By David Snyder His thinning white hair dyed orange in the traditional local style, Aden Esse Kan stands amid the swirling dust clouds of eastern Ethiopia, eager to talk about the drought that now plagues this region. An elder in the village of Togo Wuchale, a dusty half hour drive from the town of Jijiga, ...
The land is barren, the animals are dead, the people are starving. This is one face of northern Kenya in July 2011. “The famine started last year,” says Ellela from the village of Lokitaung. “There were no rains last year or this year. We have had drought for two years. If there are no people ...
By David Snyder You are not expecting rain when you come to cover a drought. But that’s what I found when I stepped off of the plane here Sunday—and what I have seen each day since. Rain. Looking around at the green of the hillsides, you could easily be fooled about the real problems facing ...
By Eoghan Rice The Turkana district of northern Kenya is where human life began. The earliest known human remains have been found here and in the areas just north across the Ethiopian border. The fact that human life has been sustained here for hundreds of thousands of years points to a fertile land capable of ...
2011 is one of the worst droughts to hit East Africa and the Horn of Africa in living memory, including the east of Ethiopia. The local Caritas there is called the Hararghe Catholic Secretariat. It’s part of the national Caritas organisation (the Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat), and is supported by a number of Caritas members from ...
Caritas Internationalis Policy Director Martina Liebsch reports on a ministerial level meeting at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome about the drought in the Horn of Africa. The outgoing director of Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf had called the emergency meeting to address the food crisis in East Africa. The ...
By Laura Sheahen They’ve walked for days or weeks, and their shoes show it. Dusty and worn, the sandals of a little boy dangle in his hand as he wails in the centre of a refugee camp. Nearby, his mother rocks her sobbing baby. The family has made it to the camp, one of several ...
Caritas members are responding to a growing humanitarian crisis in East Africa and the Horn of Africa. The worst droughts in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia in 60 years have left at least 10 million people in need of aid. Half of those are children. Tanzania and the new state of South Sudan are experiencing serious ...
The rolling mountains in the distance are known locally as Louwa Le Ukinchu, or Cattle Mountains. For generations, people have travelled there to find water and pasture for their animals. But today, the streams that run down Cattle Mountains are dry. Most families in Isiolo, 300 kilometres north of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, are pastoralists: ...
Deadly hunger once again stalks Niger. It affects people like Abdoulai and his family in the dry, sandblasted village of Toudoun Jaka. The rain never came here last year; the land cracked and Abdoulai’s fields produced less than a single bag of millet, not enough for his children for a week.