Photo: Holly Pickett/Oxfam America

Sadio Danfakha washes her hands with a tippy-tap, a low-cost, low-tech plastic container used to promote hand washing in places with no running water. Oxfam and our partner AKAD distributed tippy-taps along with soap and bleach (to treat drinking water) as part of our humanitarian program to help people suffering from a dramatic food shortage in 2011-2012.

When I met Danfakha in Senegal last October, she said she had been working closely with Wally Cissokho of AKAD, who is in charge of promoting good hygiene practices as a means to avoid diseases.  “We teach people how to use the hygiene kits, and sometime I show them how to use the kits when Wally is not there.”

Danfakha says that when people starting using the tippy-taps and treated water there were fewer cases of diarrhea in her village, Biatilaye. “We now wash our hands before eating, and we wash our clothes more now. Before, it was hard to get soap to wash our hands, but then Wally came and it is now easier to get soap.”

She says she decided to help promote better hygiene in her village as a volunteer. “I have been going with Wally to distribute the hygiene kits. I do it just to help, because we are all neighbors, and I like to help others.”

“It was not a long time ago that my husband passed away. So I am taking the opportunity to help other people instead of sitting home all alone in the house.”

Kassa Danfakha: “We need good quality seed, for rice, groundnuts, millet, and maize.” Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America

Kassa Danfakha says usually one of his biggest concerns in the growing season is cows wandering on to his millet field and eating his plants. It’s a significant source of conflict in the community, but last year he had bigger worries.

“Last fall I got almost no harvest. There was not enough rain,” he says, sitting by his home in Bembou, in Senegal’s far eastern Kedougou region. “The first rains came and the seeds we planted started to grow, but then the rain was very irregular. At one point the rain stopped and the plants died.”

“Some more rain came later but we had no more seeds to plant.”

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Drought has reduced available pasture for livestock herds in eastern Senegal. Photo by Aliou Bassoum/Oxfam America.

Second of two posts by guest blogger Aliou Bassoum, Oxfam America’s regional communications officer in Dakar, Senegal.

It takes a little more than an hour on a red dirt road through forests and millet fields to find the village of Balkissima, population 162. We can still see a few stalks in the fields, left over from the harvest last fall here in the region of Kolda. According to an assessment by the World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization in November, about 138,800 people in Kolda are at high risk of food insecurity.

Some of them are here. They are mostly farmers and herders in Balkissima, a small village with a few mud-walled houses. Around one of them, the home of the chief, stand a few cows. This area is well known for raising livestock.

The food crisis here in southern Senegal is not just hitting people. The livestock are also suffering, and becoming quite skinny, almost puny in size. The village chief, Amadou Korka Balde, says it is due to lack of pasture in the area, and the poor quality of what grass is there during the dry winter months.

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Dyenaba Traoré and her daughter, Bintou, carry water to their garden. Photo by Charles Bambara

A colleague the other day sent a computer file of photos from Mali, one of the countries in West Africa where a new food crisis is now threatening 13 million people with hunger.  Drought is among the problems many are struggling with there.

The photos are from the Kayes region near the borders of Senegal and Mauritania where Oxfam’s  partner, Association des Organisations Profesionnelles Paysannes, is working with women’s cooperatives to help families boost their incomes. Gardens are playing a key role in that effort. The pictures showed small plots of plants green and vibrant—amazingly so—in the parched landscape.

I clicked further into the collection and came to a photo of two women, Dyenaba Traoré and her daughter, Bintou, trudging up a steep, sandy slope, each with a bucket of water on her head and one lugging a second bucket by her side. And that’s when it struck me just how precious these patches of green are: It’s the backbreaking labor of women that has made them possible. With local wells running dry and no fuel for a pump to pull water from the River Senegal , Traoré and Bintou are porting water from the river’s edge to keep their vegetables growing.

