With 5 consecutive years of drought unheard of in Ethiopian history, harsh conditions have devastated the lifestyle and landscape of the southern Purina region, forcing residents to leave their villages to seek humanitarian assistance, in a vivid example of how dangerous the situation is as the United Nations opens a global conference on an "imminent" water crisis.
With this introduction, the French newspaper "Liberation" summarized what the arid Ethiopian region of Purina suffers after 5 years of stopping the rains, starting from the story of the shepherd Ghunok Girma, who still carries his stick, which he no longer has anything to shake on him after the drought took everything from him, his 50 cows, ten camels and 100 goats were all his wealth.
In a report by the paper's special envoy to Ethiopia, Cillian Massey, he laments that he did not sell part of his livestock to save for it, saying, "We don't. They say the real saving is the herd," but about 90 percent of Purina's cows, which are 5 times more than the population, have perished, and "after livestock, hunger has begun to attack humans in an area where 85 percent of the population lives on herding and the rest are on the margins of this activity.
Like 400,25 residents of Kenya's neighbouring Purina, Ganouk now lives in the Dubluk IDP camp, where he receives <> kilograms of cornmeal a month from the Ethiopian government to feed his eight family members, and benefits from the strong solidarity of his neighbours, refusing because of his past social status to engage in the only activity available to livestockless herders: cutting trees to sell firewood or charcoal.
An Ethiopian man passes by the corpse of one of his cows after most of them died due to dehydration (Reuters)
Locusts, Covid and the Civil War
The Purina region is just one example of the Horn of Africa, where 36 million people, two-thirds of them in Ethiopia, are suffering from endless drought, where "crises are piling up, combined with locust invasions, then the Covid pandemic and then the civil war in Ethiopia, with a complete absence of rain for an unprecedented period of time," says Gachon Andala Hailemariam, president of the NGO Plan International.
A report by the Emergency Operations Centre set up by the Ethiopian authorities in cooperation with the United Nations noted that "the current drought is causing a humanitarian catastrophe that requires swift action to save lives."
The centre is hosting a conference to try to meet the needs of billions of vulnerable people in the face of an "imminent" global water crisis, and warns against what it calls human "vampires" who are draining the planet's water resources "drop by drop".
Despite these circumstances, the Ethiopian government prohibits humanitarian workers and United Nations agencies from using the word "famine", which has become a historical taboo because of the dark period it refers to in the eighties of the last century, as Ethiopia has become the embodiment of famine and today believes that this is not worthy of its image as an African champion of development.
They were greeted by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, saying, "Our ambition to start exporting wheat has already been realized this year. "It's a great achievement for Ethiopia and an even bigger achievement for our continent," he said, but 800,250 people in the southern Borina region are in urgent need of food aid to survive, and more than <>,<> of them have yet to receive it.
A child walks through an area of Purina, which has been turned into a wasteland due to drought (AP)
Social and cultural trauma
The reporter continues to photograph the life of the residents in the camp, where the shepherd's wife leaves to return to her village, to shake off the acacia trees and drop their fruits and some leaves to feed her goats, which are all that is left for the family. Our ancestors wanted to live there because there were resources, and without resources we have nothing to do here. To rebuild a herd like the one we had, it will take at least 20 years."
If this recurrent drought, unprecedented in magnitude, has caused a violent social and cultural shock among Purina's residents who see their traditional means of livelihood crumbling, the newlyweds Goduru and Nagli first understood what was happening and were the first to leave their village to Doblok camp, despite the opposition of their parents to it as a disgrace to livestock.
Goduro says that his generation understood it and realized that they had to adapt and change their activity, and he put his ideas into practice, so he bought a donkey cart in the IDP camp and started selling water, renting his cart when he went to the school he returned to, yet one old woman still believes that "all this is temporary. We will return to our old lives," she wished.