Forgotten land

The heat is sweltering, wrapping itself around me like a suffocating blanket where there is no relief. All I see for miles is a continuous wave of parched scrub trees bleached from the sun’s rays, rooted in burnt-colored earth. Set against a cerulean blue sky, the contrast is breathtaking.

I am in Africa – more specifically, southern Ethiopia in the Liban Zone – an area notorious for being left behind and forgotten.

Invited by Mohamed Aden, the founder and volunteer director of Global Poverty Action, an international grass-roots nongovernmental organization, I am here to witness the drought in the area due to the decrease of Deyr season, or short rains, and lack of water development. Aden, who is originally from the Liban Zone, established Global Poverty Action a few years ago to address the water issues in the border area of Ethiopia and Kenya. This area has one of the world’s highest mortality rates, with an average life expectancy of only 43 years, even without the compounding effects of drought.

Along with Aden and myself is Tom Bourque, principal engineer for TerraGraphics Environmental Engineering in Moscow, Idaho, who is volunteering his technical assistance. As we traverse the landscape, moving from village to village, we begin to see the devastating effects of the drought. Animal carcasses litter the ground, unable to make the trek for water and food. Livestock is the livelihood for the nomads and villagers in this area – for food, status and culture. It’s a way of life that is on the brink of vanishing.

In the village of Choqorsa, residents tell us that 10 people have recently died due to contaminated water in their hand-dug, 100-foot well.

The people we pass walk slowly, yet purposefully, loaded down with containers they will fill at a borehole or the Dawa River. Some will walk for a few hours. Others will walk days for this precious resource. The only emergency relief comes from a handful of tanker trucks that deliver 10 to 20 liters of water per family every three or four days.

As we arrive in another village, we are quickly ushered into a dome-shaped hut made of sticks and hides, the typical shelter used by villagers in the area. We sit on floor mats and are served a communal bowl of camel meat and chipati, a type of fried flat bread. In true African tradition, guests are served generously and joyously, and I eat heartily in order to avoid insulting my hosts. However, I cannot help but realize that I am taking the families’ meal for the day, but I also know that they would not have it any other way.

“Even this is enough,” a village elder says to us. “Coming here to know our problems and being here with us – even if nothing else happens, we are happy with that.”

But this is not enough, I think. The drought is already being called the worst in decades by United Nations officials, and forecasters are suggesting that the April rains will also be poor. The number of families needing assistance will most likely grow in the coming months and even now the local, national and international aid is far from sufficient.

There was four times more water for each African 50 years ago than there is today, and drinking water is increasingly scarce almost everywhere, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Fortune magazine cites water as the next great business opportunity, a resource that “promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th.”

“You see someone who is completely dehydrated, a child dying – they are skin and bone and everything sticks together. This is totally unacceptable,” says Aden. “Who has an interest in protecting them?”

In one of the poorest countries in Africa, Ethiopia’s resources are stretched thin, especially in the Liban Zone. Nearly 45 percent of the Ethiopian population lives on the equivalent of one U.S. dollar a day, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. NGOs and aid-distribution rarely reach the villages in the Liban Zone, and when it does, it is usually inconsistent and misguided.

“Most NGOs come into this region without consulting the communities or local authorities and they build something whether it is needed or not,” says Yaqub Hassan Ibrahim, the province comissioner of the Liban Zone. “One NGO built a school building in the middle of nowhere where water doesn’t exist.”

Ibrahim is quick to point out that he needs and appreciates every person who comes into the area to help, and his vision is to help his people ultimately become self-sustaining without having to rely on handouts. That’s why he wants to work with NGOs in order to ensure their projects are relevant and successful.

Eventually we arrive at the site of Boji, an earthen-dam reservoir project that was started by an NGO about five years ago and was never finished. Aden’s goal is to finish it by instituting a food-for-work program to feed and teach skills to the local population.

“I think I know what the people’s problems are, but for communication purposes and for them to have a sense of ownership, they have to be part of the effort,” Aden says. “I still ask everyone what they need help with, and there are a lot of needs, but the top priority is always water.”

The nearby village awakens with activity upon our arrival. We all stare at the eroding dam as Bourque does his assessment. Since heavy equipment is very expensive and hard to come by in Ethiopia, manpower will be essential. Aden asks a village elder how many people he could get to work on the dam. The elder tells him easily 1,000.

“We could have them move the dirt using shovels and wheelbarrows, and find a bulldozer to finish it,” says Borrque. “It’s a primitive approach – the same way the pyramids were built – a lot of people, hard work and hand tools.”

With more than 30 projects identified and assessed, of which six are top priority, it now comes down to Global Poverty Action securing enough funding to ensure their completion. In the meantime, Aden, on behalf of Global Poverty Action, has sponsored additional tanker trucks to distribute emergency water relief in the continued absence of rainfall.

Some climate experts have linked weather-altering greenhouses gases emitted from industrialized nations to East Africa’s severe droughts and “desertification.” While I continue to struggle with knowing the bounds of our responsibility in a world that has become completely unbalanced, I need to remember that for as futile as it seems at times, even in the smallest personal exchange of helping someone in need, we are salvaging our humanity – and that gives me hope.