North
Welo, Ethiopia - April 30, 2000
By Paul Jeffrey
Action by Churches Together (ACT)
North Welo, Ethiopia, April 2000
It's the wrong color. At this time of year, the highlands around the
village of Gubalaftu should be green. Yet after two years with little
rain, today everything here is brown.
And yet people plow the land, sow a few seeds, and watch the skies.
These days, hope is all they have to live on. There's not much food.
Eneinat Amara eats just once a day. The 57-year old woman tends a small
fire in the round stone and thatch structure that is the traditional
home to families here in the stark northern highlands of Ethiopia. She
prefers to eat her only meal in the evening. "It gives me something
to look forward to during the day," she declares, coughing. Along with
her children and many others in this village who are weakened by an
insufficient diet, she suffers from chronic respiratory problems.
Eneinat cooks the little bit of wheat she received from the Mekane
Yesus Ethiopian Evangelical Church, a member of Action by Churches Together
(ACT). It's not enough to go around, but the church's grain storage
warehouse down the road is empty, awaiting a promised new shipment.
Eneinat mixes in some moss and leaves, what are known here as "famine
foods." Their use is a sign that life in the highlands has grown critical.
Much of the agriculture here is dependent on the shorter of two rainy
seasons. Although there are variations in different regions of the country,
the shorter "belg" rainy season usually runs from March to June, and
the longer "meher" season (also called the "kiremt" in some parts) from
July onward. Many highlanders are more dependent on the belg because
at such high elevations, the torrential rains, frost and strong winds
of the meher can destroy much of the crop.
The region suffered a bad belg season in 1998, a total failure of the
belg in 1999, and this year any belg rains that fell were too little,
too late. When the rain comes late, rather than planting their normal
crops of sorghum, maize and barley, farmers plant more rapidly-maturing
crops such as teff and chick pea, which are less productive. Yet even
the later crops can wither before harvest if the rains are too erratic.
The drought hasn't generated the dramatic suffering here in the northern
highlands that it has caused in the east of the country, where in recent
weeks foreign television crews have had no trouble finding starving
children. Yet according to workers from the United Nations and several
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating here, a number of "stress
indicators" warn the situation here is already desperate, and may get
worse.
Migration from rural areas to the cities or coffee-producing areas,
for example, has increased in recent weeks, aid workers report, as traditional
"coping mechanisms" have proved inadequate. "For some it comes down
to a choice between migrating or dying," said Tesfaye Ejesu, director
of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) office in Waldyia.
"If
help doesn't arrive soon, those who can will leave their village, looking
for alternatives, and many of them will die on the road," said Dereje
Jemberu, the Dese-based coordinator of relief operations in northern
Ethiopia for the Mekane Yesus Ethiopian Evangelical Church. "People
who are too weak to walk will stay at home. If we want to help people,
now is the time. If we don't respond soon, we'll be facing a situation
like 1984," when a massive famine killed as many as one million Ethiopians.
In some hard-hit areas, where farmers have no seeds left to sow and
no animals left alive to sell, people have begun dismantling their houses,
selling the wooden timbers or exchanging the straw from their roofs
for food. Prices for firewood and charcoal, gleaned from an already
heavily deforested landscape, have dropped as residents take whatever
they can to the market. Animal dung is being burned for cooking rather
than wood, meaning soil fertility will be reduced. School attendance
has dropped in many communities, as families migrate in search of work
or children stay at home because there isn't sufficient food to give
them strength to attend classes. Villages where school-related feeding
programs operate appear to be an exception to that phenomenon.
Some relief specialists in the region suggest that a delay in providing
food aid to North Welo farm families has exacerbated the situation.
By waiting until traditional coping mechanisms have been exhausted and
people have depleted their entire asset base in order to purchase food,
tardy relief aid has insured that the eventual process of recovery will
be much longer and more painful than otherwise.
Ethiopia's churches are doing what they can to head off the incipient
famine brewing here. At Kombolcha, just four hours to the south of Gubalaftu's
brown fields, hundreds of tons of cooking oil and a high-energy corn-soy
mixture were loaded onto trucks last week. A shipment of wheat is expected
in a few days, and Tesfaye said churches are discussing with government
officials the possible need to truck drinking water into some communities.
Catholic Relief Services (CRS) trucked the food to Kombolcha from the
seaport in neighboring Djibouti. CRS then turned the food over to the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Mekane Yesus Evangelical Church, and
the Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat for distribution in communities throughout
the North Welo region. The groups are all members of the ACT-supported
Joint Relief Partnership, an ecumenical alliance formed during the 1980s
famine to coordinate emergency response among faith-based relief organizations
here.
