Bilbela / 09

Situated at the epicentre of the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, the village of Bilbela was once again facing drought in 2003. A visit by Bob Geldof in May of the same year reaped a series of media images of a barren landscape with no people. D J Clark visited two weeks later in a bid to trace the locations of images printed in the UK press and found a thriving village far from starvation. On the day of his visit the school was giving out the annual report (the blue forms) which formed the basis of this picture story.