to witness history took him but also a sobering reminder of the staggering value of wise, responsible, and honorable journalism.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781668052150
ISBN-10: 1668052156
Pagini: 352
Ilustrații: 16-pg 4-C insert
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 33 mm
Greutate: 0.53 kg
Editura: Simon&Schuster
Colecția Simon & Schuster

Notă biografică

Brian Stewart was for decades one of the Canada’s most prominent television journalists and was acclaimed for his foreign coverage for both CBC’s The National and The Journal. Born in Montréal, and originally a newspaper reporter, Stewart went on to become foreign correspondent for CBC in London and NBC in Frankfurt. He worked in ten war zones, was host of the CBC Foreign Affairs show Worldview, and interviewed many of the historic figures of his time, including Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Salman Rushdie, and Henry Kissinger. After retiring, he was appointed Senior Fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. Stewart is a recipient of the Order of Ontario, the Queen’s Jubilee Medal, and the Order of Canada.

Recenzii

“One of the world’s finest reporters, acclaimed for his skill and humanity, Stewart gives a moving account of the high drama and perils of chasing history as it happens.”
— PETER MANSBRIDGE, #1 bestselling author of Off the Record

 
“If Brian Stewart from Canada does not go to Northern Ethiopia in the 80s, and does that reporting, Live Aid doesn’t happen, and then, the world does not change.”
— BOB GELDOF, co-organizer of Live Aid & Live 8, CBC News
“A magnificent, gripping memoir. . . . Brian Stewart [is] one of the legendary foreign correspondents of his generation. This ranks with the best pieces of reportage in the footsteps of Edgar Snow, Martha Gellhorn, Matthew Halton, and Ernest Hemingway.”
— MARK STAROWICZ, award-winning journalist and producer 
“On the Ground is a remarkable book. One of Canada’s most distinguished international correspondents, Stewart takes his readers around the world from Ethiopia to Iraq to London and Afghanistan as he reflects on what he saw during his extraordinary career. Like all great journalists, Stewart does not flinch from telling unpleasant truths. Everyone who is interested in the world and in Canada’s role in the world must read this book.”
— JANICE GROSS STEIN, Founding Director, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy
“On The Ground is more than a memoir, it is a profound meditation on the human costs of war and the ethical challenges of conflict journalism, and a clear-eyed account of Canada’s evolving sense of itself and its place in the world.”
— DR. ANDREW POTTER, author and Associate Professor, Max Bell School of Public Policy
“One of the best foreign correspondents in television news . . . [Stewart] woke up the world to the catastrophic famine in Ethiopia. He is thoughtful, literate, and very knowledgeable. [Here] he explains how to cover war, how to bear witness, how people come back from disaster, and how he recovered from the moral injury of doing his job.”
— VALERIE PRINGLE, award-winning broadcaster 
“Before I knew Canada, I knew Brian Stewart. I grew up with my father—a then Ethiopian government official—telling me about a certain Canadian who used journalism to tell the story of millions of vulnerable Ethiopians. Had it not been for him, many would have perished. . . . This book is a reminder of why Canadian journalism and Brian matter at home and in the world.”
— SAMUEL GETACHEW, award-winning international journalist
“[On the Ground] is a reminder of the influence and importance of television journalism in telling consequential stories that both explain and expose the world around us.”
— CHRISTOPHER WADDELL, Professor Emeritus, former Director of the School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
“Brian Stewart’s reporting brought us many of the most important stories of our time. Here, in his memoir, he brings a Canadian lens to those stories, reminding us that our perspective matters now more than ever.”
— PETER MANSBRIDGE, #1 bestselling author of Off the Record

Extras

Chapter 1: The Child in the Ethiopian Famine 1 The Child in the Ethiopian Famine
Across the north of Ethiopia runs the great massif of highlands and mountains that, rising to four thousand metres, form the fabled Roof of Africa. Everything about the land appears stark, remote, dramatic, and timeless. Life exists, precariously, across sun-seared plateaus and atop flat buttes, the jagged gorges in deep shadows and the isolated terraces dotted with the grass-roofed huts of subsistence farms. I have returned to this land many times over four decades to cover human struggles for survival and humanitarian efforts to save lives. My connection there is precious to me because no other story ever affected me so deeply.

The reason I first flew into Ethiopia for CBC TV in the fall of 1984 was to investigate alarming rumours of a giant famine advancing across the northern highlands—not just widespread hunger but a full-force famine that could kill millions of the world’s most vulnerable people. True famines are rare, arising not just from drought and harvest failures but from the combination of major calamities in severely misgoverned lands and involving failed rains, insect infestations, soil overuse, environmental collapse, extreme poverty, and some form of war as well. When such a famine occurs, oppressive governments not only try to hide it but may even collude in promoting it to curb the growth of troublesome populations.

Several times during my first reporting from the famine epicentre in northern Ethiopia that year, I made a point of visiting one particular relief centre early in the mornings: the St. Vincent de Paul Clinic, which sat isolated on a flat, burnt-out plain outside Makelle, the capital of Tigray province. A line of dull-green eucalyptus trees along its side broke up the monotone browns and greys of the surrounding fields, giving it an oasis-like air from a distance. It was anything but calm when you reached the gates. The clinic lay on the path of one of the largest mass famine migrations and was daily overwhelmed by refugees seeking help. Still more would arrive through the night and quietly line up waiting for the gate to open.

The clinic was run by the Catholic order of Sisters of Charity, who had operated the mission among the poorest of Tigray regions since the 1920s. Because it was situated on a road leading into Makelle, it took some of the first brunt of the migration as increasing waves of starving and sick people trekked down from the farms in the highlands. The Sisters, both Ethiopian and foreign, offered what medical aid they could for the sickest and helped families bury the dead with dignity. They understood that a score of diseases, from meningitis to typhoid and pneumonia, were surging among people so malnourished that a cold could be fatal.

The individual stories told by the refugees increased fears that an apocalypse was building: however bad it was here, far worse realities were spreading in the trackless hinterland. Once families had exhausted everything they owned, they left with only a small pouch of grain to trek over barren and bitterly cold ground for days, past human and animal corpses. Through the terrors of the night they huddled together to sleep, only to find more dead around them in the morning. Most feared were the hyenas shrieking in the dark, attracted by the smell of death. Whole villages tended to leave together, so if one died, there would be others to bury them. Sometimes they walked for weeks, passing through ghost villages depopulated in the panic. Death was everywhere, the stench overwhelming; a common sight was mothers still carrying a dead child in their arms, reluctant to leave it behind to such horrors.

When my CBC news team and I arrived at the clinic around nine one morning, we were already emotionally battered after a week covering the hardest-hit region and still had weeks to go on just our first assignment here. With me was my hard-driving, tireless producer Tony Burman, who had fought Ethiopia’s bureaucracy for months just to get us here; our lanky and brilliant cameraman Phillipe Billard, experienced in filming crises of every kind but shaken now by what his lens captured; and sound technician John Axelson, a last minute addition to the team, fitted in well despite brutal circumstances.

