Famine

BLENNERVILLE, Ireland -- Winter days are dark and cold on the rugged west coast of Ireland. And in summer, the rain and wind off Tralee Bay can make the shipyard at Blennerville a chill and dreary place to work.But this is where Baltimore shipwright Rodney Goode arrived in July 1998, eager to lend a hand -- despite low wages and old tools -- with the construction of the Jeanie Johnston, a replica of an 1847 "famine ship" being built near Tralee, in County Kerry.The new Jeanie Johnston will celebrate perhaps the most famous and reliable of the sailing ships that carried Irish families to Baltimore and other ports during the potato famine of the mid-19th century.

PICTURE this: It's a freezing cold morning and the four of us brothers are encased in the collapsed mattress, which reeks of excrement and urine and is the home of millions of fleas and lice that feast nightly on our bodies.Church bells ring out as they do every day, giving Mass times. You struggle to light a fire with wet scraps of wood and sodden peat. Your soaked shirttail is beginning to stiffen with the cold and your ears, nose and toes and fingertips tell you it's freezing in here.That would be a sample winter morning in our house, except for getting the monthly food docket.

READ 'EM and weep, the saying among poker players goes. In poker, the weeping is fake and comic.Read it and weep. In this case, the weeping should be literal. But read Gil Lewthwaite's story in today's paper on the impending famine in Sudan and, if you can't weep, at least feel some empathy for the people of southern Sudan.Lewthwaite and I were in Sudan two years ago, buying the freedom of two slaves and doing an article on how slavery still exists in that country. In addition to buying the freedom of Garang Deng Kuot and his brother, Akok Deng Kuot, and reuniting both boys with their father, we talked to several other people who said they had been kidnapped and forced into slavery but escaped.

AKUEM, Sudan -- Ajok Luah Luah, 25, a young mother of upright bearing but dwindling strength, is the anguished face of famine-threatened Sudan today.For three days, she has eaten nothing but wild leaves, walking by night, sheltering under the shade trees by day, all the time cradling her 14-month-old baby in her arms as she flees from civil war.Her little daughter is sick, coughing and perspiring with fever; her hair is copper-tinted, the tell-tale sign...

ALBANY, N.Y. - Albany officials have unveiled a memorial to commemorate the Irish potato famine.The memorial's flower-and-stone design is the inspiration of Robert Haldane, an Albany resident. "It took literally a minute to draw it," Haldane said, smiling through his lyrical Irish brogue during a City Hall presentation of plans for the garden.The Famine Garden, as it will be called when it opens this year, is to remind people with Irish roots of the hardship their ancestors endured in fleeing their homeland in the last century in search of food and survival.

Alvin Chesley Wilson Jr., a retired publicist and highly decorated World War II Navy veteran, died of of heart failure Monday at Genesis Elder Care Center in Annapolis. The Annapolis resident was 79.Mr. Wilson was commissioned as an ensign in 1940 and was assigned to the USS Marblehead. The ship was badly damaged by Japanese air attacks during the Battle of the Java Sea, and he remained aboard throughout the vessel's 13,000-mile voyage back to the United States.He was twice awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal.

TUMEN, China -- At the souvenir shop in this border town, tourists pay 60 cents to peer through binoculars across the frozen Tumen river into North Korea, where a human tragedy is unfolding.The North Korean soldiers posted at 50-yard intervals along the riverbank to prevent hungry North Koreans from slipping across to seek food in China are clearly visible. So, too, is the giant billboard of North Korea's late "Great Leader," inscribed with the words "Kim Il Sung Lives in Our Hearts Forever."

Dustin Hoffman has been a major movie star for more than three decades, one of those rare actors whose careers can be judged as both a commercial and artistic success.Yet there Hoffman was in the New York Times last week, a quivering bundle of insecurities, confiding that he has always felt like a "fluke" who never believed he had really "arrived," and concluding that "in a way I've been hanging on by my fingertips for the whole ride."Huh? Clearly, there is stuff going on inside an actor's psyche the rest of us can only guess at.Caroline Nesbitt, a stage actress now on tour with "Enchanted Doll," a production of the Underground Railway Theatre of Boston, clears up some of the mystery in the current issue of American Theatre magazine.

The Maryland Senate gave final approval last night to a bill that would require public schools to teach children about the Irish potato famine.The bill passed 26-20 with no debate and goes to the House of Delegates, where its prospects are uncertain.The legislation sponsored by Sen. Perry Sfikas, a Baltimore Democrat, would require public elementary and secondary schools to teach children about a tragedy that killed 1 million of Ireland's 8 million people and set off a historic wave of immigration to the United States.

EVERY YEAR, Maryland's General Assembly is faced with its share of silly bills, which usually die an early, welcome death. Sen. Perry Sfikas' legislation requiring schools to teach about the Irish potato famine should have met such a fate. Instead, the bill is alive and well, and threatens to become more dangerous than absurd.The Irish potato famine of 1845 to 1850 is an important historical event that had a significant impact on American history; 2 million Irish emigrated here to escape the disaster.