The manager of the CRS warehouse in Kombolcha, Negase Jemaanih, said
such ecumenical cooperation is crucial. "We're working hand in hand
with other churches throughout the area," Negase said. "By cooperating
together we can better respond to those who need food to survive."
More food shipments are on the way. DanChurchAid has 5,000 metric tons
of wheat in transit as part of more than 67,000 metric tons to be provided
under the current ACT appeal for Ethiopia. Issued in early April, that
appeal requests more than $32 million in food aid, seeds, fertilizer,
hand tools, and animal fodder.
This
isn't the first time that members of ACT and the JRP have provided food
assistance in the region. Indeed, giant warehouses in Kombolcha and
Dese, as well as smaller ones located in rural communities, all built
during the famine of the 1980s, remain empty and waiting today, ready
to be pressed into service once food arrives.
Aid officials always worry that such repeated assistance could create
dependency among farmers, yet workers on the ground here believe the
opposite is true. "People aren't expecting food, and only get it when
they really need it," said Ken Soerensen, a relief consultant for DanChurchAid.
"Far from producing dependency, after farmers have lost their crop for
yet another year, food aid helps provide the strength and hope for them
to go out and plow the fields and sow the seeds one more time. Rather
than dependency, food aid creates hope."
According to Kidane Mariam Gebray, former general secretary of the Ethiopian
Catholic Secretariat, the religious faith of rural farmers keeps them
from losing hope. "Farmers in this country are all believers, be they
Christian or Muslim," Kidane said. "So they never lose hope. They believe
that next year will be better. That's their faith and their tradition.
No matter what has happened, when the rains come they forget about the
past and sow their fields."
Seeking alternatives to vulnerability
When not scrambling to provide emergency assistance to hungry highland
families, ACT member organizations here are helping people develop alternatives
to complete dependance on rain-fed agriculture.
In Cherety, for example, LWF helped local residents build a small-scale
irrigation system alongside the Humo River in 1998. Today, 886 families
benefit from the project, which provides water for 172 hectares. Rather
than getting one harvest a year at best from rain-fed agriculture, today
farmers in Cherety get as many as three crops. Trees have been planted
and flourish alongside irrigation ditches.
"People were ready to migrate from the area because of repeated droughts,"
said LWF soil technician Terefe Seife. "Now they're not just stable
here, but the quality of their lives is improving. And we don't have
to worry about providing them with emergency food aid this year."
According to Yasin Noriey, one of the farmers who has benefitted from
the irrigation project, besides basic grains, he and his neighbors are
also growing vegetables and fruits which provide needed nutrition for
their families and fetch attractive prices in local markets.
"Before we planted our fields and if the rains came, we got a crop and
we'd have enough food to eat. But today, thanks to Allah, we are getting
three or four crops a year, and there's enough food for both us and
our animals," said Yasin Noriey.
In Lasta, an area just west of Gubalaftu, a survey conducted by development
workers from Christian Aid and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church showed
that only 2.5 percent of the population had access to safe water supplies,
and only 10 percent access to latrines. Those two factors caused over
60 percent of the health problems in the communities, the survey indicated.
After a small scale irrigation system was built by the community with
help from the two ACT member organizations, residents also enjoyed new
access to water for drinking, cooking, and washing. As a result, the
quality of life-especially for women, who in rural Ethiopia are the
ones who fetch the water and tend the sick-has shown dramatic improvement.
Basic facts about Ethiopia
Name: Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Population: 58,390,351 (July 1998 est.)
Population growth rate: 2.21% (1998 est.)
Birth rate: 44.69 births/1,000 population (1998 est.)
Death rate: 21.25 deaths/1,000 population (1998 est.)
Ethnic groups: Oromo 40%, Amhara and Tigrean 32%, Sidamo 9%, Shankella
6%, Somali 6%, Afar 4%, Gurage 2%, other 1%
Religions: Muslim 45%-50%, Ethiopian Orthodox 35%-40%, animist 12%,
other (including Catholic and Protestant) 3%-8%
Languages: Amharic (official), Tigrinya, Orominga, Guaraginga, Somali,
Arabic, English (major foreign language taught in schools), others
Literacy rate 35.5% (male: 45.5% , female: 25.3%)
Area: 1,127,127 square kilometers
Land boundaries: Total: 5,311 km; shared borders: Djibouti 337 km, Eritrea
912 km, Kenya 830km, Somalia 1,626 km, Sudan 1,606 km
Coastline: 0 km (landlocked)
ACT members in Ethiopia:
Mekane Yesus Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat,
Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Other ACT members present: Lutheran World
Federation, Norwegian Church Aid, Christian Aid, Dutch Interchurch Aid,
DanChurchAid.