We weren’t surprised to find that the crowd already covered the entire stony courtyard or that both the staff and the refugees looked exhausted. A modest stone-and-concrete administrative building stood in the centre, surrounded by a few corrugated iron huts used as temporary shelters. A nurse nodded when we asked to record interviews, so, half crouching, I started down a line of parents and infants slumped along the main wall. Several had already lost one child, and their eyes pleaded as they held other sick infants.

Almost immediately I noticed a short, lean man in the customary shawl who was trying to comfort a girl about three years old who looked barely conscious. She seemed to be the most serious case there, and I kept glancing their way as I continued my interviews. Suddenly, the child slumped into a heap on the pavement. I called to a nearby nurse, and she rushed forward, picked up the girl, and raced her inside to an examination room. The father ran after them and we followed, camera rolling.

As we entered, the girl lay on a table. I was struck by her face as her glazed eyes appeared locked on something far in the distance and her rasping breath slowed. In my emotional state I saw her face as a tragic symbol of Ethiopia’s countless children denied hope, robbed of life, beseeching the distant world for justice. A tired-eyed Irish sister said softly: “The child will die very soon—she has pneumonia and is very malnourished. She will die here, maybe within fifteen minutes. There isn’t anything we can do at this point.”

We left to allow her to die with whatever dignity the situation could provide. Stumbling outside into the glaring light, we learned she would be buried later that afternoon in a grave being dug for the most recent dead. We drove away, not speaking much, and almost by rote continued on through the day collecting scenes of other relief operations swamped by huddled masses of the sick and dying on grounds with no hygiene, little food or shelter, and fading hope. How could we show an individual tragedy among this sea of desperation? I began mentally scripting the news item that would focus on the child’s death, the searing power of that tragic face and those last breaths.

We would need the burial scene for our report, so around 5 p.m. we drove back to the clinic. We were finally talking freely among ourselves about how emotionally upsetting that scene with the child had been, so painful to witness the end of her life. Someone seemed to speak for all of us when he said angrily that her agony drove home just how bloody hellish, unjust, and utterly depressing was everything we saw here: “Bodies after bodies of children, just bundles. Bloody hell, where’s the aid?” I hoped that viewers would identify with her and see how real people, not just vague images, were being destroyed by a famine the world could stop if it had the will.

As we pulled into the courtyard, there was a bustle of activity and the shock of seeing real smiles on faces. One of the Ethiopian staff ran up, saying, “You must come!” We scrambled out and followed her toward a small crowd of people who were also smiling and clustering around the same Irish nun, who held a bundle in her arms. I approached—it was the girl, awake, alive, safe. “Sister, I see we had a little bit of luck today,” I stammered. She smiled more: “Yes, we felt a surprise pulse and we gave her one last shot and rehydration, and she will survive.”

She was still very sick, so the nuns would keep her in the clinic for as long as she needed to recover. The father, standing nearby, appeared dazed by the sequence of events, from doom to deliverance. I asked her name and someone replied, Birhan (Light). Her last name was Woldu.

Ten days later, we returned to the clinic when we heard that Birhan was ready to be released. At the door of her shelter, the father emerged with the child standing beside him and her younger sister, Silas, in his arms. Birhan was shy of strangers, but it was a wonderful scene of survival that once more touched us all.

I finally had a brief chance to talk to the father, Woldu Menamano, who stood barely five feet tall and appeared all lean muscle and bone, so weather-beaten he seemed ageless (he was thirty-six). He had spent his life battling hardscrabble poverty through many droughts and at least two famines.

Any notion of pity, however, would have appalled him, for he was an immensely proud man who insisted that, in their remote highland village of Lahama, the family’s conical, thatched, mud-and-dung-walled hut had been a loving home and a happy place when Birhan was born. Given any decent rain, he was skilled at growing crops on small plots and had built up holdings of two oxen, a donkey, and some goats. He had sold the best honey and yogourt around. In good seasons, when it rained, the highlands could be lush, but now there was only death.

Though he’d never been to school, Woldu was an intelligent and vivid talker. After three years of drought, he said, the crops didn’t grow and the rivers were dry. His wife had died of an illness and, to feed his three daughters, he’d had to sell everything, even his farm implements and the cooking pots. They had only the clothes they stood in and a few handfuls of grain. How could he not flee? I have rarely heard a better personal description of why famine is different from other calamities.

Neighbours were “falling like leaves,” he told me. “The village was starving.” They all left together, and the days of trudging toward hoped-for help was like walking through a cemetery of unburied dead. They had no shelter, so slept under one blanket on frigid ground, fearing hyenas in the dark and vultures circling overhead through the day. On a future trip I got a sense of that terror when I came across a dead woman half-eaten by hyenas, and a boy who’d fought himself free of one at the loss of much of his hand.

When they finally could stop near a small village close to Makelle, they slept outside on the ground with barely enough rations to survive. By then Birhan was so sick that Woldu feared she was dying. With no medical aid nearby, he wrapped her on his back and half-ran fifteen kilometres in a loping gait to the Catholic mission. When they arrived just before dark, it was so overcrowded they couldn’t get in. He spent another night trying to keep Birhan warm.

In the morning, he finally got his place in the line inside. At some point strange-looking firangi (foreigners) with a camera machine came by. Then Birhan collapsed as if dead.

The misery in the northern highlands of Ethiopia had caused barely a ripple of interest in the outside world, much of which was enjoying prosperous times with bumper harvests and unprecedented stockpiles of grains. Some commentators were calling the eighties the “age of greed.” Out of a population of forty-four million in Ethiopia, between six and seven million were soon at risk of starvation, and tens of thousands had already perished.

Although some private aid groups and government studies had warned for months of a steady drop in Ethiopia’s food supplies, there was no international alarm about the coming catastrophe mainly because no television pictures of mass starvation had emerged to show just how devastating the human cost could be. Ethiopia’s Marxist regime, the Derg (Committee), was determined to keep foreign news crews from poking into the scandal of mass deaths at a time when it was expensively celebrating ten years in power. The strongman leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, knew that kind of revelation would feed growing insurrection in northern provinces. The solution? Simply ban travel permits to TV news teams, at least until after the September celebrations. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and Ronald Reagan’s White House wanted nothing to do with the Derg, including any form of direct aid. Most Western nations took the cue and stayed clear.

I was then in my second year based in the CBC’s London bureau as foreign correspondent, in the dream job of my youth. It was a vast beat: I was responsible for the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland’s unrest), much of Africa, and various conflicts in the Middle East, which meant a lot of time covering the civil war in Beirut. By June, Burman and I were picking up alarming accounts from our sources in NGOs and universities of a third straight year of drought across northern Ethiopia. Burman started lobbying the Ethiopian embassy to give us visas, using every Canada “nice guy” image he could think of. At the time, the Canadian passport had respect as a symbol of an internationalist middle broker.