Studying that picture, I found myself slipping back nearly 40 years to the summer a friend and I had to walk for our water. We were volunteering for a couple of months as fire lookouts and living on a ridge near Mt. Rainier in Washington. Our only source of water was a small, half-frozen lake about a mile’s hike down a steep trail. We dragged the water back up in awkward five-gallon containers. Full, each was about 42 pounds. We dreaded the chore, and back in our lookout, we used that water as sparingly as possible. Neither of us wanted to have to fetch it a moment sooner than was absolutely necessary. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s thanks to the rain that the animals graze; it’s thanks to the rain that we have food,” says Koubra Hamid, who lives with her family in Bahr el Ghazal, Chad. But she is worried.

“This year, it has not rained much, so the pastures are not good enough,” says herder Etta Brahim Senussi. “When an animal dies, it really hurts.” Photo by Andy Hall/Oxfam.

The rains haven’t come. Not enough, and not at the right times. Across the Sahel region of Africa, poor harvests, erratic and inadequate rainfall, and rising food prices are harbingers of what many predict will be a severe food crisis. Already the poorest families are struggling with hunger, and their animals are visibly weakening.

Oxfam is supporting animal feeding and health care to enable farmers and herders to weather the lean season. Photo by Andy Hall/Oxfam.

A top priority now is to prevent farmers and pastoralists from losing their cows, goats, sheep, and camels – and with them their sources of both food and income. Oxfam’s emergency programs include providing livestock with improved water sources, fodder to supplement the dwindling pasture, and vaccinations to counteract the damage drought and hunger could do to their health. (View “ Taha vaccinates 1,000 goats per day.”)

“We’re tired and frustrated,” says Hamid. “But there are also moments when we laugh with our children.”

John Ekono Ekiman is a herder who lost most of his animals to drought. He received four camels and 20 goats as part of Oxfam's restocking program. "I feel really proud of having them," he said of his animals. "In the future I want to expand and grow my camels and goats." Photo: Alejandro Chaskielberg

Judging from the comments on our Facebook wall, many of you liked the stunning new photos taken in Turkana, Kenya, by Alejandro Chaskielberg. The acclaimed Argentinian art photographer traveled to the region with Oxfam to take portraits of people affected by the recent East Africa drought and food crisis. Last week the photos were featured in a slideshow on BBC News, raising awareness of both the crisis and Oxfam’s ongoing response.

In most of the photos, Chaskielberg used his trademark technique of shooting by moonlight, illuminating these scenes of herders and their families with a dramatic, unearthly glow. The results are memorable (and newsworthy) because they’re so distinctive.

However, when we saw how the photos came out, some of my Oxfam colleagues loved them, but others gave them mixed reviews.

Women tend gardens they built with support from an Oxfam project, which aims to help mothers improve nutrition for their children while also earning an income by selling extra vegetables. Photo: Alejandro Chaskielberg

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Along with millions of other Americans, I’ll be watching Anquan Boldin and the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL playoffs this weekend—but my mind will be in Ethiopia.

I traveled to southern Ethiopia not long ago to visit Oxfam America’s programs in the area. As we drove, my colleague Tewodros Negash explained why Oxfam uses its cash-for-work program to pay communities to clear brush from the fields by hand, something they’ve done for generations by setting controlled fires. As it turns out, the winds, which for as long as anyone can remember have been predictable, are now wholly unreliable. It used to be that people could set fire to the brush, rely on the wind to control the flames, and have a field that was clear in time for the rains. The grass would grow and their animals would have a place to graze. But with wind that’s unpredictable, and rain that’s even more so, communities must now take steps to survive the effects of climate change.

Just weeks later I told that story to Boldin and his friend and former teammate Larry Fitzgerald, NFL wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals, during a meeting to discuss Oxfam America’s work. Boldin and Fitzgerald learned this summer of the devastating drought in East Africa and were looking for ways to help, which is why they reached out to Oxfam.

