Over 23 million people across East Africa are facing critical shortages of food and water. Alun McDonald visits one of the areas worst affected.

I’m visiting Turkana with Dida and David Napereng, two local Oxfam staff, to see some of the areas affected by East Africa’s worst food crisis in a decade. Turkana, one of Kenya’s largest and driest districts, has suffered increasingly frequent droughts, and people here are feeling the impact of a third successive year of poor rains.

The impact of the drought seems to get worse with every mile we drive deeper into Turkana.

On a dried up riverbed near the village of Kaaleng, we come across Tegero Ekai, sat with her children and grandchildren around a shallow well, dug a few feet into the earth. Donkeys and camels share the small pool of murky water with humans. The chances of contamination are high - cases of cholera and diarrhoea have risen recently as clean water has become scarce - but the family has no other option.

Each morning Tegero and her family walk two hours each way to get to this meagre well. They collect 20 litres of water, which they haul back home in the blazing 40-degree Turkana heat, to sustain a family of seven. Just three litres per person has to last for drinking, washing, cooking, cleaning and keeping their animals alive. I think guiltily of all the water I use at home. Just my morning shower probably uses up more water than Tegero’s children get to use in a week.

“This water is not enough but it’s all we have,” Tegero tells me. “We’ve run out of food and I don’t know what to do. All we can do now is pray to God for the rains or help to come.” 

A few hours later, we were in sight of the Sudanese border, and joined by an armed escort - two local men with antique-looking G3 rifles. “It’s just to deter any bandits,” explains Dida. “With the drought making people desperate, security is getting worse.”

As the settlements get more remote, the number of guns increases. Men wander past, miles from anywhere, dressed in long dangly earrings, colourful sarong-style mini-skirts, and rifles slung across their shoulders.

In the village of Napak - a small gathering of huts strewn across a rocky hillside - security was the first thing on everyone’s mind.

“Last week we took our animals near Sudan, where there is some good pasture,” said Ereng Lominito, a local herder. “But we were attacked by the Toposa (a tribe from southern Sudan), and two of us were killed. They stole lots of cattle as well. Now we’ve had to move closer to home for safety, but here there is no good pasture.”

Robert Asurut, the village’s assistant chief, says such clashes have intensified as the drought has got worse: “The last time it rained here was six months ago, but that was for less than one day and it was not enough to make the rivers flow. There is no grazing land for the animals, so we have to take them further away to find pasture and some of the areas we have to go to are very insecure. Most of our cattle are now 70kms away, in or near Sudan. The Toposa are like us - they are pastoralists who depend on their livestock - but they have more guns. In areas like this there are no roads and no phones, so we cannot communicate with them, and when we both need the same pasture it often results in violence. Our men, women, children - all are being killed.”

While the men of the village go off with the cattle, the women and the elderly are left at home. Lochaa Eregae worries about the future of her community and her young sons “We don’t sleep at night, we are too worried. I am a widow - my husband was killed in this fighting - and there are lots more women like me. This is a poor place and there are no medical facilities here. If people are wounded, they die. We need a school and development here. I want my children to have a better life.” 

With night approaching, and the area particularly insecure after dark, we head back to the town of Kaikor to spend the night. On the way, we see a family on the side of the road, slaughtering one of its cows. “The animals are so weak,” the oldest men tells us. “We’ve walked 77 kms over the past three days and this cow just could not walk any further. It stopped here and wouldn’t move. The only option was to kill it here and try and sell the meat in Kaikor. Otherwise we lose everything.” 

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Tags: east africa, East Africa Food Crisis, Kenya

This entry was posted by Alun McDonald on October 14th, 2009 at 12:52 pm and is filed under 'Here & Now' climate change campaign, Climate change, General, News Blog, You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.