In the world of TV foreign news, the 1980s were exhilarating—glamorous enough to be looked back on as a golden age. Well-staffed news bureaus had budgets to travel extensively, and reporters could spend enough time on location to understand and develop stories properly. The new satellite technology allowed us to feed items almost in real time from remote areas of the world, while video seemed “more live” than film for feeding out footage of wars and catastrophes directly into living rooms at home. For me, personally, I thrived on working in an endless vortex of crises and historic moments. But there was also a downside: for months on end, the reporters, producers, and crews lived on alert with suitcases packed, never knowing where we’d be next, leading to emotional exhaustion. Sure, between tough foreign assignments, the good life of covering peace talks or elections in capital cities and exotic countries made up for a lot of hellish postings, but the inner wear and tear could build up alarmingly over time.

One October morning when I was researching the history of Ethiopia’s past famines and wars, Burman raced into the office announcing yes, we had our bloody visas! We were the first TV network in the world to get the go-ahead. Soon after, we got news that the BBC also had entry, though for a much shorter period. Given the urgency of the story, we knew we were in a race to get as much material out as possible before, as we feared, the Derg would expel us.

Arriving in the capital, Addis Ababa, we scrambled to find relief agencies with planes willing to take us with them when they flew north on missions. We left within hours to fly to Makelle in northern Tigray, the hardest-hit province. Flying at twelve thousand feet, we could just make out thin black lines that trailed along the roads near sizable towns—a seemingly endless number of destitute refugees making their way toward distant relief camps through the grey countryside devoid of green.

Once on the ground, we ran into a situation barely operating above chaos. On any day as many as eighty thousand to one hundred thousand refugees were in Makelle alone in severe stages of malnutrition. There were no food riots—only a quiet despair. Many of the Orthodox Christians believed they were suffering heaven’s punishment for past sins; others were too weak to move or too proud to make a fuss. Along many roads we saw what appeared to be slowly moving tides of humanity, sometimes almost crawling, masses decimated by cholera, pneumonia, dysentery, and flu. They would often appear out of a haze floating across the land from small fires and dust clouds. The smells of human waste, fires, sickness, and the rotting corpses of animals could be overwhelming. Most of the human dead were quickly buried, except in the countryside where famine victims often had neither the time nor the strength to inter those who died around them. On average, people who were already starving walked for two or three full days, parents leading or carrying several sick children, to reach a place where they might appeal for aid. At moments when burials were underway, mothers might weep and chant, but that was the only sound, apart from prayers and the wind.

Ethiopia’s own Relief and Rehabilitation Commission staff were supported by small, overworked teams of foreigners from Oxfam, Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other NGOs. The hardiest had been struggling to run hunger relief and medical care for months, and I could find no hint of optimism among them. Instead, there was a seething rage over world indifference. For nurses, the hardest task was the morning triage as they went down rows of mothers or fathers holding a child, measuring the circumference of a tiny arm to pick out those still likely to survive. I approached a nurse with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and asked what the world should do: “Send food! Food! Food!” she cried before backing off in apparent hysterics.

One nun, Sister Jean Harris, had spent weeks travelling through rebel lines to her outpost near Makelle, treating any in need she could find. She told me stories of diving into ditches or hiding under hedges with others to avoid strafing by government MiGs and attack helicopters. She had been working nonstop for months as the death toll rose, first into the hundreds, then thousands some days, within the region. What was changing, she said, were the numbers giving up: “They’re tired, too tired to go on. First the fathers often die, then children, and only last do the mothers give out, for they feel the need to keep going for the rest.”

When we were at a relief site, I would spent some of the time watching visuals that Billard was getting, pointing out details I wanted to write into the script. I also walked around the camp, talking to organizers, staff, and refugees. Like most correspondents, I wore a safari suit with big pockets to hold notebooks, pens, passport, media cards, and throat medicine, essential amid the dust. Burman kept it all moving, arranging ground transport, schedules, and the satellite news feeds he had to travel to Nairobi in neighbouring Kenya to use. At night, he and I plotted how best to record “the true picture,” though we never knew what new scale of horrors the next day would bring.

“I remember that you and I had conversations where we asked, ‘Are we really experiencing what we think we are experiencing?’ because this is just incredible,” Burman recalled years later. “My biggest worry was just how to get this story out. We were in the middle of nowhere, it seemed, and how could we portray something so vast that would make sense at home?” We felt we’d have one or two chances at best to wake Canadians up to the real tragedy of Ethiopia. Disaster stories normally have only a few days before audiences turn their attention elsewhere. I felt sure that CBC, which was run by serious people, would place the story at the top of the national news.

The script was up to me, and it would fail unless it firmly captured not just the depth of the catastrophe’s misery but the urgent imperative for international action. I needed to get across that endless floodtide of humanity, so I wrote: “All across northern Ethiopia, famine is along each road, and at the gates of every town. By the hundreds of thousands, peasants are fleeing the worst drought in memory. Unknown thousands are dying along the way. It’s feared close to a million could die within months unless the world responds with a massive relief effort. Relief agencies here are swamped; they’ve never seen starvation on this scale.”

Much of the first report was shot when we flew to the desolate plateau of Korem, the most notorious of the relief camps. Some eighty thousand refugees crowded onto the site around a series of huts that could shelter not even a tenth that number. In the surrounding fields there was no water, no shelter, no sanitation. It was fiercely cold whenever the sun sank behind the hills, and the sound of coughing and retching remained constant. I added in one of my on-camera stand-ups that I was wearing three layers of clothing and was still very cold, while all around people shivered in one thin rag trying to get through the night.

In the nearby hills there was the threat that the insurgent Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, the largest of the anti-government guerrilla movements, was keen to kidnap foreign volunteers or media to get them to acknowledge their cause and famine needs, and then release them for propaganda value. The government guards thwarted their plans by locking foreigners into a cement-block “guesthouse” at night. I tried to sleep, but I kept hearing a ghostly moan through the shutters that I couldn’t identify. When we were released at first light I realized that the sound had been coming from a long line of refugees who had huddled all night along the road, praying as they faced their likely end. When I mentioned the sound to the others, none had heard it. They had slept, and I worried that I might have been hallucinating. Years later I read a description by David Lamb, a former correspondent for the Los Angeles Times who also spent an icy night in Korem around the same time: “When all the valley is as still as death and the foreboding darkness seems eternal, the wailing begins, softly at first like the distant chant of ghosts. It is a high-pitched, eerie howl that slices through the night, gathering strength until it lingers and echoes over the mile-high valley—thousands of voices united in prayerful pleas for mercy and forgiveness.”

For several hours after dawn, my team was alone among the refugees because the medical staff were even more carefully guarded in lockdown caution. Everywhere we looked were desperate people needing help to survive—mothers holding up half dead or actually dead children—and not one of us could do a thing to assist. It was a hideous feeling—all we could do was report, and we summoned all the energy we had to do just that.

When a handful of Médecins Sans Frontières doctors and nurses finally appeared, several were from Canada and looked stunned to see anyone from outside, particular from the CBC. One medic from Quebec approached with a caution: “Are you actually ready for this? You are about to experience things here that will change your lives forever.” Burman answered, “Please show us all—everything—we have to show this to the world.”

