Waiting to die in southern Ethiopia

Yatani is a pastoralist, an animal herder who roams the arid landscape of southern Ethiopia with his cattle and goats, leading the animals through grasslands watered by seasonal rains. Yet the rains haven't come for three years, so he has slowly sold off his cattle and used the proceeds to feed his family. Today, the lean times have become impossible times, and Yatani has nothing left. The last five of his cattle died after his band of pastoralists arrived here a few weeks ago. Hundreds of cattle skeletons lay baking in the hot sun around their encampment. The animals that died most recently have their skin intact; pastoralists like Yatani don't even have the energy to skin the dead animals in hope of selling the hides.

In addition to the animal carcasses littering the desert, the landscape around Dubuluch has changed in other ways. A new cemetery has been established just east of town, with more than 100 new rock cairns marking the graves of pastoralist family members who've fallen victim to the drought.

As he sits quietly alone, his emaciated body covered by a shawl, Yatani says his wife and children walked to the town in hopes of selling a few pieces of firewood they gathered. Asked how he feels, he replies in a barely audible voice that he's fine, he's not sick, just hungry. He doesn't complain.

He just waits.

Will Yatani still be alive by the time relief assistance arrives from the outside world?

That's a question being asked today throughout the drought-plagued Horn of Africa, where some 16 million people are at risk of starvation. Half that number lives in Ethiopia.

The international community has promised to help, yet to many here the time lag between promises and food deliveries has seemed inordinately long.

"It will be a crime against humanity if we let hundreds of thousands of people die because there's not enough food here," declared Christian Balslev-Olesen, general secretary of DanChurchAid, during a visit to Ethiopia. Balslev-Olesen met with Yatani and other drought victims throughout the Borena region.

"Ethiopia has the infrastructure in place, a very good monitoring system, experienced nongovernmental organizations, and a very organized society at a local level. There's no excuse for the international community to let people die here," Balslev-Olesen said.

DanChurchAid is a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), a worldwide alliance of churches and aid agencies responding to emergencies. In early April, the Geneva-based ACT issued an appeal to its members to come up with $32 million in relief supplies for Ethiopia, including food, seeds, and tools.

Balslev-Olesen came to Ethiopia to participate in talks aimed at creating an even broader international response to the drought. ACT, which brings together mostly Protestant and Orthodox churches and agencies, is soon expected to join with the Rome-based Caritas Internationalis, the main relief and development network of the Roman Catholic Church, in issuing a new joint appeal for Ethiopian relief work carried out by the Joint Relief Partnership (JRP), a national organization formed by several faith-based organizations which began coordinating their relief work during the 1984-85 famine.

The ACT-Caritas joint appeal would support relief programs of JRP members, which include the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Mekane Yesus Ethiopian Evangelical Church, and the Lutheran World Federation, all members of ACT. The Ethiopian Catholic Church and Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the overseas development and relief arm of the U.S. Catholic bishops conference, are also JRP members.

The JRP announced early this year that its members planned to provide food assistance to about one-tenth of the 8 million Ethiopians that were then expected to go hungry this year. Yet because of worsening drought conditions, relief officials here now predict that another 2.6 million people will soon be added to the rolls of those needing assistance. Church-related agencies are beginning to plan how to expand their relief role even further.

Although JRP members and others in the ACT and Caritas networks have been sounding the alarm about an impending famine for months, much of the world didn't seem to notice until April 3, when the BBC aired dramatic video images of starving children near the town of Gode in the Somali region of eastern Ethiopia.

The emotional scenes were shot at a feeding center run by the Ogaden Welfare Society, a local Ethiopian organization supported in part by Christian Aid, an ACT member from Great Britain. Within days of the BBC broadcast, the rest of the world started trekking to the site. By April 20, more than 250 foreign correspondents had registered with the government to travel to Gode, and the Ogaden Welfare Society was inundated with visits by representatives of funding agencies looking for where they could provide funds to help feed starving children.

While the situation at Gode and other nearby villages is definitely critical, the now well-televised scenes from there don't tell the whole story. "That pocket of Ethiopia has been severely hit by the drought, but it's not representative of the whole country," said Anne Bousquet, the Catholic Relief Services country representative in Ethiopia, who visited Gode on April 15. Bousquet warned that there are "many areas that are at high risk, however, so if aid doesn't come
in a timely manner, we're going to see a lot more Godes."

Aid officials agree the Borena region is next in line for the drought to turn into a full-blown famine. In some areas of Borena, more than 90 percent of cattle and 65 per cent of sheep have already died. Many farmers are using drought-resistant camels to plough their fields as their oxen are dead or too weak to work. With many pastoralists selling off their remaining animals to buy food, livestock prices have plummeted. A cow that cost 400 Ethiopian Birr in February 1999 cost only 100 Birr in February of this year. Today it's hard to find a buyer at any price. "No one wants to buy skinny cattle," said Gollo Huke, director of integral development for the Southern Synod of the Mekane Yesus Ethiopian Evangelical Church.

If rains return to normal, aid workers say it could take many of the pastoralist families in this area as many as five to seven years to replenish their herds. Even for those animals that have survived until now, high levels of stress will prevent female animals from getting pregnant very soon. That means no milk, an important part of pastoralist diets, especially for children.

Not surprisingly, when Mekane Yesus staff conducted a survey in February and March in several areas of Borena, they found that more than one-third of children under five in the region were malnourished. In several villages, schools have closed as children lacked the energy to study.

Stein Villumstad, the assistant general secretary for policy and human rights of Norwegian Church Aid, another member of ACT, said it is important in Borena for aid agencies to provide animal fodder as well as food for people.

"Distributing food is relatively easy, but dealing with the long term effects of the drought will be much harder, and much more difficult to get funding for," said Villumstad. He claimed that only 15 to 20 percent of food-for-work relief programs have any significant impact on long-term production and survival strategies among the pastoralists. "It won't be sufficient for aid agencies to just provide food for a few months. We've got to help people increase their ability to cope with drought over the long run."