From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

Andrew Purvis, who reported a good chunk of this week's cover package on Somalia, may have been destined for his assignment in Africa. When he was a boy, his paternal grandfather, a chemical-company executive, filled his head with great tales about his work and travels throughout the dark continent in the 1920s, while his maternal grandmother, who lived in South Africa, filled his mailbox with wooden spears, shields, even plastic Zulu dolls. When Purvis turned 21, he started out on a year of thumbing across Africa, riding mostly on transport trucks and camping out alone or staying with Peace Corps volunteers. "Back then I made a point of avoiding trouble spots," says Purvis, now 34, who began his tour in Africa for TIME last summer. "These days, I seem to find trouble everywhere."

Case in point: Monrovia, Liberia, where Purvis arrived a month ago on a chartered flight just after rebels started shelling the airport runway to impede Nigerian troops. He spent a scary night holed up in a dilapidated beachfront hotel, he says, "listening to artillery fire mingled with the sound of crashing waves as I filed a story on a laptop computer." On his way out the next day, three Liberian "security" officials detained Purvis in a small room at the airport and shook him down for a $60 bribe. It was pay or stay. "They each got $20, which was big money to them," he says.

An inveterate hitchhiker, the Canadian-born Purvis had trekked his way across North America five times by the age of 20. He studied science at Middlebury College and journalism at Columbia University and, before joining TIME in 1989, enjoyed stints at both a daily newspaper and a physician's journal. But even his medical background couldn't prepare Purvis for the human suffering and starvation he has witnessed in Somalia. "After my first visit, in August, I didn't feel like eating for days," he recalls. "I had never seen someone die before, and there I watched several die. One boy wept over his last brother's body right in the middle of a busy feeding center, and nobody stopped to notice." Well, almost nobody.