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What a difference the rain can make

Caption: Trócaire has used Irish donations to fund vital agriculture programmes in regions such as Ishiara in Kenya. Photo: Eoghan Rice.

What a difference the rain can make. When I visited Tharaka, a four hour drive north of Nairobi, in April, the land was brown and dry. The shrivelled corpses of burnt trees lined the hard and dusty tracks.

The crops were dead, the animals were dying, and the people were scared.

In a blog on the Trócaire website, I wrote: ‘The lush green fields that surround Nairobi mask Kenya’s emerging crisis: a food shortage in the northern regions of the country that is rapidly descending into famine.’

You didn’t need an early warning system to see that hunger was coming to east Africa; you just needed a pair of eyes.

Two months later, the United Nations issued a massive international appeal for the people of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. Thirteen million people – among them the people I had met in Tharaka – unable to survive without outside aid.

It’s November and we are back in Tharaka. The trees are green; grass and crops spring from the ground; goats happily munch on plentiful bushes. It is like a different world.

The change has been brought about by rain – so often the missing ingredient in east Africa’s attempts to feed itself. After going a year and a half without any rainfall, the Tharaka soil has finally felt moisture over the last number of weeks, bringing life back to the earth.

Captions: Tharaka in Kenya in April 2011 during the drought and again in November after the first rain in the area for 18 months. Photos: Eoghan Rice.

The rain has allowed crops to grow and animals to live. Those crops and animals will keep the people of Tharaka alive and healthy.

But where did these crops and animals come from? The answer is simple: you.

You gave to Trócaire, and Trócaire used your donations to purchase food, crops and animals for people in Tharaka and throughout east Africa.

Across the fields and homes of Tharaka, evidence of Irish generosity is everywhere. Ireland is known around the world for a variety of reasons – our music, our books, our scenery, to name but a few. In Tharaka, the people we spoke with knew just two snippets of information about this far away land: the first that it is very cold, the second that the people of Ireland saved their lives.

 Captions:

Top right: Bishop Kieran O'Reilly of Killaloe with Beatrice Wanjiru, who has received goats, crops and food through Trócaire's east Africa appeal.

Top left: this Trócaire-funded water pipe, which stretches for 27km, will bring water directly to 9,000 people in the Tharaka District of Kenya.

Bottom:  Trócaire's Up to Us climate change campaign t-shirt makes its way to a Kenyan village. Photos: Eoghan Rice.

The crisis in east Africa is far from over, but in places such as Tharaka the people have been kept alive through the drought by outside aid. If the rains continue for the next month, soon they will be able to harvest their crops and will be once again able to provide for themselves.

The rain has made a massive difference to the lives of people in Tharaka, but so have you.

Kenya's Green shoots

We responded to the crisis in East Africa as part of Caritas, the worldwide Catholic network of humanitarian aid agencies. Together Caritas agencies helped over one million people during the crisis.  See how we helped here.

By Eoghan Rice
03/01/2012

Two people, two thousand miles, one problem

Andrew Lodio has nowhere to go. Drought has ravaged his land, bringing dry desert all around him. A sea of dust stretches out before him for thousands of miles.

Andrew can hardly remember the last time he saw rain. His village of Lokitaung in northern Kenya has become engulfed by desert. Where once there were rivers, now there are valleys of dust.

Life in northern Kenya has become a constant search for water. Water for the crops, water for the animals, water for cooking. But there is no water anywhere.

Photo: Andrew from Kenya and Gulshad from Pakistan. Two people, one problem.

Photo: Andrew from Kenya and Gulshad from Pakistan. Two people, one problem.

“The last two years there has been no rain,” he says. “There have been droughts here before but never like this one. This one is worse because it is all over the region. Normally if it is bad here we can go somewhere else, but now it is bad all over. There is nowhere to go.”

Over two thousand miles away, Gulshad Chandio searches for space in an over-crowded tent.

Eight-year-old Gulshad and her entire family have lived in this tent for a year, ever since floods struck Pakistan and destroyed their every possession.