“I’ve been to the Horn of Africa before,” Fitzgerald, who will be appearing in the Pro Bowl for the seventh time later this month, told Yahoo! Sports Radio in a recent interview. “And I’ve seen some of the effects of the drought myself. … When you see [people affected by drought] you definitely want to do something because they are in dire need.”

Since then, in between catching footballs and evading linebackers and safeties, Boldin and Fitzgerald have raised money for Oxfam America on Twitter and Facebook, filmed a public service announcement (below) and used their high profiles to bring attention to the crisis.

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A young herder tends to his cows in southern Ethiopia. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson

He had the skinniest legs I think I’ve ever seen on a 15-year-old boy and one of the most disarming smiles, though it took a few minutes for that to appear. Being the mother of two boys and now, too soon, an empty-nester, I can’t help but notice these things.

He was standing next to a stretch of rough dirt road in front of a herd of cows so thin their ribs cast shadows on their hides. They were moving slowly in the heat of the morning, almost as if they were sleep walking. We were on our way to the village of Melka Guba in southern Ethiopia where drought has killed countless cattle and plunged millions of people into crisis. We had pulled over to wait for our colleagues who had stopped some miles back to repair a flat tire. When we finally turned our attention to our surroundings, there he was with his cows, studying our dust-coated truck. We were as curious to him as he was to us. We started to talk. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

Coco McCabe filed this report from Ethiopia, where she is reporting on the severe drought in East Africa. In August, she visited an area in northern Ethiopia – which has thus far escaped this year’s drought but has been devastated in the past – to report on initiatives to fight recurrent drought. Her reporting is featured in a World Food Day half-hour documentary special report from ViewChange and Oxfam: “ViewChange:  Africa’s Last Famine,” which is available online at www.oxfamamerica.org and www.viewchange.org and broadcasts on Link TV on Friday, October 14, and Tuesday, October 18.

When we left Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa for the long drive south to Yabello, the air that was cool at dawn turned dry as the sun inched higher—pucker dry, the kind that makes you lick your lips until they sting and leaves your fingertips feeling chalky. Maybe some of it was due to the dust in the air, a veil of topsoil whipped aloft by the wind and mixed with plumes of black smoke swelling from the tailpipes of trucks.

We were on our way to a triangle of drought that has plunged more than 13 million people in Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia into crisis. Some places are the driest they have been in 60 years and famine has struck Somalia.

We stopped to stock up on water—plastic bottles of it covered with the brand name “YES” and a tagline that declared “for a better life.” As we pulled back onto the road all I could think about were the words of our driver: “On a long journey, water is better than food.” I reached for one of the bottles and settled it in my lap, taking long swigs as the sun grew hotter.

Climbing through coffee country around Yirgacheffee, we entered a stretch of respite from the sun. Clouds had massed over the hills and rain drops began to pelt the windshield. The wipers whisked them away, turning a morning’s worth of dust into a film of grime. We had caught the tail end of a downpour and through the side window of our car, I watched people watch the rain, standing alone in their doorways, peering out their windows, their faces solemn. I wondered how much they knew about the drought in the south.

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Oscar-nominated actor Djimon Hounsou has supported Oxfam’s work for more than five years.

In the last few years I‘ve had the privilege of taking part in many incredible campaigns led by some of the most inspiring people and organizations. Their fight continues, and the cause is still in need of your help. I’ve spoken about this before, urging you to assist in various crises taking place around the world. Today is no different. Those living in hunger are still living in desperation and their numbers are growing every day.

Oxfam Ambassador Djimon Hounsou and Kenyan Ambassador Elkanah Odembo spoke at the launch of Oxfam America's GROW campaign in June. GROW is a campaign focused on fixing the broken food system. Photo by Leigh Vogel for Getty Images.

Sadly there are still those that are not aware of the dire need that East Africa is in right now. In an area of the world already ravaged by civil war, the innocent people there are now displaced by one of the worst droughts the region has ever experienced. To some this problem is a world away and is easy to ignore, but I implore you to pay attention. Help us spread the message and raise aid for those that need it the most. Read the rest of this entry »