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Part 1 of 2
It must have been pure chance.
The discovery of an old reporter’s notebook made me sad, to tears. It exposed a hollowness in our American soul that average people like me often seem helpless to fill.
A hollowness that our current elected leaders and their impossibly wealthy compatriots in power mock as weakness.
The discovery happened on Monday, on the day that the United States government under Donald Trump shut down the United States Agency for International Development, a day that also brought former president George W. Bush to tears. His “compassionate conservative” claim seemed a long time ago, and the work he had directed during his administration — life-saving work that especially helped thwart an African AIDS epidemic — seemed even more distant.
“You’ve showed the great strength of America through your work — and that is your good heart,” Bush said. “Is it in our national interest that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is, and so do you.”
Like clockwork, he was ridiculed as hapless and weak on social media by the same crowd that celebrates, like children at a July 4 fireworks, America’s ability to dump bunker-busting bombs on far-away targets or send missiles through bedroom windows continents away. The same crowd that thinks we should disassociate ourselves from the rest of humanity and hoard our collective abundance for, let’s be honest, a few power-wielding billionaires and white generations to follow.
On this day when Bush finally came forth to say what he felt, I opened a notebook I hadn’t in 40 years.
My Monday discovery was a reporter’s notebook, the story in which began on Feb. 19, 1985, less than two months before our first son was born. And I did it reporting on the very Agency for International Development works that the billionaires club has now ended.
The son born two weeks after I returned from Ethiopia has lived these past 40 years without fear of everyday violence, or hunger, or want, or the absolute terror of oppression. A son who, with a selfless, caring wife as co-partner, a first-generation American herself, is deeply embedded in the foster community. A family with an adopted son out of foster care, with two foster children as brother and sister. Living their version of the American Dream.
My 1985 notebook is filled with quotes and observations from my reporting journey through Ethiopia in the midst of a drought-induced famine that remains among one of the worst in recorded history. Thank God my handwriting was so much better as a 31-year-old man.
I went to Ethiopia, a country in civil war at the time and largely closed off from the western press, that late winter and spring. I was there for six weeks, and reported from several aid camps.
It was not an easy trip, but in retrospect I cringe even writing this sentence, for the burdens carried by others was the true definition of hardship. For a short time, I was detained and held under what was essentially house arrest, accused at one point of being a CIA operative, of which, I assured them then and do now, I am definitely not. Journalists are terrible at keeping secrets that need to be told.
Finally, after days of repetitive-question vetting, after several face to faces with the same sad government bureaucrat who called himself “Comrade Getchachew,” I was allowed to fly on World Vision planes into the camps that had been set up in the northern part of the country to feed hundreds of thousands of people. A government “minder” was assigned to me to make sure I stayed in line. He turned out to want that tragic story to be told as much as I.
“You are free to go,” Comrade Getchachew told me, and then: “We ask that you report in a positive and fair way of what you see.”
USA Today devoted ample space to my reporting. Front-page cover stories. Profiles of aid workers. But most of all, accounts of the absolute deprivation of people living through prolonged drought, in a region of sub-Saharan Africa that had once been garden-like in its abundance, but in 1985 was a vast wasteland traversed by starving families. Estimates are that up to 1.2 million people died in that famine, with 2.5 million of the 40 million in the country left homeless, and 200,000 children orphaned.
The journey shaped in an enduring way my view of America’s special place in this world, and in all of history. Blessed with abundance and the freedom to enjoy it, we are now abandoning it in the age of autographed Trump for-profit Bibles and lectures from billionaires that equate compassion with weakness.
My unsigned Bible says we should feed the hungry, embrace the other, and to put ourselves in the footsteps of those who, by sheer chance of birth, were given virtually nothing on which to build a life.
The Bible that teaches in Corinthians and Acts and throughout that for those of us to whom much has been given, much is expected.
The only way I could get into Ethiopia those 40 years ago was through attaching myself to a western aid group, in this case World Vision.
It remains an established global leader in the pursuit of mercy, a Non-Governmental Organization (or NGO), that sends missionaries to the body and spirit into the world’s worst disasters. One of those nonprofits that Trump and Musk and the 20-something DOGE minions, who don’t know what they don’t know, have ridiculed and denigrated for political cover to cut taxes on the wealthy and end our government’s non-lethal relationship with the rest of the world.
The cabal of wealth worshipers that has created myths and spewed social media untruths about people getting rich off the taxpayer dime through these non-profits of mercy.
I can assure you that every single person I met on that journey into the depths of human suffering, the people whose quotes and impressions fill my notebook, were wealthy in spirit and compassion. No one I met along the journey was there to build a 401(k).
Every single one of them had stories about peril, deprivation and yet mercy and many miracles in the globe’s worst places.
For many, this was not their first rodeo. Some had not seen the U.S. and their families for months, some for years. Same for World Vision aid workers from Britain, Canada, France and others who often hurriedly crossed my path. Some were veteran soldiers of mercy of the famine and disasters from the civil war in Bangladesh that had raged for a decade — the disaster that inspired George Harrison and Ravi Shankar to form the first rock ‘n’ roll concert to benefit refugees.
I met pilots who had dropped everything in their lives to fly aid workers and sacks of grain or food or baby formula, often with “U.S.A.” stamped on them, into camps where tens of thousands had congregated in the open air. Where temperatures approached triple digits by day and freezing by night.
I am convinced that a single sack of American grain dropped into one of those camps did more good and advanced our country’s interests abroad more than any bunker-buster ever dropped.
George McGovern, who dropped actual bombs over Europe, and Bob Dole, who almost died a lonely WWII death on an Italian hillside, both would agree with that statement. They told me versions of that belief many times. Ideologically opposite, they still came together as Americans to build up the Food for Peace programs and the U.S. AID relief programs precisely because they knew that warmongering only led to more war. And they also knew, firsthand, that we grew the grains of peace in abundance in our heartland.
Back in 1985, I fantasized that one of those bags of wheat landing in the relief camps of Ethiopia could have been grown by my dad on the family farm back in South Dakota.
Chuck Raasch, a Castlewood native, is a reporter and author who covered major state, national and world stories for the Huron Daily Plainsman, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, USA Today, as a Gannett News Service columnist and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Photo: USAID workers in a Haitian orphanage, public domain, wikimedia commons
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