Melamine feeding bowl
Production date
1984-1985
Audio tour
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Description
I was working as a field nurse running a Red Cross supplementary feeding centre in Maichew Province, Tigrey, during the famine in East Africa in 1984/5.
Malnourished children were given a high energy milk drink served from these bowls.
I’d get to the feeding centre early, to check that the cooks had managed to light the fires and that the water was boiling before they began to mix in the dried skimmed milk, butter oil and sugar to make the high-energy milk drink that we gave to the starving children.
In an ideal world, each child would have been given its own individual regime, depending on conditions; and we would have given them as many as five or six small meals a day. But this was far from an ideal world. At that point we didn’t have the time, the food supplies or enough trained personnel to give more than three supplementary feeds a day to two sittings of up to 250 children each.
We divided each sitting into groups of about 25 children, each accompanied by their mother or a member of their family, with a local Red Cross worker in charge of them, helping to coax the children into taking a little milk from one of these bowls.
Given the number of starving children with which we were faced, this was the most effective supplementary feeding programme we could manage. We were dealing with about four to five hundred each day. Hundreds more were left outside to die.
On one day I had sixty to seventy places to bring in children, but outside the feeding centre there were ten rows with a hundred children in each row. I told the local Red Cross personnel to go and bring in some children but they said they couldn’t choose, because that was their families, their cousins, brothers and sisters and that I had to choose. So we decided that I would go down each row and choose the ones that had a spark of life in their eyes – we knew the worst ones would die within the next 24/48 hours. They were all badly malnourished with no fat or muscle, their skin just dripping off their bones.
My work with the Red Cross has continued throughout my life and I am now a Vice President of the Essex branch of the British Red Cross.
Claire's work in Ethiopia inspired Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to launch Band Aid in 1984 to raise money for the famine relief. Their song- Do they Know it's Christmas?- was a big hit and raised over £8 million. This was followed by the launch of Live Aid in 1985, which raised more than £150 million and saved an estimated 2 million lives in Africa.
Audio recording by Dame Claire Bertschinger (Former Red Cross nurse and Vice President of the Essex branch of the British Red Cross).
Malnourished children were given a high energy milk drink served from these bowls.
I’d get to the feeding centre early, to check that the cooks had managed to light the fires and that the water was boiling before they began to mix in the dried skimmed milk, butter oil and sugar to make the high-energy milk drink that we gave to the starving children.
In an ideal world, each child would have been given its own individual regime, depending on conditions; and we would have given them as many as five or six small meals a day. But this was far from an ideal world. At that point we didn’t have the time, the food supplies or enough trained personnel to give more than three supplementary feeds a day to two sittings of up to 250 children each.
We divided each sitting into groups of about 25 children, each accompanied by their mother or a member of their family, with a local Red Cross worker in charge of them, helping to coax the children into taking a little milk from one of these bowls.
Given the number of starving children with which we were faced, this was the most effective supplementary feeding programme we could manage. We were dealing with about four to five hundred each day. Hundreds more were left outside to die.
On one day I had sixty to seventy places to bring in children, but outside the feeding centre there were ten rows with a hundred children in each row. I told the local Red Cross personnel to go and bring in some children but they said they couldn’t choose, because that was their families, their cousins, brothers and sisters and that I had to choose. So we decided that I would go down each row and choose the ones that had a spark of life in their eyes – we knew the worst ones would die within the next 24/48 hours. They were all badly malnourished with no fat or muscle, their skin just dripping off their bones.
My work with the Red Cross has continued throughout my life and I am now a Vice President of the Essex branch of the British Red Cross.
Claire's work in Ethiopia inspired Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to launch Band Aid in 1984 to raise money for the famine relief. Their song- Do they Know it's Christmas?- was a big hit and raised over £8 million. This was followed by the launch of Live Aid in 1985, which raised more than £150 million and saved an estimated 2 million lives in Africa.
Audio recording by Dame Claire Bertschinger (Former Red Cross nurse and Vice President of the Essex branch of the British Red Cross).
Collection Type
Objects
Media/Materials
History
One of a number of items donated by Claire Bertschinger. In 1984 Claire was working as an ICRC field nurse in Ethiopia, caring for those caught up in the civil war and subsequent famine. Claire prominantly featured in BBC journalist Michael Buerk's report from the region, highlighting the fate of thousands of children. It was this footage that inspired Band Aid and then Live Aid.
Catalogue Number
937/1(1)
Associated Person and Role
Claire Bertschinger
Associated Place
Associated Person
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Object Types
Part of 1 highlight set
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