Touring the famine huts—we didn’t know what else to call them because medical aid was so limited—we were immersed in scenes of bodies being tied and carried out for burial and scores of dead, mainly children. We were shaken by a terrible feeling that what we were seeing was only the beginning of something beyond our full understanding. Everything we saw suggested millions faced death (the Red Cross would soon warn of six to seven million at risk).

To me it seemed a dystopia set more in the future than the past, as though we were experiencing, as I wrote, “the world as it would look after a nuclear holocaust when all normal life was destroyed and swept away.” In my on-camera conclusion, I expressed my fear that the world would not respond quickly enough despite this proof of catastrophe: “It is difficult to imagine anything more horrendous or pitiful than these camps, but within months things here could be ten times worse. That’s the most frightening thing of all here—the fact that this may not be the height of a catastrophe but just the beginning of an even greater one.”

Once our material taped, we had to get it to the satellite feed point in Nairobi. First, though, we had to edit it in Addis Ababa, where our London editor, Colin Dean, had flown in with his gear to set up an editing suite in a hotel. There we had food, showers, and laundry, but no rest for Burman or me as we edited our footage to get the impact we wanted in the four minutes we would get on The National at 10 p.m. We had only hours to put the pieces together. Dean had not been in the field with us, so it was his first look at famine. “Oh my God,” he gasped. “Can we even show this? Will they allow it?”

When I sat down to write the script, it seemed to compose itself in a stream of consciousness unlike anything I’d known before. Rather than my usual obsessive rewriting, the sentences flowed onto the page, and I didn’t change a word. As morning advanced, Burman started tapping his watch and pacing, impatient to carry the cassette through the airport and onto the fight to Nairobi. He faced the real threat that authorities might demand to screen the tape before he left and then seize it. In desperation he stuck it to his back with sticky tape to smuggle it past airport security. The tension was high because this iron-fisted regime might throw him into a prison cell, expel the rest of us, and confiscate all our equipment. We might even get the CBC permanently barred and ruin access for other networks. I was glad it was his task, not mine. Too sleep-deprived to think much, I wished him well and collapsed into my bed, hoping not to be awakened by security police.

Burman made it, and fifteen hours after our report was fed by satellite, I got a phone call from The National’s host, Peter Mansbridge, a friend since our days together at the Ottawa bureau. The November 1 newscast had just ended, and he rasped in obvious emotion, “Do you have any idea what kind of impact your report’s having? People in the studio were in tears, and that’s never happened before.” Before hanging up he wished me luck, adding, “This report will follow you throughout your life.”

In the weeks that followed, the BBC and CBC reports set off an unprecedented explosion of international empathy—shock waves reverberating wherever viewers saw the images. Within forty-eight hours our news story of Birhan Woldu’s survival against all odds had the special impact I was hoping for: here was a symbol of hope in a devastated land, a light in that darkness. Her story affected not only Canadians but even more viewers across the United States, where the NBC network carried it. It spurred more interest in relief efforts.

Britain and Canada were the first nations to respond, but did so in strikingly different ways. In Britain there was an immediate public outcry, a mass movement spearheaded by show-business celebrities, musicians, and particularly the rock star and activist Bob Geldof, who began organizing performers on both sides of the Atlantic and across Europe to raise money. So many pledges poured in that he set up an organization called Band Aid to launch Live Aid by June 1985—the largest-ever famine relief concert. The Thatcher government, however, remained firmly aloof, as did the grain-rich European Common Market and most governments in the West.

In Canada, in sharp contrast, the government led the charge: the newly elected Progressive Conservative majority of Brian Mulroney immediately declared it would take the lead in demanding not just a Canadian but also a world response to the emergency. At 24 Sussex Drive, Mulroney and his family had watched our report and wept. Having been interested in foreign aid projects as a youth, Mulroney knew more about Africa than any Canadian leader before or since. First thing next morning he called Stephen Lewis, whom he had recently appointed ambassador to the United Nations, to ask if he’d seen CBC’s report.

“Yes, Prime Minister, and I hope that you are about to ask me what I think you are going to ask me.”

“Yes, I am,” said the prime minister, and instructed Lewis to go before the General Assembly in New York and rouse the world to immediate action. Barely a day later, Lewis, a powerful orator, told the UN that the CBC report had been the most shocking news item he’d ever seen and demanded nothing less than “a Herculean effort on the part of all member nations” to confront the famine.

Meanwhile, Mulroney rallied Parliament and lobbied the United States, the United Kingdom, and other key allies to overcome their ideological hostility and save vast numbers of innocent lives. Our first report on November 1 “set off what can only be described as a political tsunami,” Mulroney biographer Fen Osler Hampson wrote years later. The rush to aid Ethiopia swept the country, leaving no part untouched. The outpouring of empathy that united politicians and public remains unique in Canadian history: according to author Nassisse Solomon, everything changed the moment The National “aired a four-minute editorial on the devastating famine in Ethiopia by reporter Brian Stewart… between 1984 and 1985 the Ethiopian famine became a unifying national cause and ‘clarion call’ to international action for Canadians from coast to coast.”

Within days of Canada rallying the General Assembly, the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross launched what was then the greatest single humanitarian effort in history. It would expand into a drive to save not only as many as seven million Ethiopians but also to help care for twenty-two million people in danger from food crises across much of sub-Saharan Africa. TV’s first searing images and brutally honest reports “shook the world in 1984/85,” according to the official UN history. The depthless horror of such a truly mass starvation appeared more immediate on video than it would have on film, and was larger than anyone had imagined, so that the public uprising demanding humanitarian intervention built over the coming months, eventually triggering billions of dollars in aid relief and a historic rise in new humanitarian NGOs and volunteer causes across much of the world. Above all, the Ethiopian relief operations, the UN reported two years later, led to “the greatest single peacetime mobilization of the international community this century.”

I was not surprised that Canada performed well when the empathy stakes were high. Canada’s record of involved internationalism had been growing since the late 1950s, giving it in some diplomatic circles the title of the “Samaritan state.” Canadian diplomats, foreign aid officials, and private NGOs were highly respected internationally, and the CBC’s foreign news coverage was valued more than it had ever been in peacetime before or since. There was cross-party agreement in many areas; even in the year before the famine, the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau had supported Ethiopian anti-poverty programs, despite the regime’s pariah status in the West.

Still in Ethiopia, we were encouraged by brief accounts of the remarkable response in Canada, but I had no time to take solace as we left Addis Ababa immediately to return to the famine lands to do more reports, including a documentary for The Journal, the current affairs portion of the news hour. Sadly, very little had improved in the relief camps. Stocks of food and medicine were even more stretched, and shelter, hygiene, and fuel were utterly inadequate for the mass movement of populations. Aid workers were exhausted, angry, and close to despair. When I asked a normally upbeat Irish priest how bad it was, he just glared at me, growling “Ahh—desperate! Desperate!” as he walked away.

My own mood was hardly better. An estimated one million tonnes of food, largely grain, would be needed from outside donors over twelve months, and that estimate seemed to be rising every week. But there were strong doubts anything close to that total would actually arrive, given logistical hurdles, the internal war, and general chaos. A great many people I was seeing every day would suffer an agonizing death, while even children who managed to survive might be mentally damaged by starvation.

