Like an archeologist of the lost harvest, Elizabeth Wambui digs through the dusty soil for the remnants of her crops. Here are the dead stalks of corn. Here are the dead potato vines. Here are the dead beans, the dead peas, the dead sorghum.
They germinated, then shriveled and turned lifeless. Only the thorns and cactuses are still alive. She owns a sheep, but there is not enough grass to sustain it. Her husband had to drive it away in search of food.
"I came here with a lot of hope," she says. "I hoped to plant crops and have a little income. Now I'm just praying for rain. I've lost two seasons. Even if the rains come, I don't know if I can afford the seeds to plant again."
This region in the shadow of Mount Kenya was among the most fertile in the land until Kenya was hit by a lethal combination of drought and political violence. Now the country is facing its most disastrous food emergency in more than a decade, with cattle dying, rivers disappearing, food prices soaring, children hungry and malnutrition rising.
It's part of a much broader crisis across East Africa and the Horn of Africa, where 24 million people are lacking basic food or are dependent on relief supplies. Somalia is perhaps the worst hit, with fully half of its population now relying on emergency aid. In Kenya, 80 percent of wells have dried up in some regions, and half of the livestock are expected to die. And in Ethiopia, nearly 14 million people are dependent on food aid this year, the highest number in years.
Climate change is believed to be at the heart of it. Droughts and floods are happening at nearly the same time. Even as relief workers struggle with the water shortages, they must also prepare for heavy rains and flooding that are likely to hit Kenya within a month.
"The situation is desperate," says Josephine Muli, a field officer in central Kenya for the World Food Program, a United Nations relief agency.
"We've had two years of drought -- four consecutive seasons -- and the crops are dried up. It's not only farmers affected, it's pastoralists, it's everybody, all livelihoods. Even rivers that are traditional sources of irrigation are drying up, and they never dried up before."
On the slopes of Mount Kenya, the Masai herdsmen are watching their cattle die. These forested hills are their traditional refuge, their last hope when drought hits. They brought their cattle, a migration that took a month, because they had no rain in their home region for the past year. Now the cattle are dying here, too.
Six months ago, John Lenyarwa and his relatives left home with 600 cows. Today only 200 are still alive. Almost all of his calves and young cows are dead. The hills around his camp are littered with the corpses of dead cows. He expects the rest to die, too.
"Every day they die," he says. "We have no hope. If there is no rain by the end of September, we will have nothing."
He left 800 sheep at his home region, but only 50 have survived. If he had left the cows at home, he says, they would all be dead by now. "We couldn't just sit and watch them die. We had to do something. So we took them here. Now we are watching them die."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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