ETHIOPIA: Hungry Ethiopians are receiving emergency food supplies that give them an average of 900 extra calories a month - about the equivalent of "seven bars of Snickers", as Ms Georgia Shaver, American head of the UN World Food Programme here, put it graphically yesterday.
She was spelling out the scale of the emergency facing Ethiopia to the Minister of State for Overseas Development, Mr Tom Kitt, who is on a four-day fact-finding visit with senior officials of Ireland Aid. Everybody smiled at the Snickers analogy, but there was no denying the crisis.
"If we don't get seeds out by the end of February, we're in big trouble," Ms Shaver warned. That would be just in time for the country's short rainy season - and if it doesn't come, as it didn't last year, even more than the current 11.3 million Ethiopians will face the grim reality of famine.
Food aid is coming through, but not enough to avert this impending disaster. Work is also continuing on the ground to improve the lives of people living in rural areas and in the shanty towns that sprawl around Addis Ababa, where people live in makeshift houses in narrow, congested alleys.
Mr Kitt, travelling in a 30-year-old Mercedes 230 with the Irish flag on a small spear in place of its crest, saw the squalor of these slums for himself and the work being done by the Irish aid organisations, Concern and GOAL, to provide communal latrines and a drop-in centre for homeless kids.
Everywhere his motorcade stopped, the Irish party was surrounded by often-barefoot children, some of them so impossibly beautiful that they could be the next Naomi Campbell or Will Smith if any talent scout happened to drop by.
Some were in school uniforms, others in rags. Nearby, goats were being herded along the roads.
At GOAL'S drop-in centre for children, many of them made homeless after parents died from AIDS, Mr Kitt was entertained by girls and boys in traditional costume dancing energetically to a drumbeat in front of pictures of the crucified Christ, the Virgin Mary and St Therese of Lisieux.
He told the 190 children and young teenagers that he was delighted to be there in "this special year for GOAL", when the charity is celebrating its 25th anniversary. He then played a bit of table tennis with one of the boys before being whisked off to the relative luxury of the Hilton hotel.