I worried also about growing exhaustion in our small team—Burman, Billard, Axelson, and me—as the daily tragedies battered us all. I noticed more heavy silences among us as we kept our thoughts to ourselves, awash in personal emotions boiling below the surface. Even eating field rations roused feelings of guilt, and lack of sleep was a growing hazard. I noticed that my hands often shook as I tried to take notes.

“I too worried about illness because we were working what seemed to be twenty-hour days, and I don’t think any of us got untroubled sleep at any point,” Burman recalls. “I remember I got chills and started shaking so bad I thought, ‘Oh God, this is going to knock me down’—but it didn’t.”

It seemed unlikely we wouldn’t get sick. Disease was all around us and we all had coughs, which I didn’t help by nervous chain-smoking. (I never lit up again after this trip.) Illness would spell doom, however, for given the visa hurdles, no replacement team could take our place. If I went down, Burman, who began his career as a reporter, could handle my role, and if he collapsed, I might at a pinch have taken over field producing duties. But neither Burman nor I could handle the sophisticated video camera if Billard got sick.

We were recording the biggest story in the world, the most important any of us would ever cover, yet by the third week of November we still seemed to be the only TV crew around. Apart from informing Canada, our reports and footage were also being shown on other world networks including CBS in the US. “I think what helped us through it,” Burman recalled later, “was that inner knowledge that the situation was just so enormous, we had to hold it together and get the story out. I noticed too that we talked much less than normal. I think, frankly, we were reluctant to break into the inner space each of us needed to get through this.”

We had little time to brood because the first conference of donor nations opened in Addis on November 8. Almost by the hour, Canada was emerging as the driving force behind the international rescue mission. Stephen Lewis was the leading spokesman for a small group of ambassadors demanding that the new UN Command Centre for Ethiopian Relief be set up in Addis rather than the traditional power boardrooms of New York and Geneva. Maurice Strong, known across the UN as “the man who got things done” and the first president of the Canadian International Development Agency, was appointed executive coordinator of the UN Office of Emergency Operations in Africa. He was, in effect, the supreme commander running a stupendously complex series of relief and rehabilitation operations involving several dozen nations and scores of arrangements with private relief groups.

The Canadian embassy in Addis was the most hard driving of the diplomatic bodies pushing for united action. Then came word from Ottawa that foreign minister Joe Clark would attend the conference—the first senior minister of any advanced Western nation to visit Ethiopia in a decade. His arrival had an electrifying effect on weary and demoralized relief aid agencies.

With his trademark can-do optimism, Clark immediately injected energy into the meetings at the Hilton Hotel. A quick study, seemingly tireless in any situation, he offered Mengistu’s government a bridge to Western donor nations and assured NGOs that Canada was fully committed to the emergency. The mood shifted noticeably: participants vowed that difficulties would be overcome, logistical problems were given priority, and relations with the steely Ethiopian regime improved. Clark’s delegation even met with Mengistu to discuss ways to coordinate foreign and domestic aid efforts.

Clark was not given access to the north—too insecure—so just before leaving he asked Burman if he could see our report and field tapes, which he had missed while travelling. We crammed his team into our bedroom/edit suite and began the screening. Everyone was shaken, and Clark along with several in his entourage broke down in tears. As I interviewed him later, he struggled with his emotions and could now fully grasp why Canada had been so shaken by the coverage. Our story of the screening, together with his interview, resonated powerfully at home. On the tarmac a reporter asked Clark why governments had suddenly sprung into action after doing nothing for so long. “Television,” he replied.

Later that night, as I packed my travel bag, I again worried about the inner injuries, the psychic scar tissue, I was accumulating. Why was it so many people wept and talked openly of their reaction to these scenes, but I had not? I couldn’t even cry in private for all the worn-out mothers and dying children I had seen. I recalled a line from Dante’s Inferno: “I could not weep, so much of stone had I become within / They wept.”

It would take two more extended visits into Ethiopia before, one night in a small country guest house, my swelling memories of sorrows witnessed in this land finally brought tears that seemed unstoppable through much of a very dark night.

By the third and fourth weeks of November I could at last see that an international relief effort was getting underway and even resistant powers were starting to come around. But I knew that getting food and medicine to those on the ground would be a logistical nightmare. Ethiopia was short of everything—food, medicine, transport, spare parts, even peace. Enormous, the size of France and Spain combined, with eighty ethnic groups in a population of forty-four million, it was a transportation nightmare. Relief convoys would have to range from sweltering tropical forest areas in the south to a distant and largely denuded north, where four regions—Eritrea, Tigray, Gonder, and Wallo—were taking the brunt of the famine. The country had few roads, railways, ports, or airports, and in the north most people got around as they had for millennia, by foot and by donkey. How could the million tonnes of food needed to feed the vast numbers under severe threat of starvation be delivered? There wasn’t even enough storage for such a flow—I knew that already one of the earliest Canadian shipments of fifteen thousand tonnes of grain had spoiled at the unsheltered port before it could be loaded onto trucks.

Depressing as the obstacles were, however, I began to see as days passed that more lives were being saved. Standing in a relief camp, I’d sense the sudden excitement as someone spotted a dust cloud on the horizon, followed by a small convoy of relief trucks on a hillside dirt road. When one of the long-haulers pulled in, it would be swiftly unloaded and the food immediately cooked for families huddled on the ground. Grain was also distributed in pails to refugees packed outside the overcrowded camp.

I also saw more relief flights overhead heading into Makelle’s airport. The Addis operation put together an early fleet of twenty fixed-wing aircraft and thirty helicopters that crossed the chilliest Cold War lines—Hercules transport planes from Britain, larger air carriers from the United States and the USSR, helicopters from Poland in the Warsaw Pact. In my second tour a few months later, as pressure on governments to aid Ethiopia soared still higher, the air fleet grew into an armada of seventy-five relief aircraft of all sizes, many capable of flying into small airstrips.

As the situation got more desperate, the UN Command Centre in Addis considered the possibility of airdrops—shoving bags of food out of planes to land in a drop zone below. A majority of experts thought they were too expensive and wasteful because many bags would break on landing, but proponents countered that the spillage would soon be scooped up by eager waiting hands. Almost overnight the plan was implemented, and soon we taped the first mercy drops as dozens of bags tumbled from the sky above. They saved an estimated two hundred thousand more lives.

As if famine wasn’t grim enough, we found dark new elements to the story to try and unravel. There were rumours, but little visible evidence, that the Mengistu government was forcibly resettling vast numbers of the famine refugees from the northern highlands to the tropical lowlands in the south. Some aid workers were expelled for damning it as ethnic cleansing—a way to remove Tigrayans and weaken the local Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front rebel army. Some four hundred thousand were flown south in the first wave. It was all done away from foreign observers, especially the media.

