I can't remember the first time I saw you. It was a glimpse of your legs, slim and dangling from your mother's arms.
The vultures were there as she carried you up the four concrete steps to the verandah porch of the children's ward, your mother picking her way between the other women eating their rice from scratched tin bowls.
They were always there: the women on the porch and the vultures on the roof - four or five of them hanging around like the stragglers at the end of the football match - up to no good. It's not that the dead children are tossed out on to the dusty forecourt of the hospital - nothing as crass as that - but somehow in a country where one in three children don't make it to the age of five, it seemed like a logical place for a vulture to hang out.
Zinder Hospital is one of two in Niger, a great swathe of African desert that the British and French decided would be a country when they carved up Africa between them. The carve-up didn't go well for Niger, a desert and a few scrubby fields of maize. In the 1970s they discovered uranium, a nice deposit, at a time when the bankers of the West were throwing money at Africa, raking in the interest and not asking too many questions about what would happen if the price of uranium fell and Niger went bust.
Now its debts are so big and heavy that on days like this, when the temperature is over 100F and the bad birds bake on the roof, it seems like the whole place is dying with you, Zenibou.
The corridors between your ward leads from one airless room to another. This month it is malaria: next month the killer will be the measles. The mothers are on the floor with the chipped bowls trying to spoon beige, sticky rice between small flaccid lips.
Across the city in the medical college your Prime Minister is addressing an economic conference. In the front row is the man from the World Bank, occasionally dabbing his sweating upper lip with a white cotton handkerchief and tapping away on his calculator.
The sums go like this: if your country is to get debt relief, they have to prove that they can privatise/rationalise/economise (as they say in IMF-speak) and while they're doing it, pay back £22 million a year; more money than your government is allowed to spend on the health and education of everyone in your country. Then, in the year 2002, when you should have been 10, then they will consider debt relief.
By then Oxfam estimates that half-a-million children will have died in your country, all just as small, black and irrelevant as you, Zenibou.
Your mother has a vacant bewildered look on her face. She brought your brother here two years ago, to watch him die of malaria when £2.50 worth of medicine might have saved his life. When the doctor finally arrives, he tells her that she must find the same money to pay for two glucose drips and some medicine to save you - not much, about £2.50 (same as your brother) - so we give your mother a fiver and feel OK about ourselves: the rich whites on assignment buy your cheap little life and leave to chase our own story in the bush.
We drive for hours. It's not beautiful, your country, too dry and hard. A family of giraffes oblige us with an early-morning gallop across the road and we listen to Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl on the jeep radio.
In the village, we have come to see another girl. She's 13 - not much older than you - but she has a headline face. She is a rare survivor of Noma, also known as the grazer, a mysterious disease that eats the face of children, last seen in Europe in the Nazi concentration camps. The grazer will kill 140,000 children this year in countries like yours where governments are too broke and too crippled by debt to help children fight back with a £2 mouthwash that might banish the grazer.
But as the man from the World Bank with the white handkerchief explained, this is a time for tough medicine, not mouthwash.
It came first as a small black spot. Her father thought it was an abscess and treated it with the leaves of the lemon tree. He wasn't to know. He never heard of the grazer or its African name, Noma.
In Niger there is no war, famine or pestilence, but the grazer is kept supplied with children by the starvation diets and a collapse of the health system caused by the pressure of international debt on a country's finances. In Niger, the poorest country in the world, they spent three times more money paying off the international debt than on health and education.
No choice. No repayments means no more loans. No more loans means total collapse.
When we get back three days later to Zinder Hospital, it is just before noon and you are lying on a bed under the window. I notice the white dust blown in on your black curly hair from the scorching wind outside. Your mother is as undemanding as ever, sitting below the broken shutters on your white metal bed.
I didn't stay to see you die, to wonder what it might be like to sit on the edge of a bed and watch my own son die because someone in New York was structurally adjusting.
When I came back an hour later your mother had already carried your body to the same graveyard where she had buried your brother, sneaking out in case the doctor came back to charge her for your deathbed.
