Where Soldiers Fear to Tread

Chapter One

1. The Crisis

One villager reported the building simply collapsed without warning. The woman and her three children and the two old people on the tin roof vanished under the fast-moving brown floodwaters and were swept away.

Marerey was one of the villages on the banks of the southern stretch of the Webbi Jubba. It was disappearing fast, ripped apart by the rising river that had broken its banks and was sweeping away everything in its path.

Its people were a strong lot, used to hardship. They had weathered searing droughts and previous floods, the pestilence of locusts and mysterious diseases. They were more fortunate than others.

One time not so long ago, there had been a sugar factory on the other side of the airstrip, where many worked, and so the villagers could afford tin roofs instead of thatch, could afford to build their homes of mud bricks instead of wattle. There had even been a school. But the fighting had come and families fought families and the area had been divvied up by the warlords and their clans. The sugar factory had been destroyed in one of the many seesaw battles for turf and was now no more than a skeletal ruin ... read full excerpt from Where Soldiers Fear to Tread: A Relief Worker's Tale of Survival ebook