GROUP ENDS AFRICA TRIP ON A WEARY NOTE

From the air, the land resembles chocolate pudding left too long in the back of the refrigerator.

Cracks and fissures cleft the fudge-brown surface. It looks as though it may once have been sweet, but no more. Camel carcasses and lye-whitened grave mounds now dot the land.

The Wad Sharif refugee camp here, just a half-dozen miles from the Ethiopian border, is home to an estimated 100,000 Eritreans who have fled both civil war and famine in their native Ethiopia.

Harry Belafonte came to sing to them Friday--to tell them help was on the way. But the desert winds sang louder and, in the end, it is only the slimmest of a conjecture that any of them heard Belafonte at all.

USA for Africa’s dwindling expeditionary force into the famine-stricken hinterlands of East Africa paid one of its final visits to Wad Sharif before returning to Hollywood.

There, the best of the drama captured by USA for Africa camera crews will be spliced and diced into the kind of documentary of which telethons are made. Only this one will reverberate, over and over, with the rousing refrain from “We Are the World.”

Half the original USA for Africa crew who came to Africa on a two-week fact-finding trip have returned to the United States, and two days have been cut from the original Sudan itinerary. The group’s tour of Africa will end today.

“I think everybody’s had enough famine for a while,” said one USA for Africa staff member.

Even Belafonte, who helped conceive the idea of raising famine funds through a group-superstar sing-along, has begun to show signs of wear.

In Tanzania earlier this week, the group traveled miles by four-wheel-drive truck to a missionary-run agricultural project, only to discover no one had expected them.

So they turned around and went all the way back, wasting most of the day.

Back at their hotel, Belafonte and his wife, Julie, found that their room had been burglarized. The Tanzanian thieves got two tape recorders and a pair of sneakers, but left Harry’s expensive collection of Nikon cameras untouched.

“Maybe that shows where the need lies in Tanzania,” Belafonte philosophized later. Tape decks and tennis shoes for a better Africa? asked an incredulous reporter.

“Why not?” Belafonte shrugged.

And trucks. And roads to drive them on. And gasoline to fuel them. And spare tires. And batteries.

And the list goes on and on.

“We have 20 million people in Sudan,” said Sudanese information ministry spokesman Bakri Said. “Now, with refugees, we have four million more. We need (supplies) very much.”

Sudan, he explained, has a reputation for being a softhearted, easygoing nation, despite its lunar landscape and solar temperatures. As a result, its borders have been overrun by drought and war refugees from nearly all of its neighbors: Ugandans, Chadians, Ethiopians all pour into the Sudan at the rate of several hundred a day, according to a report from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

And Wad Sharif--where cholera bellies and malarial eyes give thousands peering from thatched hutches the museum look of a living morgue--is actually one of the better settlements.

“When it rains, it will be a disaster,” said UNHCR volunteer Maggie Higgins, who has worked here for seven months. “The heat and sun actually act as a kind of disinfectant, drying everything out.”

Rain is expected by early July. Then, the cholera, pneumonia and, perhaps, typhoid epidemics, will begin.

Inside the camp medical clinic, Dr. Dick Snyder, a newly licensed family practitioner from Arkansas who volunteered to work in Sudan, is showing Belafonte and the TV documentary crew a dying child.

In the background, a loudspeaker truck from the Sudanese administration of information is blaring a shrill tape of Michael Jackson’s “Shake Your Booties” in special tribute to the arrival of the Americans.

“What does he have, Doc?” Belafonte asks Snyder as the cameras begin to record the child in Bed No. 19.

It is malaria and pneumonia, to be sure, but lately the nearly lifeless form lying on the bed had taken on some new infection, the doctor says.

The boy’s stoic mother holds onto one of her son’s skeletal hands with both of hers.

His father shoos away flies.

A bottle of milky liquid is rigged up over the bed, dripping through plastic tubing taped to the boy’s nose and mouth. His eyes stare, even blink at the touch of a fly, but they do not seem to see. A wristband identifies him as “Hamoe.”

Belafonte waves his hand over Hamoe’s face in futile absolution and manages to frighten off a few flies.

“I think that’s enough, Harry,” says the documentary producer after he orders his crew to move on to Bed No. 20.

Belafonte lingers a moment longer, then moves on with the TV crew.

Hamoe’s father coughs loud and deep and brings up white, foamy evidence of his own sickness. He spits and sprinkles a handful of the pudding-brown dust over it. Then he returns to the eternal task of scaring off the flies from his son’s face.

A Sudanese soldier with a fully loaded rifle and a bushy Omar Sharif-like mustache walks by, shrugs, and waves his hands over Bed No. 19, as if to say, “What’s the use?”

Hamoe’s mother never moves, never smiles, never frowns.

Outside, the government truck now is playing “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough.”

And Belafonte moves on to Bed No. 20, followed closely by the television crew.