To reach their fields, farmers must cross a seasonal stream in southern Ethiopia. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

We had a lot of rain here in the Boston area this spring. Endless rain, it felt like. Would it ever stop?

I’m embarrassed now to have whined about it when I think what some steady rain could do for people in the Horn of Africa. Many of them are desperate for it.

The late 2010 rainy season failed completely in many parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. And in some districts of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, the March through May rains have been only about 10 percent of average. For herders and farmers who depend on every drop, the consequences could be severe: Already there are reports of hundreds of thousands of animals having died.

Climate change is leading to longer, hotter dry periods, shorter growing seasons, and unpredictable rainfall patterns—all of which make it harder for farmers, both experienced and just learning, to decide when to sow and cultivate their crops. Read the rest of this entry »

Atsbha Abraha and Girma Legesse discovered a decades-old connection in the hardships of forced resettlement. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

In my last two posts, I wrote about a young man named Atsbha Abraha and his determination to get an education. I met him in Ethiopia, on a field visit to an Oxfam America-funded project in Tigray where he helped translate the stories women told about the hardships of living in a place where water is scarce.

But one of the most compelling stories of all was Abraha’s (see Part I and Part II)—and the serendipity of human connections in one of the more remote places on Earth.

We were snaking through the mountains of Tigray in a truck when Abraha told his tale, my questions carrying him back through the decades to the resettlement he endured in Gambella in the mid 1980s when the government was forcing families to move as drought and famine hit their communities. Sitting in front listening carefully—and so quietly—was my colleague, Girma Legesse.

At the end of the day, our field work complete, Legesse turned to us in the back seat and revealed that he, too, had been there in Gambella during that difficult time.

Unlike Abraha—who was just a boy when his family was shipped off to the hot and wet western region—Legesse was a second-year student at Alemaya University pressed by the government  into spending  more than two months constructing huts for the new arrivals.

“We were in a very terrible situation,” recalled Legesse. “Most of us were infected by malaria and diarrhea.”

It was the rainy season, and poured so hard sometimes that a mud-walled hut Legesse’s team built one day would be gone the next—melted away by the rain or destroyed by wild animals.

When his stint was up, Legesse came home barefoot (his shoes long lost in the mud) and emaciated.

“Nobody recognized me,” he said. “When I saw a mirror after two and a half months on my way back from Gambella, I was shocked.”

Abraha, quiet himself now, nodded solemnly.

“He built for me,” he said, and then smiled at Legesse—a new bond formed between men, strangers until that week, who have endured the same struggle.

Villagers collect water from a rain-fed pond behind a new dam built to provide them with a reliable source. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

Even as young teenager, Astbha Abraha knew there was only one way he could make a better life for himself and that was with an education. An interpreter, he told me the story of that schooling (see Part I) as we trundled in a truck through Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost region, on our way to the Raya Azebo district to visit a dam—one that holds a whole lot more than just water.

A remote place of rocky hills and plains, some of the district’s villages have been plagued by lack of water, and in 2008, the situation in Boye Gararsa became critical when rains failed to come, triggering acute food and water shortages—conditions Abraha knew well from his own childhood in Tigray. Together with the government and a local partner, the Women’s Association of Tigray, Oxfam America helped respond to the villages’ needs with a solution intended to solve the water problem for good: a micro dam. Read the rest of this entry »

Atsbha Abraha got his first taste of school when his family was resettled in Gambella. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

At home, we’ve been in the throes of college prep, a process that somehow involves the entire family–except the dog.  My son is a senior in high school and he has spent this academic year applying to a bunch of places, fretting over essays, and waiting, waiting, waiting for the all-mighty Admissions Office to say yes—or no.

He’s in. And so are all of his friends.

That’s how life—in their world—is: Step by predictable step, they will get their educations. It’s as good as guaranteed.

But that certainty, that unquestioned assumption about opportunity, sometimes makes me wince, especially when I think about people like Atsbha Abraha and the many years of struggle he bore to earn  his own degree. An interpreter who helped me recently while I was visiting Oxfam America programs in Ethiopia, Abraha is a young father of 32 from Tigray, a rugged region in the north where many people eke a living from the small plots of land they farm and the few milking animals they own. Life there is hard for many—and in some years, impossible. Read the rest of this entry »

Galgalo Boru is a herder who also depends in rain-fed fields to feed his family. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

It’s been years since the grasses of Deed Liben grew tall, ensuring a safe haven for wildlife and abundant nutrition for the herds of cattle and goats that families in the Guji zone of southern Ethiopia depend on for food and income. In a handful of places, preservation efforts have restored some of this renowned pastureland, but for many people, including Galgalo Boru, making a living by herding alone is no longer an option here.

Late one afternoon, as sheets of rain and sunshine washed the plain, he sat by the side of the road, a few cows behind him munching shoots of green the rain had coaxed from the ground. He was alone and contemplating the five hectares of wheat and haricot beans he had planted recently on the far side of the road. Some of it had sprouted—slivers of possibility pushing through the red earth—but so much depends on what comes next: sun that scorches or clouds that cool and bring rain?

Boru could only hope.

“I am a pastoralist,” he said. “But I lost many animals and now I am farming. Now, I don’t have animals except for a pair of oxen and a donkey.”

The rain came late to this region, and the dry days, seemingly endless, put severe stress on families and their animals. In the last month alone eight of Boru’s precious herd died, including six lactating cows and an ox. Weak and hungry from drought, most of them collapsed in the cold rain.

