“[My editor] Susan got word that Hollywood actress Jessica Lange would be touring the airport camp as a UNICEF representative, and since half the Nairobi bureau was in Iraq, she sent me to cover it. Lange was flying in to highlight the hunger crisis and the fact that over two hundred women had been raped in Bunia that summer, along with countless others who’d probably never come forward.

The actress arrived at the camp at 9:00 a.m., then made her way to the general hospital, where a therapeutic feeding center had recently opened. Inside the center’s dark rooms were three hundred children in various stages of starvation. They lay in cribs shadowed against the light, their temples sunken and disfigured, and skin so shrunken against their delicate bones they no longer appeared human. Their eyes told you everything, round and filled with terror, or glazed and slipping, but whatever they were suffering, they did it in silence, hardly even a whimper.

The UNICEF officer leading the tour had been caring for them from the beginning. I’d seen her at the airport right after the siege, days since her last sleep, and on the verge of tears or collapse. She now led the actress to each crib and peered inside, and in the depths of her eyes you could see the scabs that had bled and dried somewhere within. They spent the next hour at the giant scale, hoisting the emaciated figures into the slings, while the officer explained in clinical terms the stages in which children slowly died from hunger.”

— From Chapter One: In the Valley of the Gun

Young Lendu soldier, Bunia

Johnny Ngure and Bryan, Bunia

Carter Dougherty, Karel Prinsloo,
Rodrique Ngowi, reporters camp,
UN compound, Bunia