Back story on a ‘haunting’ image of famine in Africa

• Posted By: Times Editors
• Posted On: 8:21 a.m. | August 6, 2011

By Barbara Davidson, Los Angeles Times

I was on assignment in Africa for six weeks. The famine was not a story that we had originally planned to cover, but when I arrived in Kenya and read about the plight of the Somalian refugees  who walked some 200 miles looking for food and safety, I contacted my editors who agreed we needed to tell their story. After a couple of weeks of  “permit”-gathering, a drill the Kenyan government makes all visiting journalists go through, I was on a plane to Dadaab, near the border of Kenya and Somali, home to the world’s largest refugee camp with 372,000 people, more than four times its original capacity.

The front page photo of Hawa Barre Osman looking for a signs of life from her 1-year-old severely malnourished child, Abdi Noor Ibrahim, was made inside the small Médecins Sans Frontières therapeutic feeding center at their Hospital in the Dagahaley refugee camp.

http://framework.latimes.com/2011/08/06/back-story-on-a-haunting-image-of-famine-in-africa/