The life and times of rick hodes

A memory Rick Hodes has from early in his career doesn’t arise often, but when it does, it returns in the same vivid detail.

It’s 1985, and he’s standing among hundreds of gaunt, emaciated people who have hardly eaten in weeks. Hours before, they were dirty, but now they’re clean, and their heads have been shaved. Some wear oversized blue jeans and T-shirts; others are in handsome tuxedos and slinky evening gowns. The irony of the clothing isn’t lost on them — they’re laughing about it, and Hodes is laughing with them.

At the time, he was a medical resident at Johns Hopkins University, spending his vacation volunteering in Ethiopia, where one of the 20th-century’s worst famines was raging. Tens of thousands were wandering the countryside in search of food, while a civil war fueled the chaos.

Starving people arrived at the camp where Hodes was stationed, and were divided by gender, cleaned in mass showers, and deloused. The staff gave them new outfits donated by Western relief organizations and burned what they’d arrived in.

This was his first trip to Ethiopia. Apart from that brief moment when the clothing’s irony trumped the suffering, the famine remains the most haunting thing Hodes has ever witnessed.

After a month, he returned to Baltimore, not sure he’d ever return.

CONTINUE READING a pdf of the piece that ran in Fall 2015 issue of Middlebury Magazine.