THE Global Campaign to cancel the unpayable debts of the Third World is run from a crowded office near London's Waterloo Station. They call themselves Jubilee 2000 based on the biblical jubilee that called for the forgiveness of unpayable debts every 49 years.
For the last year, the organisation run by Ann Pettifor, a former trade union official and Labour Party activist, has been gathering a momentum that is turning the campaign into a champion of the most pressing human rights issue of our generation, debt relief.
The Jubilee campaign is being run in 40 countries and has signatures from 120 countries. In June they aim to present the biggest petition in human history - 22 million signatories - to the Group of 8, the most powerful countries in the world gathering for the first time to discuss seriously the issue of debt relief, a subject in the words of Victor Hugo which has "no greater power on Earth than an idea whose time is come."
Jubilee's argument is that the millennium should be celebrated not by domes and dances but by the Western governments cancelling the $100 billion worth of debts owed to the Third World. Success, they say, will free the world's poor from economic slavery.
The architect was the Pope, who had the idea reading from the book of Leviticus which says that no man must insist on collecting debts from another if it means taking the clothes from his back or the food from the mouths of his children.
In the past two years, the focus of the Jubilee 2000 campaign has been the group of G7, the countries that tell the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund which other countries to bail out, and which not.
The US, once opposed to debt relief, has called for the cancellation of debts. Germany, under Dr Helmut Kohl, was reluctant to contemplate debt relief, but the arrival of Gerhard Schroder has seen the country lining up with the British government in calling for relief. Even the Japanese, who have a clause in their constitution forbidding the writing off of foreign debts, have indicated privately that they will go along with the initiative.
"Expect to see radical changes in the way the IMF deal with the debt programme by next October," said the British Chancellor, Gordon Brown, when he was interviewed on Thursday. Mr Brown, the son of a Presbyterian minister who died at the end of last year after spending a lifetime working against poverty in Glasgow and in the Third World, is perhaps the inspiration that may have led his son to proclaim at a speech in St Paul's Cathedral in London on March 7th that debt relief is "the great moral issue of our day and this decade".
He said: "When you know that 30,000 children are dying every day unnecessarily from avoidable diseases, then you realise that is an impulse to action, and if we don't make some progress in the year when people are focusing on a new millennium then that would be a terrible tragedy."
At the same time he announced that Britain was calling for $50 billion to be wiped off the debt of the world's poorest countries. President Clinton waited a week and then came forward with a proposal for the world's most powerful countries and the IMF and the World Bank to spend $100 million doing the same thing. But Jubilee 2000, while admitting progress, are relentlessly critical of the size of the relief being promised.
"What's going on is a beauty contest within the G7 in which they are vying to please the judges who are the constituents and the voters. What we believe needs to be changed is the bone structure. Yes, the US proposals are good news, but in real terms when they send out a glorious press release talking about $300 billion, they are being hypocritical because they are talking about the cost of writing off debts that they have already decided to write off anyway," said Ms Pettifor.
"The good thing is that now this beauty contest is going on. Three years ago, you couldn't get any president or prime minister to even talk about this. It was all discussed behind the walls of the IMF and the World Bank. Now it's out in the open," she said.
The equation that Jubilee 2000 puts forward is simple. What impoverished African countries are forced to spend in paying back their debts is depriving their next generation of children of medicine to keep them alive, schools to educate them and any chance of future economic growth.
"Unless we want a third millennium marked by resentment, violence, fanaticism and despotism, there is a growing consensus that the debt must be wiped out," says the author Salmon Rushdie, another of the campaign's supporters. The statistics are startling and deeply disturbing.
The World Bank admits that for every £1 spent on aid to the Third World, £9 is paid by those same countries to service their debts. Live Aid raised $200 million for Africa, the same amount, according to World Bank figures, that Africa pays out in debt repayments every week.
The United Nations Human Development Report 1997 estimates that if the debt were cancelled now in 20 of the world's poorest countries, the lives of two million children - children just like Zenibou - could be saved by the end of this millennium.
Maggie O'Kane was in Niger making a tele- vision documentary on the problems caused by repaying debt. The programme, The Face of Debt, will be shown at 8 p.m. tomorrow on Channel 4