One morning as we were about to set out for another shoot, an unmarked van with two army officers inside pulled up beside us. “Get in,” the closer officer ordered. My time covering conflicts in Latin America and Beirut had left me jittery about rides with strangers, including army officers. Journalists too often never came back from such mystery rides. “Just get in,” the second officer commanded. “There is something you should see.” Warily we clambered into the van and were sped out of Makelle. Quite soon, however, we pulled up in a back part of the airport, away from the civilian terminal. Nearby a giant Soviet Antonov cargo plane sat with its back ramp down to receive a long line of weary-looking Tigrayans. They were being forcefully escorted by armed guards who looked like government militia. They did not seem to notice us.

“Be quick,” one of the officers snapped and motioned Billard to get his camera out. Within forty seconds he had footage of the rumoured resettlement operation in action—the only outside media to ever capture this shadowy operation. It now seemed clear that the officers wanted to alert the outside world to the forced movement. Who they were we never learned, for we were soon back on the same sidewalk we’d been snatched from and they vanished down the road. For the next three years this same forty seconds of CBC tape was replayed every time a network reported the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of northerners from their homeland.

Once we had completed our first assignment in Ethiopia, we went straight on to the famine zones in nearby Sudan and Mozambique before wrapping up our travels toward the end of 1984. When I finally boarded the plane to England from Johannesburg, I was a wreck. I passed out and remember nothing of the flight or much of the first four days in London, which I spent in bed with a fever. Today, many employers would be quick to offer psychological counselling, but that thought was still alien to news organizations, and to most foreign correspondents as well.

When I finally got to the London office, I found that staff had put up a touching welcome-back sign for us. I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t speak. I withdrew into myself: people suggested I had the new “Ethiopia syndrome,” the tidal waves of emotion experienced by those wound too tight in the field who were disorientated by the luxuries and calm at home. The nicer the compliments I received, the more pleasant the dinner party with old friends, the crappier I felt. I had flashbacks to those starving families along the roads as we drove past. I felt guilt, no matter how much I donated to aid organizations, for not having done something to help a particular individual or family. For weeks I had nightmares—strong ones of starving children and corpses piled in mortuary tents. I also began to worry that our Ethiopia footage might establish a dangerous new reference point: What if people would now react only to similar extreme images of horror, when it was already too late to save millions?

In London I was struck by a remarkable mood of empathy toward Ethiopia—millions of pounds were being raised, and expectations ran high for the coming summer’s Live Aid concert. When I flew back to Canada for Christmas I found the sympathy was even stronger than in the United Kingdom. Strangers came up to ask me what they should do to help, and my dad’s business friends called me up for advice—one even quit his lucrative job to go volunteer in the relief effort. In the first month after our November 1 broadcast, more than $28 million in today’s currency had poured in from Canadians. The federal government set up matching funds to encourage giving but, within weeks, had to double its pledge.

The Mulroney/Clark effort continued behind the scenes as they worked the phones urging allies to put more effort into tackling the Africa-wide crisis. Another remarkable Canadian, David MacDonald, was appointed as the effective czar of the whole campaign, officially called Emergency Coordinators of Aid to Africa. A wiry, fast-talking former United Church minister, MacDonald had long been a charismatic pitchman for a form of humane internationalism that Canada now seemed determined to achieve. Doctors took sabbaticals to work in clinics; pilots arranged leaves to deliver supplies. The total donations and volunteer contributions will never be fully known, but, even with fifteen million fewer Canadians than now, over the next two years, $430 million in today’s currency flowed in not only from the government but from farmers, steelworkers, schoolchildren, and others in every corner of the country. The country’s musicians turned out a fundraising single whose title, “Tears Are Not Enough,” exactly caught both the enthusiasm to help and the hard challenge to be faced.

The expression “global village,” coined by Canadian Marshall McLuhan, was often used, and with reason: the largest amount per capita raised came from a group of Inuit in the Far North who had experienced their own famines in the past and now told the CBC, “We want to help.” Word got around. Later, when I was talking to elders in an isolated rural village in Tigray, one of them told me through my interpreter, “We heard what your ‘Eskimos’ did and we want you to thank them for us. We will try to help them if they are ever in need.”

People kept predicting that compassion fatigue would soon end the wave of caring, but it took far longer than anyone expected for Ethiopia and Africa to recede from Canadians’ concerns. At the start of the second year, government pollster Allan Gregg found that the clear majority of Canadians “were more concerned about global problems of hunger and starvation than about domestic economic problems.” Even as late as March 1986, he discovered that one-quarter of those polled held “world hunger and poverty as their second major issue of concern.” The enormous success of Canadian efforts was likely unmatched for crisis management in peacetime, saving at least seven hundred thousand lives—a number suggested by international famine experts given Canada’s share of the roughly six million saved overall. Close to a million lives were likely lost, although the exact number will never be known.

Back in Tigray in early February 1985, I asked if anyone knew where Birhan and her father were, but no one had time to search out a single family when millions of people were displaced. Moreover, the forced resettlement program was causing panic in the refugee camps as word spread that the government planned to move about a million more poor northerners from the infertile highlands down to the south, where the soil is rich. But the area is also malarial and unhealthy, a steaming-hot forested land quite unprepared to accept the number of people arriving there. Ultimately, up to sixty thousand were believed to have died of disease, many while trying to flee back home to the north.

Finding no trace of Birhan and her family, I feared I would never learn what happened to them—a thought that gnawed at me for years. Strangely, I did see a fleeting image of her that February. We had again brought in Colin Dean as our editor and, as before, he set up a rudimentary suite in his hotel room. He was normally a chatty, sunny-natured Londoner, but our material affected him and, by the time an item was edited, he was sometimes very emotional. Like me, unable to escape the horrific images we had seen, he had trouble sleeping.

One night I was irritated when he seemed to be pulling an unscheduled all-night session. The clattering of editing, along with rock music I couldn’t identify, kept waking me up. First thing next morning, Dean called us in to see the video he had completed using our past footage as his homage to the victims. He hoped the CBC might find a slot somewhere to show it. When he flicked the switch, on came a short, intensely moving mix of tragic images set to the poignant music of the song “Drive” by the Cars. The most striking image, of Birhan’s face in distress, appeared near the end, anchoring the mood and the message.

When it ended, Dean wiped tears from his eyes. I was mute, deeply touched by the power of the piece but completely pulverized. Would the CBC run it? It did not, for reasons I never discovered, and after we returned to London the video lay undisturbed on a shelf. Then, a couple of months later, the pop star and political activist Bob Geldof, busy organizing the giant Live Aid concert, agreed to an interview with the CBC. I was away, but my fill-in, Terry Milewski, and cameraman Phillipe Billard took the cassette along and pushed him to screen it. Back in Geldof’s office, when he started the video, all activity stopped. As writer Oliver Harvey recounts in his book Feed the World: Birhan Woldu and Live Aid, David Bowie happened to be there and pronounced it “the most dramatic thing I’ve ever seen.” He volunteered to drop one of his songs in the performance to make room for the tape. On July 15 it played to the seventy-five thousand people at Wembley Stadium and the simultaneous concert at the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia—and to a TV audience estimated at 1.9 billion in 150 countries.

