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damage. “I thought, how strange to hear those same three things. But it was also a moment of glory for me, because just then a big UNICEF truck came by full of food and medicine.” 78
    Be it famine in Ethiopia, civil war in El Salvador, or ethnic massacre in the Sudan, “I saw but one glaring truth: These are not natural disasters but manmade tragedies for which there is only one manmade solution—peace.” Just in the past month of this most brutal civil war, “20,000 starving orphan boys have fled from the Sudan into Ethiopia,” she said. “Many of them never make it. They either die of hunger on the way [or] drown in the river which divides the Sudan from Ethiopia.” 79
    In the Sudan, with Rob’s help, she would again employ her “summit” skills, as Wolders relates:
    â€œThere was a meeting arranged for Audrey, me and Sadique, the man in power, who didn’t usually deal with UN people. But he wanted to see Audrey, and he was gracious to her. It was our intention to go to the refugee camp in El Mereim, where 16,000 people had died. Sadique sent his minister of health along with us, and we got to an area just on the border with the Christian south. From there we were supposed to go with the Moslem minister of health into rebel country, the city of Juba, which was totally surrounded by government troops. But they said they couldn’t guarantee safety and they made us go back to Khartoum.
    â€œIt was very frustrating. We said we were willing to take a chance, but the UN officials overruled us. So rather than go home with our tail between our legs, we got a Red Cross plane to fly us from Khartoum to Nairobi—a night flight over Uganda—and then they sent one of rebel leaders to Kenya to fly us back into Sudan. It illustrated Audrey’s determination. Without that corps of journalists along, we could speak our minds more bluntly to the leaders there, and we did. It produced some results.
    â€œSome places we went to over the years were run-of-mill, but this was one of the truly exotic places we’d heard about as children—Khartoum. We smuggled in a bottle of scotch, by the way, since it was a Moslem country.”
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    SOMETIMES it got to her. “If everybody just decided to do something about it, we wouldn’t be here talking about it,” she said in frustration. She had to reinvent the wheel constantly—as at the Canberra Press Club, where the question was, “What do you really do for UNICEF?”
    â€œMy task is to inform, to create awareness of the needs of children,” she replied politely, as if for the first time. “It would be nice to be an expert on education, economics, politics, religions, traditions and cultures. I’m none of those. But I am a mother and will travel.” 80 UNICEF had only 2,000 paid employees, she said. It consisted mostly of volunteers, such as herself. “I fly around the world on tickets donated by airlines, stay in hotels free of charge—in great luxury, I might add.”
    It was a rueful inside joke at UNICEF that people so often congratulated her for her work with UNESCO. Over and over, she explained the difference between the two organizations, chiefly that “UNICEF has no permanent allocation. We get no funds from the UN. By definition, we are a fund, not an agency.” 81
    Hepburn provided a phenomenal boost to the fund-raising campaigns of the national UNICEF committees everywhere. Also, every year between 1988 and 1992, she hosted with Roger Moore the Danny Kaye International Children’s Special in Holland, which was broadcast worldwide and drew enormous donations.
    â€œJim Grant told me they got $1 million in contributions every time she made an appeal on Barbara Walters or wherever,” says John Isaac. “She made such a huge impression.”
    Isaac and Hepburn had become important figures in each other’s lives by then. After their