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“Don’t you get overwhelmed?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“We can’t think too much about one of them,” Dr. Tectonidis says, waving a hand. “The little kids they go easy. One in four of them. They estimate something like two hundred thousand children under five die a year here. And in a year like this, it’s probably much more.

“I tell the nurses, ‘If you get attached and you want to cry, fine—but go somewhere else. Go hide.’ If you cry in front of the mothers, what good is that? It’s not a sign of sympathy. It makes the other mothers worried. They start wondering, ‘What’s going to happen to my kid?’ You can’t do that; it’s not fair. They look up to you like a God. You’re the one chance they have. Only fifty people died here last month. We saved about fifteen hundred. You can’t stop for one death. The mothers understand. They don’t expect sympathy, they expect you to try your best. They don’t expect you to cry for them. That’s not your job.”

I’D INITIALLY COME to Somalia in 1992 on my own, hoping to get a job with Channel One. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. At outdoor feeding kitchens set up by international relief groups, young and old, like human skeletons, sat in rows waiting for food. The food was cooked in old, giant oil drums over charcoal fires. The smell of cooking food filled the air, taunting the hungry.

When a person died, he was wrapped in a shroud, and placed with the other bodies stacked like cords of wood in a makeshift morgue, eventually to be buried in an unmarked pit. Saiid took me out to the burial grounds, where each day dozens of graves were filled, while new ones were dug.

By the time we got there, it was already late in the day. I took some pictures of the graves, and then started to get worried because we were all alone. Just me and Saiid and two gunmen. I began to think that they might shoot me and dump my body in an empty grave. I couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t. I had more money than I planned on giving them, and we hadn’t discussed their fee.

“Saiid, did I mention that I have several journalist friends who will be coming to Baidoa in a couple of days?” I asked him, trying to come up with reasons he should keep me alive. “They’ll need interpreters, and I will definitely give them your name.”

I also gave him a raise on the spot.

We drove around aimlessly for a while, and ended up in a small gathering of makeshift huts along a dusty footpath, where a man and a woman squatted over the body of their dead child, lying on the dirt floor of the hut. I wasn’t sure if I should videotape them. I didn’t want to disturb their grief. When the man finally looked up, I motioned to him with my head, nodding toward my camera. He nodded back, and returned his attention to his son. I pressed RECORD.

The man appeared old, but was probably no more than forty. The boy had just died. The man held the boy’s head in one hand and with the other spread out a dirty cloth to cover the child’s face and body. The woman filled a kettle with what little water they had. Slowly, sparingly, she poured it over her son. You could see his hollowed-out eyes through the wet cloth; his ribs were visible as well. He had no muscle, no fat. His legs were as thin as the sticks that formed the outer layer of the hut.

They had already watched their three other sons die. This was their last. He was five years old.

He was just one boy, his was just one death. It happened a thousand times a day in places like this all over Somalia. It happened every day.

“AMINU’S DEAD.”

Charlie Moore, my producer, tells me when he gets back from the intensive care ward. Aminu was four. Yesterday he seemed better. Yesterday was a long time ago.

“Aminu’s dead.”

That’s all the nurses said. They don’t know exactly what killed him. They don’t do autopsies here in Maradi. No point. No time. Aminu was starving, but that’s not what finally did him in. He’d been sick for months, hospitalized for the last two weeks. His body was riddled