The East African famine’s ripple effects

In my home state of Texas, we are experiencing the worst dry spell in 60 years this summer. I have listened to my parents lamenting about the dead trees in the backyard, the mandatory water restrictions and the nearly $5 billion this has cost the Texas farmers and ranchers.
While the current Texas drought is undoubtedly a bad one, it doesn’t begin to compare to the drought in northeast Africa. The loss of human life from famine and the disruption of lives and livelihoods that the drought in northeast Africa has caused are staggering.
Tens of thousands of people in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Djibouti are estimated to have already lost their lives, 3.2 million Somalis (half the population) are suffering from extreme hunger and nearly 1,500 Somalis a day are arriving in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp.
While international donors and governments in Britain, China, Turkey, the U.S., Brazil, and some other African countries are starting to provide emergency foreign aid to the most severely affected regions, the drought is also having severe ripple effects in places not directly affected by the dry spell.
Last winter break, I traveled with three other Harvard students Laura D’Asaro, Alex Breinin, and Esther Moon- and University of Texas junior Sara Hollis to Wema Children’s Centre in western Kenya to see what we could do in the short three weeks of winter break to help the orphanage stay afloat.
Already barely scraping by, the orphanage directors, native Kenyans Teresa Wati and Steven Juma worked two jobs to ensure that they could feed the Wema’s 150 mouths a day. The orphanage is home to children ages of four to 18 and provides food, housing, education and security. Although the orphanage, located in the Bukembe region of Kenya (close to Lake Victoria) is not directly affected by the lack of rainfall, it is hard-hit by the skyrocketing food prices resulting from the damage to crops.
Teresa Wati e-mails me in desperation frequently, as she has had to reduce the number of meals the children receive every day. “Food prices have gone up nearly 60 percent” she writes. “We have started rationing meals for the kids at Wema, and other kids in the village have stopped going to school and started working to make extra money so they can eat.”
Life is in a tenuous balance at Wema and some of the children were already suffering from poor nutrition before these latest difficulties. Teachers and cooks are demanding higher pay so they can make ends meet as well. More children have been placed in the care of Wema as villagers in the surrounding area have too many mouths to feed with food prices rising, To relieve some of their burden they put their children under the care of the orphanage.
Amanda Nguyen, another Harvard student, travelled to Wema for the first time this August to continue the work we started in January and was struck by the incredible domino effect the drought has caused in the region. Though international aid is pouring in (and rightfully so) to the people that need it the most in northeastern Africa, places like Wema are silently suffering and are also in great danger if the drought continues.
It is sometimes too easy to become inured to suffering taking place halfway across the globe when the sheer magnitude of the tragedy is blurred by inconceivably large numbers of dead and large numbers of people seeking help in refugee camps. Nick Kristof of The New York Times wrote an article in Outside Magazine about the ‘tragedy of the masses’ that describes this effect on people who read about human tragedy from afar.
Perhaps if I had never travelled to Kenya and met Teresa and Stephen or built relationships with the children of Wema, I would read about the drought with great, but detached, concern. But when I remember 7-year-old Purity, who I played ‘duck-duck-goose’ with every day, or 4-year-old Zena who was picked on during play time every day for being the smallest, these troubles hit me very hard.
When I read about the drought and famine, I see the individual faces of the children at Wema and I wonder if they are frightened and going to bed hungry or sick from malnutrition. For this reason, I urge those who have the means to make a donation to an organization providing disaster relief in Africa, or to make a donation to Wema Children’s Centre.