The road between Nkisoro and Yaqbarsadi, two villages in Isiolo County, in the heart of Kenya, is a tomb.
Hundreds of animals, goats, cows and the occasional camel lie dead and decompose on the banks.
They succumbed to thirst and hunger due to lack of rain and grass in one of the worst droughts that the African country has experienced in recent decades.
With them perish the means of livelihood of the shepherds and their communities, who hardly have anything to put in their mouths.
"This means losing my life," says Roba Godana, 65, as he points with a cane at the stinking corpses, proof of his brokenness.
Since he set out on his journey south with his wife and his cattle in search of better land, he has lost 140 of his 430 head.
A fortune: at the usual price of 45 euros each, he could have obtained just over 6,000 euros.
And, due to the weakness and weakness of those who remain alive, these will not be his last casualties.
"I can no longer pay my children's school fees."
Father of six, three still in school (the others dropped out), he regrets that any disbursement, given his situation, “is too much”.
“This is extreme.
I have lived through other droughts, but this is the worst.”
PHOTO GALLERY
Living without drinking water and with only one meal a day
The arid and semi-arid lands of Kenya (53 million inhabitants) share a stamp and destiny.
The UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs warns that 3.5 million people are at risk due to lack of food.
“We are very poor.
Only 10% of the people here can afford to eat more than once a day,” estimates Omar Aga, 62, the oldest of the Yaqbarsadi villagers.
The extreme thinness of the neighbors corroborates his words: the cheekbones are angular in their faces, the eyes sink into their sockets, the gestures are tired.
“We had locusts in 2020, that led to a lack of grass.
The covid-19 impoverished the market and we were not selling.
Then the drought came again”, says the old man who has lost 300 of his 350 animals.
“We eat rice, potatoes, tea… And vegetables when we can afford it.
Getting milk is a challenge," says Halima Guyo, 33, one of the locals gathered next to the town's drinking water tank, whose extraction motor broke down due to overuse at the worst time, between October and November, the wet season in the it didn't rain a drop.
The Government declared the drought a national disaster in early September 2021, which meant increasing efforts to help affected households with the distribution of food and water, as well as the acquisition of their livestock, which are still alive but threatened with death. .
Half a year later, the president
Uhuru Kenyatta took stock of this relief intervention for 2.3 million Kenyans, for which he had released 16 million euros.
Some funds with which, according to what he stated, the Kenya Meat Commission – a public institution whose objective is to sell the products of local farmers – had bought 11,250 cows and 3,200 sheep and goats at that time.
Among other actions such as the transfer of cash to vulnerable families and the construction of new water tanks and wells.
Some 750,000 people need urgent help to avoid famine in Kenya, synonymous with mass deaths from starvation
At the end of November, a group of workers were already in Yaqbarsadi repairing the tank and building a second well to avoid disputes between humans and beasts that, until now, had shared a water source.
For its part, the NGO Action Against Hunger had just installed a new solar extraction system to save fuel and not overload the existing one.
And in those, the rain returned after three years, but there were no faces of joy or revelry in the place.
The brief storms barely managed to form some puddles and small lagoons.
Far from improving their health, these erratic rainfalls increase cases of diarrhea and other ailments among the population, especially among children, because desperate to quench their thirst, they collect this stagnant, dirty and unhealthy water for consumption in drums.
In this way, the women, in charge of the task of collecting water, save themselves kilometric walks to the few available and functional safe sources.
"We have had many deaths and illnesses due to lack of water," says Ali Happi, 43.
“Since we had a supply point, many people came and it ended up breaking.
It worked 24 hours a day, ”she recalls.
Animals dying of thirst and hunger in Isiolo County, central Kenya.
JULIAN RED
Despite efforts, since then the situation has only deteriorated in the Isiolo region.
"The expected rainfall between March and May seems to be failing," confirms Dancliff Mbura, responsible for Action Against Hunger programs in the area.
The official data it manages does not let up: the number of people in severe food insecurity increased from 107,200 in August 2021 to 120,000 in February 2022, while the total number of cases of acute malnutrition in children under five years of age rose from 16,757 to 17,861 during the same period.
“The last survey carried out by the county government two months ago registered a global acute malnutrition of 17.8%.
This reveals a worsening compared to the data from a year ago, when there was 16.7% of the population in such a circumstance”, notes Mbura.
In a similar trend, the levels of food security in the country as a whole have worsened since the beginning of 2021. The latest assessment by the Kenyan authorities, in February 2022, estimates that 3.5 million people suffer from severe food shortages;
they are 75% more than a year ago and, of them, some 750,000 need urgent help to avoid famine, synonymous with mass deaths from starvation.
International organizations warn that the situation is critical and there is a lack of funds to deal with it.
The UN World Food Program (WFP) has requested €38 million to meet the needs of the most severely affected communities in the north and east of the country over the next six months.
He has it hard.
Even before the war in Ukraine took this part of the world out of focus, previous appeals failed to raise the required funds.
Last February, donors barely contributed 4% of what this organization had requested for the Horn of Africa.
More information
Somalia is broken by the historic drought and the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Kenya, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia add up to 14 million hungry people, which could rise to 20 in summer, warns the WFP, if the conditions of drought and stagnation of humanitarian aid continue.
The agency needs 435 million euros to increase assistance in these countries in the next six months.
"The situation has been aggravated by the consequences of the conflict in Ukraine, with the cost of food and fuel rising to unprecedented levels," he describes in a statement.
“The price of a food basket has already risen, particularly in Ethiopia (66%) and Somalia (36%), which are heavily dependent on wheat from Black Sea basin countries, and import disruption threatens food security even more.
"In Africa, children are paying the highest price for crises they have not created: 5.5 million are threatened by acute malnutrition," warns UNICEF's regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa, Mohamed M. Fail.
