Tragedy Looms in Sudan as Famine Draws Little Notice or Aid : Charity: World Vision official warns the disaster could rival that of Ethiopia in 1984-85. But competition for the donor dollar includes quakes, cyclone and Kurds.

John Schenk is World Vision’s advance man for famine relief in Africa.

But the Monrovia-based Christian international relief and development agency is having a tough time catching the ear of the media and opening the wallet of the public.

That’s especially true of Sudan, says Schenk, where estimates of a possible death toll among the 7 million residents facing a severe food shortage start at 250,000 and climb past 1 million.

Schenk points to competition for the donor dollar: Kurdish refugees; earthquake victims in Costa Rica, Soviet Georgia and Peru--where relief workers were attempting to stem a deadly cholera epidemic when a massive temblor hit--and a killer cyclone smashing into Bangladesh.

Sudan “is not Ethiopia of 1984-85 when there was a sea of human skeletons and suffering,” said Schenk, 43, a tall, bearded communications worker based in Nairobi, Kenya. “Not yet. But there is famine and epidemics on a massive scale.”

The 1984 Ethiopia famine, which gained major worldwide media coverage, trigged a vast outpouring of charity.

Frederick Machmer Jr., head of the U.S. Agency for International Development office in Sudan, recently called Sudan “the greatest disaster in the world this year” but the place where “we have the least going for us.”

Schenk, who returned to Africa Friday, has been on a U.S. tour, telling the story and showing his pictures of the unfolding disaster.

He has walked the parched lands along the upper Nile River where 40,000 semi-nomadic people have died during the last three years from a parasitic disease coupled with malnutrition. And he has slogged through waterlogged grasslands along Sudan’s eastern border with Ethiopia where 100,000 refugees, fleeing political violence, are clustered among the 200,000 people already there and barely eking out an existence.

World Vision has pledged 583 tons of food plus blankets and cooking gear for an airdrop to the area, but support to underwrite the project is lagging, according to World Vision spokesman Jeff Sellers.

On June 30, 1989, Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir led a coup that deposed the government of Sadek Mahdi, set up a regime that suspended Sudan’s constitution, disbanded Parliament, imposed press censorship and dissolved all political parties and professional associations. Some diplomatic sources have said Bashir’s government has seemed so indifferent to the fate of its destitute citizens that it is prepared to let them die. Drought regions have in the past been centers of opposition by rebels favoring democratic rule.

The Sudanese government has blocked international food deliveries and prohibited Nile River traffic, Sellers and Schenk said.

Last month, World Vision representatives, meeting with Sudanese Ambassador Abdalla Ahmed Abdalla in Washington, were told that the Sudan government in Khartoum would soon lift its 4-year ban on nearly 60 aid organizations trying to work in the country.

“But we won’t see the results until visas are issued,” Sellers said this week.

Meanwhile, World Vision is attempting to smuggle 2,530 tons of food to tribes in the upper Nile region where thousands are dying from disease and lack of nutrition. Schenk said Red Cross workers trucked in a barge--in 15 pieces, one at a time--and assembled it.

Schenk accompanied a clandestine river run that delivered 25 tons of food and a pickup truck to distribute it inland.

“That will help several thousand people,” he said. “There were no food riots when we got there; the people were (too) listless.”

Despite hardships and hunger, the churches in Sudan are flourishing, according to Schenk, who has worked in Africa for six years.

“I met people who walked for two weeks to get to services . . . to discuss their future and coordinate medical and food relief programs,” he said.

“The place where one should see compassion is on the front line of suffering,” he added. “But Christian charity can’t stop with digging down into your pocket. We need the political will to pressure and entice Khartoum and the rebels to bring about the end of the 8-year-long war.

“If it keeps up, we’re going to see a more massive famine than Ethiopia in 1984. There’s no fallback--no food reserves.”