Bob Geldof sat uncomfortably in a vast field of igneous rocks scattered apparently at random among the sere grass.

But the rocks had been placed deliberately on the volcanic soil of the great plateau which had been lifted by magma from the earth's mantle millions of years ago to form the mountains which are the roof of Africa.

Each stone marked a communal grave in which between eight and 20 people were buried.

Tens of thousands of children, women and mainly elderly men were interred here in the fields of Korem when famine swept the desiccated Ethiopian highlands in 1984/5.

Around a million are said to have died. A sizeable number of them perished here on the great plain where stood the camp of 300,000 people who had fled their homes, days and weeks walk away in the remote mountain fastness.

They had come to Korem in the hope of finding food. But many found nothing except a place to sit in slow silent eye-glazed apathy as they waited to die.

Twenty five years ago I had been in that terrible camp and watched the tardy response of the international community arrive too late to save so many individuals.

It was around the same time that Bob Geldof had first come to Korem a few weeks after he galvanised the pop world to make the Band Aid record which was to go on to become the biggest fundraising effort in human history. €110m was given by the public for the stricken people of Africa.

Last week he returned.

And in the very place where so many people had died, he came face-to-face for the first time with some of the survivors.

SUB-HUMAN

"What I remember of the people was their immense dignity in the face of everything," he told them.

They smiled wanly, and thanked him, but it was not how the victims remembered it. A quarter of a century on they told him how it really was.

"It is a challenge to the imagination," said Gebremedhin Alemu, now aged 60, who had walked 100km with his wife and six children in search of food aid which took two years to materialise.

"We were reduced to a sub-human situation. When someone died, we went to bury him, and by the time we came back someone else had died."

"People were buried like animals," said Haile Melicot, now 50. "There was no system. No honour. People were just put into mass graves without anyone knowing who had been buried where.

"We were so weak that the aid agencies had to pay people to carry the bodies from the camp up here to the burial place."

"Our respect for you, our brother in hard times, is boundless," Gebremedhin told Geldof. "At a time when our dignity was questioned, you came and paid for people with energy to bury our dead."

This was not what Geldof had expected. But the wave of gratitude, for whatever the perceived priorities of the one-time famine victims was overwhelming and humbling.

"We have just come back to pay our respects," the singer told the men.

"We want you to pass on our thanks to the brothers and sisters outside Ethiopia who helped us," said Alana Abraham, 52, who had arrived at Korem with three brothers and was the only one of his family to survive. "Is there anything else we could do for you?" asked Geldof.

In reply the men told him of their lives since, of years of good harvests, of the economic booming of the little town, of plenty and prosperity.

"One farmer even has a minibus," said Alana Abraham in total awe.

But there was one thing they lacked. They would like a fence around the mass grave areas -- both the Christian and the Muslim one -- to stop animals from trampling on the dignity of the dead.

Band Aid would build one, Geldof said, from the royalties which still, 25 years on, come trickling in. The joy of the survivors took him by surprise.

They shrieked their pleasure, hugged the Irishman and turned around to share the good news with the rest of the crowd.

"If we lose our sense of shared humanity," said Geldof quietly, as he walked away to the church at the other side of the graveyard, "something withers inside us"

There are those who have said that Band Aid, and everything that sprang from it, was a waste of time.

More than two decades on and millions of people in Ethiopia and across East Africa are again facing severe food and water shortages after three years of poor rains.

cereal

The Ethiopian government last month appealed to the international community for 159,000 tons of food aid to feed 6.2 million people this year.

The World Food Programme says 14 million will need feeding -- and warns that the rich world is once again dragging its feet.

Its stocks are so low it has cut rations from 15 kilos of cereal per person per month to just 10. For those on the edge that means just two bowls of porridge a day instead of three.

The higher estimates made by the aid community area causing tensions with the Ethiopian government, as Geldof discovered when he began his week long return to the country by calling on the prime minister, Meles Zenawi, with whom the singer served on the Commission for Africa in 2005.

"Band Aid was needed in it's time. There's no question, you made a difference, which helped Africa," Meles told Geldof at the end of a two hour meeting.

