"El Nino has left us shocked in our hearts"
January 26, 1998
In eastern Kenya, they are used to praying for rain. This year they are praying it will stop.
At this time of the year the broad flat Tana River Valley should be baked brown, its streams sucked dry by a fierce sun, its great river reduced to a shadow of itself. This is a region that regularly receives government drought relief.
Ali Dulo wades through the chocloate water that swirls through the ruins of Rhoka, his home village. "This El Nino," he says, "has left us shocked in our hearts. We have never seen rains like this. We have always thought of rain as a blessing. Now when we hear thunder it makes us feel very bad."
"When I wake to the sound of rain, I sometimes fear that the water will cover the whole region," says Anglican minister the Reverend Japhet Komora Dhadho, "and I worry greatly for the people who are hungry and have lost their homes."
It has been raining since September, bringing chaos and devastation to many parts of Kenya, nowhere more so than along the Tana, the country's largest river. In December in some 70,000 people had to flee when the flooding overtook their homes. Livestock and first plantings of crops of the Pokomo people who cultivate the river banks were swept away. In a brief respite some planted again. The drenching rains should have stopped in December but, implacably, have kept on coming. "Now our fields are under several feet of water and mud," said Florentine Apiyo, of Laza, a stricken section of Hola town. "There is nothing we can plant. It is a mess. All our bananas, coconuts and mangoes have been washed away."
In normal times, the pastoralist Orma people who occupy the hinterland would be grazing their cattle along dry river beds. They too have fled to higher ground. They lost livestock - cattle and goats - carried away by the flood water, which brought many crocodiles and hippos to the district from upstream. Now the Ormas watch helplessly as their animals, used to dry conditions, go down with footrot, a disease that cripples them preventing them from grazing. Amid an improbably green landscape, the animals weaken and die of pneumonia or other diseases.
The Ormas, who depend on their livestock for milk and meat, wonder how long it is before they themselves will begin to starve. "We are very worried about our youth who have gone to the hinterland with the cattle," says headman Boru Dele. "Word is things are very bad for them. But we have no way to reach them and they have no way to reach us."
Though some people recall heavy flooding back in 1963, no-one in Kenya remembers such persistent rains. The ground is saturated so that at each downpour the water level creeps up. In places, the flooding has reached far inland isolating villages and even towns. Hola, the district headquarters, can be reached by small plane and helicopter, but vital roads that link it to Mombasa on the coast, and Nairobi to the west have been cut and are impassable.
Ali Dulo is from one of three villages north of Hola that have had to be completely abandoned, their 3,000 inhabitants fleeing to high points where they have set up impromptu camps. Though the people in this district live with seasonal flooding this is the first time they have had to take refuge in camps and now the camps - some 30 kilometres north of Hola - have been cut off, leaving the inhabitants without relief food or medical supplies. They have survived so far by fishing and foraging for food from surviving banana plants and mango trees, wading for great distances despite the danger of crocodiles and hippos. Some venture in frail dugout canoes across the fast moving river itself in search of food, risking destruction as whole trees are rolled and cartwheeled downstream. But now the food supplies are exhausted and real hunger is imminent.
Even in the town of Hola itself there are some people with no food. Nadina Ardi is one of 500 families in the town who had to abandon their river-bank homes. She and her three children are now living in a single rented room. She had no food to give her children. Who would give her food that day?
"God," was her reply.
Because the roads are breached people have not been able to send what fruit survived the flood to their usual markets in Mombassa and Nairobi. The region is the country's third largest beef resource but there is no way to get the animals to the points of sale. Money - never plentiful - is now very scarce. Many children have failed to register for the new school term. Many schools are flooded but few parents have the money to pay the fees anyway.
In Hola food is either unobtainable or the prices have rocketed. Before supplies of maize flour ran out the price shot from 75 shillings a bag to more than 200 shillings. Bananas which normally cost 50 cents a piece now cost ten times the amount, when you can get them.
The one thing that is thriving in the district is disease. There has been a population explosion of mosquitoes; malaria is rife. A mystery disease, suspected at first to be anthrax and then Rift Valley Fever, has killed at least 450 people in the area of Garissa, some 70 kilometres from Hola. Twenty kilometres downstream cholera has been reported and the great fear is that it will strike the town.
"People drink the river water but it is badly polluted," says Medical Officer of Health Dr David Muthama. "Pit latrines are flooded and the waste has mixed with the water. Because people are sharing accommodation there is overcrowding. Already there is plenty of diarrhoea. It would take just one case of cholera to spark a major disaster." Tana River is one of several regions of the globe afflicted by freak weather conditions that are the subject of several El Nino related Appeals by ACT International over the last months. Churches in the area belonging to the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) have been involved in yearly drought relief food distributions.
This month ACT-NCCK , along with the Lutheran World Federation, mounted a $US 239,000 relief and rehabilitation programme for the victims of the rain.
Homeless and hungry people started approaching their churches for help in mid-December. "We had some drought relief food left over and were able to give that them, "said Rev. Dhadho, "but that is finished. In the area of the camps you can find very hungry people and the children are in a bad way. Some people are out in the open under the trees." Even if the rains stop and the water subsides, it will be several months before the region is able to recover.
Anthony Swift, Christian Aid, UK
Pictures to go with this story was taken by photographer Glynn Griffiths and are available via Joseph Cabo at Christian Aid, London. Phone: ++44 171 620 4444 or Fax: ++44 171 620 0719.
For further information please contact Nils Carstensen