The floods were caused by melting ice high in the mountains to the north of Pakistan. The melting ice combined with unusually high levels of rain and washed through the country, forcing 20 million people from their homes.

"Before the flood, we were hearing about the threat through the media and through friends," she remembers. "We were very afraid because we knew that it was coming our way."

Eventually we had to leave because the floods came and destroyed everything.

 "I live in a tent with my parents and three brothers and sisters. It is very hot in the tent so I don't like it. I want to go home because I miss my hometown and my friends, but we are all very scared that the floods will come back this year so we cannot go home."

Gulshad was right to fear further flooding. Three months after expressing her fears to Trócaire, Pakistan was once again facing serious flooding, with five million people driven from their homes.

Huge areas of land throughout Asia were affected. Across Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia, millions of people had to flee as their homes and lives were destroyed by floods.

Just as Andrew Lodio faces an uncertain future due to drought, the floods which have ruined large areas of Pakistan for two years running mean that 8-year-old Gulshad Chandio does not know when she will be able to re-start her life.

Two people separated by over two thousand miles. Both victims of climate change.

To highlight the issue, two of Trócaire’s leading climate change partners are in Ireland and will give a public talk in Dublin’s Buswells Hotel on Thursday, October 13th.

Photo: Andrew from Kenya and Gulshad from Pakistan. Two people, one problem.

John Kioli Kalua (pictured right) and Cecilia Kibe Muthoni (left), both members of The Kenya Climate Change Working Group, are in Ireland meeting with the public and speaking at universities. 

John and Celia will be outlining the problems caused by climate change to politicians and will meet with Mary Robinson during their visit.

At their talk in Dublin's Alexander hotel, John and Celia will discuss their involvement in the Kenya Climate Change Bill and the impact climate change is having on rural communities in east Africa.

The talk begins at 3.30pm and will continue to 5.15pm.

If you'd like to help, you can take our e-action to help address the problems caused by climate change.

By Eoghan Rice
13/10/2011

Proof of life: Solving east Africa's food crisis

In a sea of famine and hunger, a small patch of land in the village of Nakwalekwi, northern Kenya, acts as a beacon of hope.

Surrounded for hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometres on all sides by dry and dusty desert, Nakwalewki is home to a farmland which boasts amongst its produce maize, sorghum, green grams, cow peas, bananas, oranges and sugar cane. 

Elizabeth Lomoe displays some of the crops that grow all year round thanks to a Trocaire-funded irrigation system on her farm in Nakwalekwi, northern Kenya. Photos: Eoghan Rice.Images of the greenery in Nakwalewki

In a land stalked by famine, the village of Nakwalekwi remains untouched by the drought which has left over 10 million of its neighbours on the verge of death. 

So, how did they do it? Well, for a problem so complex, the answer is remarkably simple: water. 

East Africa is capable of producing more than enough food to feed itself. Its problem is that it has no water to allow the crops grow. 

It is like a factory with no electricity; a car with no engine. 

This is not a barren land. It is the land from which humanity grew; the land that has sustained human life for hundreds of thousands of years. 

The Trócaire project which has helped Nakwalekwi grow such a bounty is visual proof that east Africa should not be condemned to the sort of unspeakable human suffering that it has witnessed over recent weeks and months; the sort of misery that has children starving to death and millions going days on end without anything passing their lips. 

Nakwalekwi is east Africa's proof of life. It is definitive proof that we can break out of the cycle of drought and relief if only we can change the conditions in which people here live.

By Eoghan Rice
05/10/2011

A year after the floods, the deep scars remain

I had never met a slave before I went to Pakistan. It’s a strange feeling to talk with someone who is owned by another man. Yet, here he was: 61-year-old Ghulam Rasool, pictured below, telling me how four generations of his family had lived under the complete control of a rich landowner.

The inequality of Pakistani society strikes you almost the minute you get off the plane. This is a country where unimaginable wealth and unthinkable poverty live side by side; a country that boasts nuclear weapons and starving children.

Ghulam Rasool, a bonded labourer who now lives in a derelict building in Jamshoro.

By Eoghan Rice
29/08/2011

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