The pattern is hardly new—though climate change may be exacerbating it—and it’s one of the realities of this hardscrabble region that is pushing herding families to find new ways of making a living. Some are now turning to farming; some, like Boru, have long combined the cultivation of small plots with the care of livestock. With rain so unpredictable, however, there is an ongoing debate about the wisdom of encouraging agriculture here, and across the sweep of southern Ethiopia’s pasturelands. Read the rest of this entry »

Heders lead their cattle to water in southern Ethiopia. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson

So much felt familiar as we rolled from the Addis Ababa airport to the Oxfam guest house a couple of months ago. It’s a short distance between the two, just a few minutes, and I relished the feeling of memory mixed with the moment: the smoky air, the shapes of people drifting through the darkness beneath the overpass near the guest house, the beeps—breathy and short—of the boxy blue taxis vying for space on the road.

I inhaled it all, happy to be back.

But I wonder, when does a place become so familiar that you stop looking around? Or does the familiarity free you to study your surroundings in a different way? Or maybe, no matter where you are, there will always be surprises? Read the rest of this entry »

Members of the Jalala Women's Association work in one of their fields. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

“People still remember what happened a few years ago,” the New York Times quoted an economist at the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization saying on Saturday as news of rising food prices—and the possible clashes they could trigger—hit the headlines.

How could anyone who was hungry then forget?

Accompanying the Times story was a stunning photo of a young boy in Mozambique where the cost of bread has suddenly skyrocketed by 30 percent.  Defiance—or is it disbelief?–seems to arc through every bone in his body: Wearing shorts and a pair of boots that climb almost to his knees, he’s staked out his position in front of a burning car. On his head floats a too-big cap that must have once belonged to a policeman or a military officer. Read the rest of this entry »

Demitu Gurmessa weeds her field. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

Demitu Gurmessa and her husband, Hussein Kedir, are sitting on a long wooden bench in the dirt yard outside their home in Jello Dida—a community in the Shashamene District of Ethiopia. Nestled with them are some of their nine children.

Demitu holds out her hand to me so I can feel her palm—rough with the countless chores required to keep her family fed, housed, and clothed. Hussein holds out his, too. It feels just like his wife’s, a hand toughened by work in the fields. For poor people in Ethiopia, that’s what life is; they are bound to hard physical labor—to plowing and planting patches of earth, to fetching water and firewood, to herding goats, sheep, and cattle.

But the couple’s hands are tough for another reason: They are determined to send their children to school, and so to make sure the kids have the time for that pursuit, Demitu and Hussein are shouldering all the work other parents in rural Ethiopia might require their offspring to do. Two of their children have already finished 10^th grade and taken national exams; two others are now in 10^th grade; and one is in fourth grade. Read the rest of this entry »

A young woman washes her plastic shoe at a water tap from an Oxfam-funded project. Photo: Eva-Lotta Jansson / Oxfam America

As Oxfam continues our response to the floods in Pakistan, Coco McCabe is visiting Oxfam America’s projects in Ethiopia, where recurring droughts, conflicts, and soaring food prices continue to burden many families. Here’s her latest update from her journey.

 I’m in Ethiopia and I’ve decided to go shoe shopping—a chore that’s always a nightmare at home where there’s a shoe for every step: approach shoes, walking shoes, running shoes, dress shoes. I don’t want any of that stuff. I just want something that’s going to do the job for me here. Something sturdy and mud-worthy.

So here, in Agere Maryam, a few hour’s drive from the Kenyan border, I’ve decided to follow the lead of the local herders and go for plastic—all purpose, one-piece plastic. No glue. No stitching. No doodads. There are heaps of molded shoes for sale here—blue, brown, black, green—piled on tarps by roadside kiosks or offered in mounds in the nearby market.

But the abundance belies the reality: many people in the fields and pastures between here and the market in Finchawa go barefoot. Shoes, when people spend the money on them, are worn to shreds. And function always trumps fashion. In the market, I spy a boy darting through the crowd. On his right foot he wears a lady’s shoe—blue or black I can’t tell through the dust that covers it—and for his left foot he has found a man’s leather shoe, camel-brown and pointy. Its laces are long gone.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Eva-Lotta Jansson / Oxfam America

A year ago when Oxfam colleagues and I took the long and only road from Ethiopia’s capital—Addis Ababa—toward the country’s southern border with Kenya, the landscape was parched and dusty. The corn had shriveled on its stalks, people fretted about failed harvests, and everywhere water seemed to be in short supply.

 But today, as we roll south dodging goats and cattle, waves of green—corn green, teff green, banana green–wash by our car.

“Oh my god,” says my colleague Selome Kebede, her eyes glued to the window, “I love the green. I love the color of teff.”

Luminous under the gray sky, fields of Ethiopia’s staple grain stretch along both sides of the road. Among the furrows, puddles lay still, evidence of a fresh rain—rain that has come in startling abundance this year, rain that Oxfam’s Tibebu Koji says hasn’t fallen like this since 1974.

We pass the Awash River, so full it has spilled its banks and spreads in a thin sea across the fields that farmers will plant with watermelons and tomatoes when the dry season comes.

But in this topsy-turvy time, when rain continues to fall weeks past normal, when will that dry season arrive?

Read the rest of this entry »