“The situation of children and families in the Horn of Africa is serious.
They are desperate.
Millions of lives hang in the balance.
The needs are massive and urgent, and rapidly outstripping the funds available to respond.
We have to act now to prevent a catastrophe,” he cries.
No water for humans, beasts and the field
It doesn't rain in Kenya, but its overlapping crises compounded by climate change are the perfect storm for humanitarian disaster.
There is no water for the beasts, nor the people, nor the field.
The Climate Prediction Center for East Africa estimates that 1.4 million head of cattle perished last year from drought in just 15 of the 23 rainfed counties.
The delayed start of the rainy season from October to November 2021 also interrupted the typical planting season.
"The corn harvest throughout the country was between 50% and 65% lower than normal," warns ACAPS, an entity specializing in thematic studies on humanitarian crises.
As a result, the price of cereal increased between 5 and 35% last year.
Josephine Kericho, 25, lived by selling charcoal, which is prohibited in Kenya to curb deforestation.
She now grows onions, among other vegetables and cereals, but the rains are scarce and the size is small.
She earns an average of one dollar a day from her sale, with what she and her five children live on in a house made of adobe and sheet metal. JULIAN ROJAS
25-year-old Josephine Kericho's onions have also not grown as much as she expected.
In Nkisoro it has not rained enough.
The woman pulls a few from the ground to show their size.
The scrawny vegetables she grows are both her food and her source of income to support her five children.
For them, she might get a dollar a day.
“I also have cereal”, she extends her arm pointing in her direction with the bunch in her hand.
Her father is missing.
"Go around the country," she says.
Her poverty is extreme.
The family lives in an adobe and straw shack of no more than nine square meters, with no paved floor and a corrugated iron roof secured with stones.
In order not to sleep on the ground, she has spread out a raffia sack in the middle of the room.
They all go barefoot and her kitchen is three rocks outside where she also has a few chickens.
There is no access to water or sanitation.
And this is his new house, built thanks to the solidarity of the local church;
the previous one, even worse and located in another locality, collapsed and was reduced to a mountain of mud.
Rice with potatoes.
That's her daily menu.
Twice a week, she explains, she tries to introduce vegetables into her diet.
You can now.
The NGO Acción contra el Hambre has supported her to cultivate the land next to her house and acquire two goats (now three).
“Droughts are more severe.
I myself sold coal, which is not enough to live on.
And if we keep cutting down trees, there will be more droughts,” she reasons.
"Now if you sell firewood, they stop you."
She assures that her two eldest go to school, but she confesses that three or four days a week they don't go, because they have to take care of the little ones while she works.
When she was pregnant a couple of years ago, she was cared for by Mariam Nbithe, a community health volunteer.
Her shack is a long way from any of the 55 most basic health facilities in the county, and then mobility restrictions to contain the covid-19 pandemic were in place in the country.
But, when checking her health status, already in the last weeks of pregnancy, her neighbor referred her to the health center.
She had anemia.
“I saw that her feet were very swollen and she had a lot of pain.
She had to be checked out at the hospital.
And there they stabilized her.
Fortunately, in Isiolo they are testing universal access to healthcare”.
As a holder of one of the 90 Universal Care Cards in the area, care for Kericho was free.
“Otherwise, she would not have been able to pay for the services,” notes her caregiver.
Kericho gave birth in the hospital, but when she returned to her shack, her poverty was the same and there were two more mouths to fill: she had had twins.
Both fell into acute malnutrition and again Nbithe had to intervene: she gave him training in basic nutrition so that the little ones could recover.
“Before, if I didn't sell charcoal, I couldn't buy food and we didn't eat,” she explains.
“Now we do breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I can afford three meals a day,” she adds proudly.
The droopy eyelids, exhausted faces and sleepy movements of mother and children suggest that even that may not be enough, but her babies have recovered and are out of the danger zone.
This is evidenced by the tape to measure the arm circumference that alerts with colors of the degree of malnutrition of the children and that Kericho keeps among his few belongings.
"I would like to save and expand the house," he dreams.
The priority is to eat
In Isiolo, the mobile clinic of the Beyond Zero initiative – a name that refers to the goal of zero maternal deaths – visits 14 remote enclaves once a week.
Kakili is one of them and there the professionals have a structure of uralite where they can consult. JULIAN ROJAS
Like her, millions of Kenyans live too far from health facilities to prevent and treat ailments, now exacerbated by the health consequences of the drought.
In Isiolo, the mobile clinic of the Beyond Zero initiative – a name that refers to the goal of zero maternal deaths – sponsored by the former first lady of the county in 2013, visits 14 remote enclaves once a week.
In these clinics, with the help of the regional government, which supplies the medicines, and ACH, which supports the logistics of transporting health personnel, family planning, immunization, HIV prevention, and acute malnutrition monitoring services are provided.
“The impacts of the coronavirus and the drought have been combined.
What we do is not enough and health is not a priority for parents because they can only worry about finding what to eat.
For example, we warn them about the importance of washing their hands, but they don't even have water!” laments Fatuma Galgalo, head of one of these mobile clinics.
Today he is in Kakili, where the toilets consult the neighbors, who are arriving from the surroundings, mainly older people and mothers with small children.
All very thin.
One of the challenges, says Galgalo, is that most of his patients believe they have to have as many children as God wants.
That's why family planning care, whether it's giving women pills or the contraceptive injection, is done in complete privacy.
“None of them want others to know that they use contraceptive methods.”
During the pandemic, these types of services were paralyzed and there has been an increase in unwanted pregnancies, especially among adolescents, as well as neonatal deaths and home births, says the doctor.
“The pregnant women think that, since they are not sick, they do not have to go to the doctor.
So we inform them that they have to go to the hospital, at least to give birth.”
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