KENYA The road is asphalt paved and in good condition, built by the Chinese a few years ago. Cars rarely run in the scorching heat, who would have an issue from Garissa to Mado Gash, through a dry and uninhabited plain.
We stop on a long straight, about ten miles north of the village of Shimbirey. Nearly a hundred settlements of a nomadic family have appeared here along the long road during April and May. Courtyards delimited by thorn bushes, huts assembled from thin tree trunks and fabrics.
This is the village of Gutoy. An exclamation point that the livelihood and life of the nomads in the province of Garissa is on the verge of destruction.
Two lean meals a day
Courtesies with the village elders are exchanged in the shade of the leafless Damajaa tree. Then we get an invitation Halima Abdulahin home. She is 36 years old, a mother of ten and currently practically a single parent.
Halima talks about family life before 2020, before this constant, excruciating drought.
– We lived in the pastures of the plain, we always changed our place of residence every few months. We had 200 goats and 20 camels. There were dry periods at times, but we always found grazing somewhere and food for our animals.
– We ate corn porridge with sauce, we drank tea with milk. It was a good life, Halima Abdullahi recalls.
We are sitting in the family kitchen. The children around Halima listen calmly and quietly. They got a moment ago from the first two meals. Thick corn porridge and tea. Nothing else.
– Now that we’ve had breakfast, I can’t offer lunch. In the evening we eat corn porridge and tea again.
After a two-year drought, only 20 lean goats and five camels remain in the family.
Is there help along the long road?
Halima Abdulahi is 36 years old, but the gaze is the gaze of an old woman.
He has had to see his own business destroyed animal by animal. And now she sees how her own children are living in constant hunger and occasional help.
– We came here for the road when we couldn’t do anything else. Like everyone else in this village. We hope that the Kenyan government will help us. Or some organizations. We can no longer do it alone, Halima says seriously.
Rejecting one’s nomadic lifestyle is a last resort, but there is no patent solution either. Authorities have brought four water tanks to the village of Gutoy, most of which also contain water imported from the Tana River by tanker. But not always.
– Then we have to buy water from the village of Shimbirey, even if we can’t really afford it.
Halima Abdulahi also procures her meager food needs from the shop in the main village. Almost always in debt. And always at some point you have to touch the last property that the family has.
– I inform my husband that the merchant will no longer give credit. Then he sells a goat or two. For we will survive a few weeks ahead again.
A village for women, children and the elderly
On the outskirts of Gutoy’s courtyards, there are also goat enclosures delimited by thorn bushes, the ground surface of which is covered with goat bogs throughout. But no goat appears anywhere. And not adult men.
– The men have taken the animals that the families still have left and set off tens or hundreds of miles away to look for pasture. There has been some rain in the southern part of Garissa County, and almost all the men and animals are now there, says a PGI NGO project worker Mohamed Mohamud.
Only women, children and the elderly have been left here by the roadside, waiting for potential helpers. Mohamed Mohamud’s Pastoral Girls Initiative (PGI) has been working for years to support nomadic families.
– We help more than a thousand low-income families in the village area of Shimbirey with monthly remittances. We give about half of what families need for their basic livelihood, the other half they have to get somewhere else, Mohamed Mohamud explains.
Remittances have been identified as the most effective way to help poor families, he said. It gives the person being helped their own decision-making and self-respect.
– Some families need cornmeal, another cooking utensils or money for school fees.
– If we only brought food aid here, like rice sacks, it would suit someone’s needs. But others would have to trade in relief food to get what they need.
Another good aspect of remittances is that they support the local economy. If rice or cornmeal were brought into the area, it would be out of the income of local traders and thus the well-being of the village.
There is not enough financial help for everyone
When Mohamed Mohamud’s SUV descends from a long road into the bushes of the village of Gutoy, it inspires hope in people. Would this now be the visit that will bring help to the villagers? Mohamed will be disappointed.
– We don’t have any activities here yet. The whole village didn’t even exist yet in early April, we can’t respond to the need for help so quickly.
PGI receives funding from the European Union, Oxfam and the Kenyan ASAL Humanitarian Network. But there is far too little money in relation to need, as in the drought-stricken East Africa.
– Even in the village of Shimibirey, we will not be able to help families for more than two months, then the current funding has been used up, Mohamed Mohamud says.
Dad came, after two months
We photograph Halima Abdulah’s family in the yard, and at some point a smiling man also appears in the yard. When I ask who he is, our interpreter says it’s the father of the family, Mohamed Osman40.
He had last visited his family two months earlier, and is no longer staying until one night. A flock of goats is just over fifty kilometers away near a village called Dujis.
– Our oldest girl is there alone and watching the goats, that’s why I can’t be away for long, Mohamed Osman says.
His only skill is herding goats and camels. As the goat herd dwindles, it is imperative to consider other options.
– If this drought just continues, we will soon have no goats or camels. I thought I could start burning charcoal. It requires no tools other than a jungle knife. There is enough wood, and I have the energy to work.
Ten goats from a daughter
One way to survive for nomadic families is to marry girls. In the Kenyan tradition, the groom’s parents pay dowry to the bride’s family. Among the shepherds of Garissa, it usually means ten goats or five camels.
16-year-old daughter of Halima Abdulah and Mohamed Osman Deman Mohamed married in April – a neighbor 24 years older than himself.
– We got ten goats, but they’re no longer alive. The drought took them too, says Halima Abdulahi.
Of Halim and Mohammed’s ten children, only two have attended school, even up to the second and third grades. It has been difficult to combine schooling with a nomadic lifestyle, as the family has always changed residence every few months.
There is a government free primary school in the village of Shimberey, about ten miles from Gutoy.
– Now we would like our children to go to school, but it is difficult when the money does not even want to have enough food. School is free, but we should be able to afford school uniforms and books. And children wouldn’t be able to walk 20 miles a day hungry, Mohamed Osman says.
The worst rainy season in 70 years
For four consecutive rainy years in East Africa. There has been no rain or much lower than normal rainfall. The “long rainy season” of the early part of the year was the worst in 70 years.
Now, according to the calendar, the families of Gutoy village have a dry season ahead of them. In the coming months, the situation for both humans and animals is expected to deteriorate further.
Climate scientists warn that the dipole phenomenon in La Nina in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean will also threaten the next rainy season beginning in October. That would be the fifth consecutive failed rainy season – an unprecedented phenomenon throughout known weather history.
In Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, the number of people suffering from food insecurity is estimated to rise to a total of 20 million this year. Hundreds of thousands of people are already threatened by outright famine.
“We don’t know what that climate change is”
Mohamed Osman and Halima Abdullahi expect rain and hope for help from the Kenyan government and NGOs.
They are already feeling the effects of the global food crisis in their own lives. The price per kilo of cornmeal has risen this year in shops in the nearby village of Shimberey from 60 shillings to 100 shillings.
Meteorologists are quite certain that the exceptional drought in the Horn of Africa, which has been going on for two years now, is the result of climate change.
Mohamed and Halimak have also heard about climate change.
– But we don’t know what it is. We only know this drought.
‘s African correspondent Pasi Toivonen also shares content about his daily life and work on Instagram @toivonenpasi.