THE sandy track through Kenya\u2019s empty north is silent. Nothing stirs in the midday heat. Then a Nissan truck appears, carrying a human cargo across the bumps and ruts of the B8 towards the Somali border, and the road comes to life.<\/p>\n
Tiny figures emerge from the bush, barely able to carry the old vegetable oil bottles that their mothers have entrusted to them. Women wrapped in bright cloths and wearing headscarves leave the shade of the acacia trees along the verge.<\/p>\n
The truck shudders to a halt and a 100-litre barrel of water is retrieved from beneath the passengers crammed aboard.<\/p>\n
With a minimum of greeting, the vegetable oil containers and jerry cans are filled and the truck is on its way again.<\/p>\n
Fetching water is women\u2019s work in this part of the world. But in parched northern Kenya \u2014 where a two-year drought is threatening to plunge the country into famine and change for ever an age-old pastoral way of life \u2014 fetching water means begging at the side of the road.<\/p>\n
Bishara Muhammad, 40, hefts a half-filled bottle on to her hip. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing to eat,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe cows are finished, the goats are finished. We have no work, nothing. Even the camels are finished which means there can be little chance for us. Our only hope is the road.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her family\u2019s 50 camels have been reduced to two. All the cattle are dead. Only a handful of goats survive.<\/p>\n
Her husband and male relatives have led the hardiest animals over the border into Somalia in search of pasture. The women and children are left to fend for themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur biggest worry is the children, getting enough maize for them,\u201d Bishara says.<\/p>\n
Around her, the other women and the stick-thin children slip silently away to wait in the shadows for the next truck.<\/p>\n
The story is the same all along the track from Wajir to El Wak, a stone\u2019s throw from Somalia. It cuts through a dusty land, where only termite mounds and leafless acacias grow. This is the epicentre of the drought in Kenya. About 3.5 million people need food aid to survive the year.<\/p>\n
The aid agency M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res has determined that 20 per cent of children around El Wak are malnourished \u2014 well above the 15 per cent emergency threshold.<\/p>\n
Across the Horn of Africa about 11.5 million people are at risk of starvation, according to the World Food Programme (WFP) of the UN. Five successive rains have failed, making this Kenya\u2019s worst drought since independence, and the start of the March-to-May rainy season has made no impression. Aid agencies say that death rates will soar if the rains fail again.<\/p>\n
So far the WFP has raised only $50 million (\u00a329 million) of the $225 million that it says it needs to feed Kenya this year, and it says that it will run out of some essential foodstuffs, such as vegetable oil and pulses, by the end of the month. People living near the road to El Wak are getting used to the aid convoys travelling from the tropical south into the dry northeast. The trucks travel with armed escorts for protection against Somali bandits.<\/p>\n
For centuries the people here have eked out a life as pastoralists, nomadic herders who follow their animals for hundreds of miles from waterhole to pasture. Aid agencies struggle to keep track of a mobile population that roams through Kenya and into Somalia.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a constant problem with trying to move the food to the right places,\u201d Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the WFP in Nairobi, says.<\/p>\n
It is also difficult to get food through northern Kenya to Somalia because of poor roads. \u201cWe have had trucks go missing for more than a week,\u201d Mr Smerdon says.<\/p>\n
The last stretch of road before El Wak is the worst. The hard dirt road becomes sand, sending 4x4s slipping one way then the other. Here you can smell the villages before you see them. A thick, sweet stench, like a rubbish dump, hangs in the air ahead of Gode. The carcasses of hundreds of cows, donkeys and goats lie in unnatural poses, rotting in the sun.<\/p>\n
Some are fresh, their hides still brown or white. A donkey lies with his head twisted, chest heaving. Others are little more than a pile of bleached bones crumbling into the sand.<\/p>\n
Gode is home to hundreds of \u201cdropouts\u201d, as they have become known, herders whose animals have died, forcing them to stay in one place.<\/p>\n
Ibrahim Abdi Amoy, 50, arrived here with the youngest of his ten children last month. He still carries the gnarled wooden stick that marks him out as a man of influence. But the 45 camels and 50 cows that marked him out as a man of means are dead.<\/p>\n
He says: \u201cOne time I was wealthy, but now . . .\u201d He picks thoughtfully at his thin beard and looks around at the handful of surviving goats. He walked for three days to reach the relative safety of Gode, close to a borehole.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe there will be rain from Allah but, for now, maybe the NGOs will help us here with food and water,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
One day he hopes to return to the lifestyle of his ancestors. \u201cI don\u2019t like to stay here in one place. I didn\u2019t choose this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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