I was back at the family home in Toronto at the time, taking a rest from the Ethiopian coverage and spending time with my dad, who was getting on. I wasn’t in the mood for a concert, but I did watch some of the live TV coverage. Suddenly I saw an emotional David Bowie walk to the mic to introduce “a video made by CBC television. The subject speaks for itself. Please—send your money in!” And there was Dean’s creation. On a giant screen the first keyboard music swelled and the heart-wrenching images Billard had captured appeared. Just before it ended, I was confronted by the haunting face of Birhan—and now, so was the world.

The video had a historic impact. Geldof later revealed in Harvey’s history of the event that Live Aid, despite an unprecedented global audience, was collecting much less than expected when Bowie walked out to announce the CBC tape. In Geldof’s words: “The response for many in the stadium and at home was tears. For others it was action.” The telephone pledge system broke down completely as a flood of calls poured in, raising over $300 million (in today’s currency) within hours, and still more as funds also flowed to NGOs involved in African relief.

That Live Aid concert also changed the political climate, making humanitarian concerns a far higher priority in Western foreign policy. Almost overnight, politicians realized the galvanizing impact of such causes on modern voters. Shipments of emergency food and medical aid picked up substantially as well. Future British prime minister Tony Blair was one who felt the concert changed his life and eventually influenced his actions in politics and in power. Birhan, the video, and the whole Live Aid phenomenon had, Geldof insisted, stopped people in their tracks. “Cynicism and selfishness had been eliminated for a moment. It felt good. A lot of people had rediscovered something in themselves.”

Birhan and her family could not have been more separated from the global TV phenomenon. Still barely surviving in a Tigray refugee camp, they knew nothing of Live Aid, and the world knew nothing of them—the stark image of her led many to believe she was dead. In fact, Birhan was not dead, though she came close to it often over the coming years. Her older sister Azmera died before the family found the bare shelter of a tent and received life-saving foreign aid rations.

Then new disaster struck. Their father, Woldu, who walked miles every day looking for sticks to sell as firewood, was picked up by government troops collecting people for the feared resettlement program. After two weeks of confinement on bare ground, the family were marched like cattle with other refugees into the belly of an Antonov cargo plane and flown to the steaming lowlands far to the south. They had no idea where they were and were given only a small plot, with a plough but no ox to pull it. Food was always scarce, sanitation almost nonexistent in the small village, and children were dying from cholera all around them. Woldu decided that, to save his family, they had to escape back home, on foot, while hiding all the way from armed government patrols. Arrest would mean being sent back or even prison for Woldu.

The journey of thirteen hundred kilometres took them two months, walking from dawn to dusk, sleeping in open fields or ditches, eating only handfuls of grain and wild herbs. Transport was impossible because Woldu had less than ten dollars in local birr. Birhan and Silas were too small to walk, so he carried them both, strapped to his shoulders. The oldest sister, Lemlem, aged eight, also walked, as did his second wife, Letebirhan, despite a chronic limp. Remarkably, they made it all the way back to their original village of Lahama.

They were home, but in a poor region of one of the poorest nations on earth, living in conditions little changed in a millennium. Woldu worked a small plot by hand and spun cotton on a half-broken loom. It took him three years to acquire four goats, a plough ox, and ten beehives. There were no schools, and no one to teach even basic writing. By age five, a barefoot Birhan was herding goats in the mountains from sunrise to dusk, guarding against hyenas and foxes.

I returned to Ethiopia in 1988 after the CBC current affairs/documentary program The Journal asked me to do a series of in-depth specials on global issues. Tony Burman was to head the new unit. Over drinks, I suggested we try to find “that girl, Birhan.” I had been haunted by thoughts of her and her family, feeling we had a responsibility to them because our coverage had made her a hugely influential symbol of Ethiopia’s famine and roused the massive global relief response. We both felt a need to show there was hope for Ethiopia’s recovery and life after catastrophe. Sure, I conceded, the chances of finding her were slim, but even if we failed, the effort itself would speak of the value of each single person in such a crisis. Burman needed no convincing. As I talked, he enthusiastically flipped over a napkin and began scribbling down myriad producer’s tasks—logistics, visas, crew, budget, and dealing with the Derg. I knew he could sell the idea to The Journal’s dynamic chief, Mark Starowicz. We were going.

The odds of finding Birhan seemed poor. The population in northern Ethiopia was still battered by the aftermath of famine and internal wars. The Derg government was even more paranoid about foreigners poking around. Aid organizations would not help for fear of upsetting the Derg. We also knew that if we did find the family, our attention could be dangerous for them. The only solution was to involve the government in our quest, feeling that Canada’s good standing in Ethiopia might provide vital protection for the family if we succeeded. In due course we got our permits for limited travel.

We figured we’d spend weeks chasing leads in relief centres and NGOs. Instead, we quickly got a vital breakthrough. Searching with the only names we had from our meeting at the Catholic mission in November 1984—Woldu, Birhan, and Silas—officials found them listed on recent records at an aid ration distribution point. We left in a scramble to catch a plane to Makelle, accompanied, inevitably, by Derg plainclothes agents.

On landing, we were put in a van and escorted under guard to the town of Ashegoda, ten minutes’ drive outside the city. Before long, another van parked alongside. We learned later that, a day or two earlier, a government official had showed up at the Woldu family hut in Lahama and ordered Woldu and Birhan to come immediately to Kwiha, near Makelle. They were terrified, wondering if they would be punished for escaping resettlement and sent back to that hell. “What do you want with us?” Woldu asked, but the question went unanswered. They were held under guard overnight and given a handful of rations, as though they were prisoners. Then they were told to get into the back of a van and driven to Ashegoda.

At this point, the back door of our van was flung open and a young girl hopped in, followed by Woldu. “My God, it really is her!” Burman gasped. Birhan was remarkably calm and quiet. The Derg agents drove us to a small village where bags of grain were stacked beside a suspiciously comfortable hut that they described as “their home.” They told us to conduct a brief interview there with Woldu, but he looked so mystified that I kept it short. I had brought a tightly wound roll of cash that I planned to slip to Woldu if Burman could distract the guards long enough. The tension was high. On cue, Burman sidetracked them with boisterous questions and cheerful slaps on shoulders, while I motioned to Woldu to join me inside the hut, just in time to slip him the money before another agent rushed in to watch us. We got some final shots of Birhan and Woldu walking up a hillside path.

I had already made plans not to lose touch again. It was clear the best escape route out of extreme poverty for children, especially girls, was education. I’d been impressed during my 1984 visit by a dynamic Salesian monk, Father Bullo, who ran a prominent Don Bosco Technical Training Centre. Before leaving Makelle, I arranged with him to have me finance Birhan’s education in a local primary school. Woldu agreed—Birhan would be the first in his family to attend school. The money I had given also enabled them to move into a safer small stone cottage in Kwiha, where life would be markedly better, close to schools, medical aid, and a market. This was the start of my ongoing connection to the family, which still endures.