"But when partnership becomes patronising that's bad for the father and the son will never grow up?

"Since the end of the last famine our overriding aim has been to make sure that there isn't another one. We've put in systems to alert us to that and mechanisms to reverse the problems that led to it. We've had several droughts but no famine over the past 18 years."

One of those schemes is a Safety Net programme which gives food to 7.6 million people in exchange for labour on public works for part of each year.

It saves them from having to sell their animals if their crops fail. But it allows the UN to add that seven million to the poorest six million and insist that 13 million of the country's 83 million people rely on foreign handouts to survive.

Meles is clearly irritated by this. "It conveys a message that Ethiopia is helpless which is only wrong; it is debilitating," he told Geldof. "They may be acting from good motives but you can't shock people with high figures every year; there's no need for it; it won't get any extra aid; and it creates the image of permanent crisis".

Nor was the Ethiopian leader pleased at the Western media's focus on the 25th anniversary of the famine and the suggestion from some that nothing has changed.

scales

"It is not just a lie. It is also disempowering," Meles said. "It implies that all the efforts in the meantime have been useless -- and that leads to paralysis rather than action. Many people are working their hearts out, and they have made real progress -- not enough perhaps -- but real progress."

So how much have things changed? Geldof embarked a week on a whistle-stop tour of projects which Band Aid has supported to find out.

The group of mothers sitting in the shade of a thorn tree in the village of Abinet, in Wollo, some 500km to the north of Addis Ababa, scarcely looked up as Geldof arrived.

They were studying a childcare picturebook whose messages were obvious enough even to those who could not read. A set of scales dangled from one of the branches from which each child in turn was suspended and weighed. Those whose graphs were below the norm were asked to walk up the road to the village clinic.

Inside, a 25-year-old villager Nazret Hilot was placing a measuring bracelet around the biceps of each child. Those who were below 11cm were placed on a supplementary feeding programme. Each was given a silver foil sachet with the words Plumpynut on it. It was an enriched peanut butter paste. There were just nine mothers inside the clinic.

"This is a real revolution in caring for children," Geldof was told by Ted Chaiban, the head of Unicef which is running the feeding programme with Band Aid funds.

"Instead of the families having to come to the health care it comes to them."

Then the Plumpynut does not need diluting like the old therapeutic foods did so there's no risk of contamination with dirty water, which happened in 1985. Nor is there the need for people to gather in squalid insanitary camps.

"And 200 tons of the food are made are being made here in Ethiopia every month. It's a huge advance to in dealing with severe and acute malnutrition."

The health worker, Nazret, had 6,854 people in her care, she explained. "I give instruction in sanitation, latrine construction, hand washing, correct use of anti-mosquito bednets, childbirth, family planning and HIV awareness," she said. "I have delivered 16 babies so far and not had to call for any assistance."

One of the requirements is that the kebele health workers are local, so they are known and trusted. "I had to be a graduate from the 10th grade and known to be of good habits," she told Geldof when she was asked how she got the job. The singer laughed.

"How many children do you all have -- or want," he asked. The reply was that they wanted families of between six and 10 children. That may change. "Use of family planning has risen from 7 pc in 2000 to 27ps today," said Nazret.

"All this is a big advance," the Unicef man told Geldof.

"There are still some issues to sort out about whether or not health workers are quick enough in recognising complications to refer them to the local hospital.

"But for 95pc of cases it's a major step forward. And that's important in a country where, even in the best years the 1 or 2pc of the population who are the poorest of the poor are going to be in some difficulties. A lot fewer children are dying."

bednets

It's a position which is reflected nationally. Though 35 pc of Ethiopian children are malnourished, and 40pc are stunted when they start school, the number who die below the age of five is down 40pc on what it was 15 years ago.

A shocking 381,000 children died from preventable causes last year but there is clear progress. Cases of malaria have been reduced by two-thirds since 2006, with the number of deaths halved thanks to the government spraying a million houses and the Global Fund and the Gates Foundation distributing a massive 20 million bednets.

"Who says aid doesn't work," spluttered Geldof as he leaves the clinic.

hnews@herald.ie