A passage to africa - George

• Passage to Africa


  Could mean a journey to Africa or a dedication to Africa
• Anna Gaea


  Writes about his experiences as a television reporter during the war in Somalia
• This is autobiographical writing
• Adjectives used to describe the faces Gaea saw

  • Hungry
  • Lean
  • Scared
  • Betrayed
• Gaea can only remember one face out of the thousand he saw
• Hamlet


  A village in the back of beyond, a place the aid agencies had yet to reach
• As Gaea and his cameraman continued their search


  What might have pulled them when they started their trip just a few days before no longer impressed them much
• Ghoulish manner of journalists


  On the hunt for the most striking pictures
• Gaea and his cameraman tramped from one cut to another
• The search for the shocking

  Is like the craving for a drug, you require heavier more frequent doses the longer you're at it
• Images of people experiencing terrible things are dismissed as "the same old stuff"
• Abdur Amin's daughter Heribieber


  10 years old, died while Abdur Amin was out searching for wild edible roots
• Reactions to the death of Heribieber


  • No rage
  • No whimpering
  • Just a passing away
• Heribieber's state is described as "half-life"
• The old woman Gaea encountered had a festering wound the size of his hand from being shot in the leg
• The old woman's shattered leg


  Had fused into the gentle V shape of a boomerang, and was rotting
• Gaea's reaction to everyone else he met that day was a mixture of pity and revulsion
• Gaea felt ashamed about feeling revulsion at the degeneration of the human body in the feeding centres
• Despite their suffering, the Somali people still aspired to a dignity that was almost impossible to achieve
• The smile Gaea saw on a man's face


  It was not a smile of greeting or joy, but a feeble smile of embarrassment and apology
• The smile turned the tables on the tacit agreement between journalist and subject


  The man had posed a question that cut to the heart of the relationship between Gaea and him, between "us and them", between the rich world and the poor world
• Gaea resolved to write about this experience with all the power and purpose he could muster
• Gaea regrets not finding out the man's name, as meeting him was a seminal moment in Gaea's collection of experiences