Over 23 million people across East Africa are facing critical shortages of food and water. Alun McDonald visits one of the areas worst affected. This article is posted as part of Blog Action Day on climate change.

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.

Across Turkana vast water pans are dug into the earth to store rainwater when it comes. Most of these reservoirs we’ve passed have been dry, but at last this morning, as we head towards the Ethiopian border, we find one half full.

“It rained a bit in February, and there is still some water from then,” says Ajikon Lonok, as she fills up a few jerry cans for her husband and five children. “But if it doesn’t rain in the next two months, I think here will also dry up. Even now, the water is getting dirty - it has been standing here for seven months, and donkeys also drink here. Some of my children have started to get diarrhoea from drinking it. But it’s the only source we have and we are desperate.”

In the windswept village of Kokoro, a few kilometres from Ethiopia, water is no longer such a problem. Earlier this year, Oxfam installed a solar-powered water pump to maximise use of one of the few resources Turkana has in abundance - sunlight.

Francis Eregae, a member of the village water association, says the new pump provides clean water to over 10,000 people in the surrounding area. “Before, we just used to have some shallow wells, and one pump run by a generator. But the generator used a lot of diesel, which was very expensive for us to run. It also broke down a lot, and spare parts are not available anywhere near here - sometimes they would take a month to arrive. The solar pump is much more efficient, cheaper and it’s better for the environment.”

Koroko may have a supply of water, but it has other concerns. “People here are struggling to find food. Every day our sheep and goats are dying because of a lack of pasture. Only the vultures get to eat,” Francis tells me.

Turkana is a remote and arid region and over time communities have developed ways of coping with periods of hunger. But the successive years of failed rains have undermined many of these traditional methods. Francis takes me to a cluster of trees on the edge of the village, which usually produce nutritious small berries for people to chew in times of drought. “But this year’s drought is different,” he says. “The trees have given up completely and there are not even any berries. I’ve never known this to happen before.”

In the village of Kanukurudio, the drought seems even more severe. Dida introduces me to a frail elderly woman named Muya, sat in the shade of a tree, too weak to move. Her arms and legs are barely more than bones. Dida worked with Muya in this village a few years ago and he’s shocked to see how ill this recently strong woman now looks. Her daughter and granddaughters who look after her are equally concerned about her deteriorating health.

Muya tells me she gets some relief food once a month, but that her body is too weak to digest maize any more. She gives the maize to the children in her family instead, while she survives on just a small cup of pulses and a few drops of vegetable oil a day. Her family try to help her, but she is getting visibly weaker by the day.

It’s the elderly in Kanukurudio who seem to be bearing the brunt of the crisis. “Some of my friends have died from starvation in the past two months,” an old man named Nadiko Lokamar whispers to me. He worries that the same fate could befall him and others. “We give priority for food to the young children, but there is not enough to go around and we elderly often have to go without.”

Part of the problem, say villagers here, is that the relief rations provided by the World Food Programme do not go to everyone. WFP says it is facing critical funding shortages and needs more money to expand and reach more people. But in the meantime, people go hungry. “In the Turkana culture, we share everything,” says Nadiko. “My wife is registered to receive food aid, but my brother and sister are not. But they are also hungry, so we share it with them. This means a month’s food ration actually only lasts two weeks.”

Like many people in Turkana, Nadiko’s livelihood is based around livestock, but the drought has wiped out most of his herd. Oxfam has been buying up some of the weakest goats and sheep here, ensuring people get a good price for animals that would otherwise be hard to sell and would soon die anyway. The animals are then slaughtered and the meat distributed to hungry families. We visit the distribution site - hundreds of women carve up meat on wooden tables as government health inspectors check the carcasses for disease. Old men sing as they wait to collect their meat - some say it’s the first they’ve eaten in weeks. It’s the closest thing to a bustling market I’ve seen on the trip so far. With food prices so high and livestock weak or dying, local markets see little activity.

Nadiko queues with some friends to receive his goat meat. Until recently, he says he owned nearly 40 sheep and goats. “Over 20 died of hunger, and I’ve now sold 10 more to Oxfam - otherwise they would all have died as well. This way I at least get some money for them. Now I have only four goats left, but they are already very weak. I really worry about the future.”

Find out more: East Africa Food Crisis

This blog was posted as part of Blog Action Day on climate change.

Tags: Blog Action Day, climate change, east africa, East Africa Food Crisis, Kenya

This entry was posted by Alun McDonald on October 15th, 2009 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Climate change, General, Humanitarian, 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.