eet Aberash Andreos. She's a 6-year-old girl from a remote village in southern Ethiopia. I met her at a Catholic-run clinic near the town of Awassa, where she was among the throngs of children awaiting lifesaving milk to rescue them from the famine that threatens millions of people in the Horn of Africa.

Aberash is not one of the worst off. The really desperate children are inside the clinic, lying comatose on beds (two children to a bed) as nurses fight to keep them alive, or they are dying in their villages.

The better-off children, like Aberash, can stand on their own on the clinic grounds.

"I've nothing to eat at home," said Andreos Lutta, the girl's father (standing behind her in this photograph). He is a farmer whose crops have failed because of the drought that has struck the region, so he tries to find day labor and earn money to buy food. When he finds work, he earns about 40 cents a day.

I didn't visit Aberash's home, but the others I entered were similar: a windowless grass-roofed hut, called a tukul, with a couple of cows (if they haven't died) on one side, and the family on the other. Keeping the cows inside at night protects them from hyenas and rustlers. Poor families typically have a single cooking pot, a water jug, a homemade bed made of sticks that serves everyone, and no other possessions: no bicycle, no watch, no change of clothes, no food.

That's not to say there is no food in the village itself. Some families are better off and have grain, and there are merchants with supplies to sell to anyone with money. In one village, a grain merchant was insouciantly putting his grain in sacks on the main street as children were staggering by, ready to drop from hunger.

Like most parents, Mr. Lutta himself didn't seem malnourished (the father almost always eats first in these villages, and then the mother and children eat together, using bread to scoop a stew from a common pot). He has six other children, and they are better off. It's typically the smallest ones, like Aberash, who are in trouble: they no longer depend on breast milk, but they aren't strong enough to compete with their siblings in grabbing food from the pot.

"It's the first time we've seen it like this," Mr. Lutta said, referring to the severity of the famine. In this area, conditions were never this bad, even in the terrible 1984-85 famine, which killed some one million people.

Children like Aberash will be saved only if the West mounts a major effort to help them. The U.S. has responded relatively well to the calls for assistance from Ethiopia, but I'm afraid that much more will be needed. For individuals who want to contribute, some options are listed below.

Aberash is just one child, but I saw countless more just like her. In village after village, you meet these kids, hold their hands, touch their bones. But they are in a remote corner of the world, dying quietly, as we go about our business.

In the best of circumstances, about 100,000 boys and girls like Aberash will die of malnutrition-related ailments this year in Ethiopia. If the drought continues and the West doesn't provide more assistance, the number of deaths will rise to several hundred thousand or more.   

Many readers have asked how they can donate money to help fight famine in the Horn of Africa. I don't think it's appropriate for me to recommend any one organization, and there are many groups doing good work in the region. Here are some options (in each case, write "Ethiopia" or "Eritrea" for the money to go to one specific place):

1. The U.N. World Food Program, http://www.wfp.org/, whose feeding programs I visited, is very active in the area. Donations are tax-deductible in the U.S. if checks are made out to "Friends of the World Food Program." Send the donation to:
WFP
2 UN Plaza DC2 - 2500
New York, New York 10017
Phone 917-367-4341

2. Doctors without Borders, http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/, is also active in the area where Aberash lives:
6 East 39th Street, 8th floor
New York, NY 10016
1-888-392-0392

3. Childreach, http://www.childreach.org/:
155 Plan Way
Warwick, Rhode Island 02886
1-800-556-7918

4. Mercy Corps, http://www.mercycorps.org/, which works in Eritrea but not Ethiopia:
Mercy Corps
Dept. FM
PO Box 2669
Portland, OR 97208-2669
1-800-292-3355 extension 250