Desperate for food drought-stricken Kenyans turn to the gingerbread tree

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Sammy AwamiBBC Africa, Turkana

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BBC

Lotkoy Ebey’s herd of goats has been decimated by the drought

Lotkoy Ebey has just five scrawny goats to her name where she once had 50.

She has watched the rest of her animals die as the pasture has dried up due to a prolonged drought in her part of north-western Kenya.

In her culture in Turkana, where livestock are not merely a source of money but are central to life itself, the depletion of the herd is a disaster that will be hard to recover from.

Although rains have recently started falling in several parts of the country and even caused flash floods in some areas, officials caution that relief will not come immediately to Turkana.

According to experts at the local National Drought Management Authority, the rains have been uneven, with some parts of Turkana receiving little to none, while the rainfall remains unpredictable and insufficient to offset the impact of the last two failed rainy seasons.

The drought also affected a vast stretch of land across East Africa, leaving some 26 million people “facing extreme hunger” in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, according to humanitarian organisation Oxfam.

In Turkana county, the effects of the long drought are visible almost everywhere.

Dry riverbeds cut across the landscape. Grazing fields that once supported herds of goats, sheep and camels are bare.

The animals have suffered but food is also in short supply for their owners.

For Ebey, who is in her early 50s, and her household, eating twice a day has become a luxury.

More often, she survives on a single meal, if that.

Sometimes she goes five days without eating a proper meal. In a weak and scratchy voice, she tells the BBC that when that happens there is only one option left - to walk into the scrubland to search for food.

The people in this part of Turkana have a precarious existence at the best of times

In the past, humanitarian organisations occasionally brought food assistance to people like Ebey. It is not clear why those sources have dried up, but it could be because other communities are in even more in need.

Those distributions helped families survive the dry seasons. But lately, they have not received that help from either the government or aid agencies.

The hunger is now affecting everyone in her household. Her mother, she says, last managed to eat a small lunch the previous day. Since then she has had nothing else.

With little left, Ebey is appealing to both county and national authorities to intervene and support her family.

Under the shade of a nearby tree in Kakwanyang village, three women sit together pounding wild brown fruits with a hard, rough and lumpy exterior.

They come from a doum palm or gingerbread tree, known in the area as “mikwamo”.

But finding the fruits is not easy. Sometimes hungry villagers walk for more than three hours into the wilderness before locating the trees.

In better times, these fruits are usually eaten as snacks by young boys as they roam in the wild grazing their goats and sheep. But they are now one of the few available food sources.

“I don’t know who brought this hunger, it’s too severe,” says Regina Ewute Lokopuu, one of the women pounding the fruits. “We eat these because of hunger.”

People in Kakwanyang have come to rely on the fruit from the gingerbread tree to sustain them

The fruit tastes like gingerbread and can quickly fill a stomach. But Lokopuu warns that it cannot be eaten in large quantities. When you eat too much, it can make you drowsy and cause severe stomach upsets, she says.

On rare days when families earn a little money from selling brooms made from the doum leaves, they buy maize flour to mix with the fruit sauce, hoping to dilute its strength and make it safer to eat.

Lokopuu shares the wild fruit with the one goat she has left. She used to have 20, but the others have died.

Like others, she also complained that the county government or aid agencies have not helped this year unlike in previous lean times.

And it is a similar refrain in Latimani village, about 5km (3 miles) away.

Kerio Ilikol has gone for three days without eating.

The little food she last ate had come from a neighbour, and even that was not enough to stretch beyond a single meal.

When Ilikol’s neighbour sees journalists arrive at her house, she quickly comes to share her own struggles.

“Help, help, help us now that you’ve come to visit us,” shouts Akale Helen, immediately after the reporter puts a microphone in front of her.

“We don’t have food, we are very hungry, and even goats don’t have food,” continues Helen.

Evidence of the devastation the water shortage has caused is clear

There are very few men around as the situation has forced those who can to leave their homes in search of greener grazing areas – sometimes crossing borders - for what remains of their herds.

The authorities are aware of the food shortages.

Jacob Letosiro, from Turkana county’s drought management team, says more than 320,000 people are in “urgent need of food assistance” in the county.

He cautions that the recent rainfall could be off-season rains, which may not last, and in any case would take some time before they made any difference.

“They may not have an immediate impact for livestock or improve water availability. So it’s not something worth celebrating at this point,” he says.

Across Kenya, some three million people are affected.

Humanitarian agencies and the Kenyan government say they are responding to the growing crisis.

At a Red Cross food storage facility just outside Turkana county’s capital, Lodwar, workers are loading bags of food onto lorries. The supplies are set to be transported to be given to some of the most vulnerable households who have no other means of survival.

But the Red Cross in Turkana acknowledges that the need for food assistance is greater than available resources.

“We have only little food, which cannot reach all people in need,” Rukia Abubakar, the Turkana coordinator for the Kenya Red Cross, tells the BBC.

“That’s why we are asking partners and well-wishers to come and support the people.”

Other organisations, including World Vision Kenya and the UN’s World Food Programme, are also providing food assistance to vulnerable households.

The Kenyan government has announced plans to begin distributing food and livestock feed in counties most affected by drought.

But humanitarian officials warn that the scale of the crisis remains enormous.

And for people like Ebey, that means that they will have to survive on the resources they still have and what little they can find in the wild.

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