c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Today’s pictures are from Niger, but they could be from lots of places in Africa, and from lots of times during recent decades. These children with the matchstick legs, and the eyes bigger than their fists, could have been from Biafra, a runaway province of Nigeria, in the 1970s, or from Ethiopia in the 1980s, or the Congo in the 1990s.

The hideous massacre stories, this time from Darfur, could be from Liberia, or Sierra Leone, or _ most bloodily _ Rwanda.

The AIDS stories come steadily from the same places.

Nobody thinks that the United States, or the Western alliance, or the entire planet outside Africa could fix all of these problems. But somehow, they always come as a surprise, in a place that we’ve forgotten about since the last time.

The problem is that Americans have AADD: Africa Attention Deficit Disorder.

Every so often, we see the eruption of something so cataclysmic that it forces its way onto our radar screens. In between those times _ especially since the Cold War ended and we were reassured that Africans might die but wouldn’t go communist _ we generally forget the continent exists.

“We have a short attention span,” says Randy Martin, Washington, D.C.-based director of global emergency services for Portland, Ore.-based Mercy Corps. “If a situation is not going to be resolved overnight, we lose interest.”

By that standard, we lose interest in anything African.

Right now, network and cable news camera crews are all over Niger, this being the point when the food situation is the worst but the footage situation is the best. (Still, U.S. media are more likely to mention Niger for its connection with Valerie Plame and Iraq than as a place where 2.9 million people are close to starvation.) The United Nations has issued a plea for $75 million for Niger.

But Niger, after a season of drought and locusts, saw this coming for six months and couldn’t get anybody interested.

There’s no footage in a famine forecast.

Which, says Martin, who’s on an emergency task force of international charitable groups, is a bad way to deal with these things.

“If you start when you see the famine coming, people might still have their seed,” he says. “If you wait, people eat their seeds, they sell their tools, they sell their livestock. If you take action when people still have resources, the chances of recovery are much better.”

Of course, to do that you have to pay attention.

On Niger, that’s included a range of private groups _ CARE, Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services _ but until now, not much of a government or public interest.

“There’s an extent to which people just don’t know Africa very well,” says Ann-Louise Colgan, director of policy analysis for the D.C. advocacy group Africa Action. To Colgan, that means Americans not only don’t see the continent’s issues very clearly, but they also think that more is being done than actually is.

On the issue of Darfur in western Sudan, site of what Colgan calls “the first genocide of the new millennium,” she notes we’re at “the one-year anniversary of the (Bush) administration saying it was genocide. The statement was used as a substitute for action.”

On Darfur and debt forgiveness, Colgan says, an increasing number of Americans are getting interested. But for situations so distant and so complex, even with some advances it’s hard to sustain activism.

“When victory is not everything they hoped it would be,” she says, “how do you sustain their interest?”

Without waiting for the interest-stirring pile of bodies.

Martin points to the southern end of Sudan _ where the Bush administration became deeply involved, appointed a high-level special ambassador and was crucial to a now-shaky negotiated settlement _ as a sign of what the United States can do when it does get involved.

And when it doesn’t give in to its Africa Attention Deficit Disorder.

Until then, we wait on the new famine or genocide, and each time declare, “Never again.”

And then our attention wanders, until the next time. And in Africa, there always is a next time.

The real problem with our AADD is that the people who have it aren’t the ones who suffer from it.

(David Sarasohn is an associate editor at The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)

KRE/PH END SARASOHN