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The first thing she felt as she climbed from the car was relief.

For almost two hours they'd been thrown around like laundry in a machine

as the exhausted wheels of the vehicle had found each rock and pit in the road.

As her feet touched the baked earth, the second thing she felt was the heat from the sun

which seemed to swarm around her skin like a cloud of bees.

The sun did not feel this way in other places.

In the gardens and at the beaches she'd known.

Here the sun was an attacking presence, an enemy to be considered and challenged throughout the day.

The man from UNICEF placed a hand on her arm and pointed towards the skeleton of a thorn tree on a hill

and at the pile of scorched bones that lay in heaps beneath its shadows.

They made their way across the cracked soil to where the bones lay,

their fingers like matchsticks scratching softly and distractedly at the dust.

The bones turned their eyes towards her as she approached and for a moment she wondered if they would fly away

like a gang of startled crows.

But she had not counted upon their lack of strength which had been stripped away painfully

and over much time by the teeth of the sun and by the lack of water and food.

Gently she reached down and touched the hand of one of these creatures who stared back at her with frosted eyes.

Insanity she thought that she, a woman of 59 years, should look so much younger than this child

who could be no more than 10 or 11 but for whom each day punished as a month of aging.

Shadows of her childhood flashed across her mind like postcards,

like the broken sounds of a radio station struggling to tune itself.

...