Back in Canada, our documentary Life after Death centred on the struggle in Ethiopia to recover from famine and improve the lives of victims through long-term development programs. Just responding to crises was not the answer. Birhan’s survival and chance of a better life underscored the message that others too must be given an escape from the endless succession of droughts, famines, and oppressive poverty that made life so perilous in areas like Tigray. The program was well received and helped spur still more public interest in overseas development. In 1991, when the Derg was overthrown, a new era of optimism followed.

As time passed, I had to search out Tigrayans in Toronto who planned visits to the Makelle area in order to send Woldu’s family occasional support payments. I wrote letters to the family and, every few months, would get a reply that had been dictated. On one of my later trips, I got a lucky break. My efficient young driver-guide, Bisrat Mesfin, turned out to know the family and offered to help. He knew David Stables, a British aid official who had set up a new NGO, the African Children’s Educational Trust (A-CET). He assured me they could handle my scholarships for Birhan and her siblings. They’d also guide her along the best future educational course.

During another visit in 1998 I sat with Woldu and his family in a series of meetings with educators. Birhan, now seventeen, loved school and had many new friends. Woldu still farmed on a plot in the countryside and had an ox for ploughing, a milk cow, and “the best honey in Ethiopia.” Life was good. The family were profoundly religious, followers of the strict codes of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. They had come to believe that Birhan had been saved by God for a purpose—to help the poorest and make sure that no one suffered from famine again. I worried that such a heavy responsibility imposed an unfair burden on her, but again I was struck by her composure. Nothing seemed to faze her, and her family roots were strong.

A few years later, when passing through London, I received a dinner invitation to the historic Reform Club. It came from Michael Buerk, the BBC’s legendary foreign correspondent, who, along with our CBC team, had got out the first horrifying reports on Ethiopia’s famine in 1984. I was surprised, but I figured he might want to discuss the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the famine.

Over dinner, Buerk laid out his plan to do a major documentary to commemorate this anniversary. He had closely followed our stories about Birhan and asked me to put him in touch with her so he could include the “upbeat” meaning of her survival in his feature. I felt uneasy: the BBC’s vast audience would mean more glaring fame for her and the family. But it was not my choice; it was up to them. I gave him the African Children’s Educational Trust as his best link to Birhan. Buerk said he would let me know how it turned out.

What he didn’t tell me was that he’d worked out a deal with one of London’s most super-hyped tabloids, the Sun, to do a three-part series on his return to Ethiopia and on finding the “lost” Birhan. He also was working on an even bigger deal with Bob Geldof, who was planning a second massive concert in aid of world hunger relief to mark the twentieth anniversary of Live Aid, and Buerk wanted to highlight the discovery of the “face of famine,” Birhan. There would even be a book deal.

And so, the mighty intensity of British media swept through Birhan’s life in 2005. Her educational advisors were dubious but saw benefits for a vital cause—education and development in Africa. The book deal would involve some payment to Birhan and the charity as well. Now in her early twenties, Birhan was also curious to see the outside world, if only briefly.

Buerk produced a documentary that appeared to discover Birhan, without mentioning that both she and her location were well known in Canada because of our extensive coverage. He and the Sun also ran three days of spectacular headlines on their “finding” of Birhan. They paid $5,000 to Birhan and A-CET and flew her to Addis to meet Geldof and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was attending an international meeting on African debt relief. Birhan, a striking figure in traditional Tigrayan costume, took all meetings with the same aura of serenity. “Birhan, do you realize your image has been an inspiration to millions?” Blair whispered. “Yes,” she replied, “I am aware of that and very grateful.”

The spotlight could hardly get brighter: Birhan was flown to London and appeared on stage with superstar Madonna at the anniversary concert in front of 205,000 fans in Hyde Park and a global TV audience in the hundreds of millions. When Birhan walked on, the famous CBC footage of her near death flashed on a giant screen.

I watched the performance from my home, struggling to identify this poised young woman with the dying child I’d seen in the pit of a murderous famine. Geldof later noted in Harvey’s account: “Who was the greatest star that day, Madonna or Birhan? For the world it was clear. Here was our miracle. Here was living proof that it was not futile to help. With one smile, Birhan defeated the cynics.” Birhan flew back to Tigray, happy to continue her college studies—nursing and agricultural science—to best serve the farming poor of Tigray. That was her mission.

Almost immediately The Oprah Winfrey Show, the most-watched chat show in the world, asked Birhan and Bisrat Mesfin, now a prominent figure in NGO circles, to fly to a taping in Chicago. The organizers also tracked me down to join them. The theme they chose focused on the power of a few images of children in war and famine to change history. The studio audience gave Birhan a standing ovation the staff claimed was unique. TV pro though I was, I felt awkward, even nervous, on the famous yellow couch, but Birhan was not. She later told me Chicago was interesting, but she needed to hurry back to classes. Like everyone in Oprah’s studio that day, I was presented with one of her famous gift bags on the way out. Her largesse was legendary, including giving away cars, so I was naturally curious. Mine contained women’s pajamas, a woman’s reading shawl, and the classic feminist book The Good Earth.

Birhan’s trips were over, except for one. I had long promised her as a graduation present a vacation in Canada with my wife, Tina, and daughter, Katie. In August 2006 she came with her friend Rahel, and I ensured there would be no media. Birhan loved Toronto and was amazed by the abundance of water in Ontario, especially the flood roaring over Niagara Falls. Much of her life had been lived in droughts, and as we stood in our rain slickers on the boat below the falls, she said it seemed like “a second baptism.”

When I retired from the CBC, I went back one last time to those former famine lands of Ethiopia to thrill at the sight of decent harvests, new roads, and a Makelle bustling with shops, internet cafés, new hotels, hospitals, schools, and a prominent university. All seven of the Woldu children had completed high school and were doing well. The family invited me to dinner, and I listened to more of the father’s positive and often humorous take on life. Birhan was working with the A-CET educational trust to extend education into farm areas in the hinterlands. She also had a boyfriend she was soon to marry and spoke of their hopes together.

A few years later, Birhan had two daughters, but then many things went wrong. The marriage didn’t work out, a business they had launched failed, and, in 2021, the central government joined with neighbouring Eritrea to crush Tigray, destroying decades of post-famine progress and killing an estimated six hundred thousand people—barely covered by Western media, but the highest death toll of any recent war in the world. The network of schools that A-CET had built up over decades was looted or destroyed, and Bisrat and Birhan struggled to keep classes going despite the war.

For over a year I had no contact with the family while all communication with the outside world was cut, but after many attempts I have recently reconnected with them. Birhan, now remarried, is still serene. Despite the horrors, her daughters are in one of the rare local schools that remain. She has few material goods but even more of a life mission—to help her Tigrayan people recover. She was heavily involved with Bisrat’s local charity, which brings education to rural children, and also did field work with several aid projects in remote villages where suffering is most acute. She recently launched, with her husband Berhane Reda, a new organization (PIDO) to work with severely disadvantaged youth. Occasionally she writes to urge me not to worry. She is determined to survive—again.

Of all my foreign reporting experiences, Ethiopia is most often on my mind, with memories both painful and cherished. But to move my reflections on, I must first go back to the beginnings.