Food is coming, but how do you get water to the people of Ethiopia?

Hiis lies in a quiet corner of the feeding centre and stares out through wide glazed eyes sunk in her skeletal face. She is one year old but it is impossible to tell - her skin is wrinkled and she wheezes furiously for breath.

Hiis lies in a quiet corner of the feeding centre and stares out through wide glazed eyes sunk in her skeletal face. She is one year old but it is impossible to tell - her skin is wrinkled and she wheezes furiously for breath.

The doctor comes along and gently squeezes a milky fluid through the drip taped to her tiny nose. "This one is very serious. She is dehydrated, has diarrhoea and lost all immunity. She won't last long." It is the image the world associates only too well with this part of the world. Ethiopia has had two famines in the past 16 years and is on the brink of a third.

Hiis arrived two days ago with her parents at the feeding centre in Gode, east Ethiopia, which is in the middle of the worst-hit region. Her brother Mohamed, six, died on the way and was buried at the roadside.

She is one of the most critical cases in this rough thatched building that holds 250 children and is staffed by a local agency, the Ogaden Welfare Society. Others victims have swollen bellies and sores on their heads but they can sit up on their mothers' laps and take rations every four hours. Many are malnourished but few are as close to death as Hiis. They are the children Western agencies are scrambling to save as Ethiopia slides from drought towards chronic famine.

The drought, one of the severest in generations, affects eight million people. Rains have failed for the fourth successive year in some regions. Wells have dried up, crops have perished and camels, the last milk source for dying children, are starting to die.

While pledges of food donations have been pouring into Ethiopia, where an estimated 800,000 tons are needed to stave off a catastrophic famine, delivery of fresh water has become the new priority. Two dozen children have died in Gode since the feeding centre opened five weeks ago; almost 300 have died in Danan, 70km to the north. Every mother tells the same story: wells going salty and drying up, the death of cattle and goats followed by a migration to other villages and the death of young children along the way, usually on the back of a donkey, which itself died later.

All life is expiring here in eastern Ethiopia because of the drought. Outside Gode dozens of half-skeletal cattle carcasses are heaped on the roadside while vulture-like marabou storks cluster near by and watch patiently. More than 90 per cent of the area's cattle and 70 per cent of its sheep have died.

A handful of camels are also sitting quietly under the scorching sun. They too are waiting to die, an aid worker, Edi Jama says. This is perhaps the worst news: the death of camels, which can survive for long periods without water, is a sure harbinger of chronic famine. "I've never seen anything like it in my lifetime, or in my father's," says Jama.

After overcoming fears about security in this bandit-prone region, Western aid workers are arriving in Gode. Much food has been pledged. Trucks have come along the treacherous road from the capital, Addis Ababa, and the first air delivery is due tomorrow,when the International Red Cross flies in thousands of tons of high-energy biscuits.

Food and medicine can be driven or flown in but water is a different story. Gode is one of the few towns with a river that has not dried up but engineers from Save the Children have found bacteria levels that went off the scale in the same water source that the hospital uses.

An estimated 14,000 people have struggled to Gode in the past two months. Some walked for as long as 10 days. Now 2,000 of the worst-affected children are being fed by the local workers with UN food.

Keh Ibrahim, who had six children, cradles her daughter, who is malnourished and struggling to stay awake. The family, with 200 others, set out for Gode last month. "First my cattle died, then my husband," she says. Two days into the journey her daughter Rukia, six, died; her son Abdullahi, seven, died on the donkey's saddle. She buried them at the roadside.