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Northern Ethiopia Waits in Vain for Rain Date: April 30, 2000 
North Welo, Ethiopia It's the wrong color. At this time of year, the highlands around the village of Gubalaftu should be green. Yet after two years with little rain, today everything here is brown.
And yet people plow the land, sow a few seeds, and watch the skies. These days, hope is all they have to live on. There's not much food.
Eneinat Amara eats just once a day. The 57-year old woman tends a small fire in the round stone and thatch structure that is the traditional home to families here in the stark northern highlands of Ethiopia. She prefers to eat her only meal in the evening. "It gives me something to look forward to during the day," she declares, coughing. Along with her children and many others in this village who are weakened by an insufficient diet, she suffers from chronic respiratory problems.
Eneinat cooks the little bit of wheat she received from the Mekane Yesus Ethiopian Evangelical Church, a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT). It's not enough to go around, but the church's grain storage warehouse down the road is empty, awaiting a promised new shipment. Eneinat mixes in some moss and leaves, what are known here as "famine foods." Their use is a sign that life in the highlands has grown critical.
Much of the agriculture here is dependent on the shorter of two rainy seasons. Although there are variations in different regions of the country, the shorter "belg" rainy season usually runs from March to June, and the longer "meher" season (also called the "kiremt" in some parts) from July onward. Many highlanders are more dependent on the belg because at such high elevations, the torrential rains, frost and strong winds of the meher can destroy much of the crop.
The region suffered a bad belg season in 1998, a total failure of the belg in 1999, and this year any belg rains that fell were too little, too late. When the rain comes late, rather than planting their normal crops of sorghum, maize and barley, farmers plant more rapidly-maturing crops such as teff and chick pea, which are less productive. Yet even the later crops can wither before harvest if the rains are too erratic.
The drought hasn't generated the dramatic suffering here in the northern highlands that it has caused in the east of the country, where in recent weeks foreign television crews have had no trouble finding starving children. Yet according to workers from the United Nations and several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating here, a number of "stress indicators" warn the situation here is already desperate, and may get worse.
Migration from rural areas to the cities or coffee-producing areas, for example, has increased in recent weeks, aid workers report, as traditional "coping mechanisms" have proved inadequate. "For some it comes down to a choice between migrating or dying," said Tesfaye Ejesu, director of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) office in Waldyia.
"If help doesn't arrive soon, those who can will leave their village, looking for alternatives, and many of them will die on the road," said Dereje Jemberu, the Dese-based coordinator of relief operations in northern Ethiopia for the Mekane Yesus Ethiopian Evangelical Church. "People who are too weak to walk will stay at home. If we want to help people, now is the time. If we don't respond soon, we'll be facing a situation like 1984," when a massive famine killed as many as one million Ethiopians.
In some hard-hit areas, where farmers have no seeds left to sow and no animals left alive to sell, people have begun dismantling their houses, selling the wooden timbers or exchanging the straw from their roofs for food. Prices for firewood and charcoal, gleaned from an already heavily deforested landscape, have dropped as residents take whatever they can to the market. Animal dung is being burned for cooking rather than wood, meaning soil fertility will be reduced. School attendance has dropped in many communities, as families migrate in search of work or children stay at home because there isn't sufficient food to give them strength to attend classes. Villages where school-related feeding programs operate appear to be an exception to that phenomenon.
Some relief specialists in the region suggest that a delay in providing food aid to North Welo farm families has exacerbated the situation. By waiting until traditional coping mechanisms have been exhausted and people have depleted their entire asset base in order to purchase food, tardy relief aid has insured that the eventual process of recovery will be much longer and more painful than otherwise.
Ethiopia's churches are doing what they can to head off the incipient famine brewing here. At Kombolcha, just four hours to the south of Gubalaftu's brown fields, hundreds of tons of cooking oil and a high-energy corn-soy mixture were loaded onto trucks last week. A shipment of wheat is expected in a few days, and Tesfaye said churches are discussing with government officials the possible need to truck drinking water into some communities. Catholic Relief Services (CRS) trucked the food to Kombolcha from the seaport in neighboring Djibouti. CRS then turned the food over to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Mekane Yesus Evangelical Church, and the Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat for distribution in communities throughout the North Welo region. The groups are all members of the ACT-supported Joint Relief Partnership, an ecumenical alliance formed during the 1980s famine to coordinate emergency response among faith-based relief organizations here.
The manager of the CRS warehouse in Kombolcha, Negase Jemaanih, said such ecumenical cooperation is crucial. "We're working hand in hand with other churches throughout the area," Negase said. "By cooperating together we can better respond to those who need food to survive."
More food shipments are on the way. DanChurchAid has 5,000 metric tons of wheat in transit as part of more than 67,000 metric tons to be provided under the current ACT appeal for Ethiopia. Issued in early April, that appeal requests more than $32 million in food aid, seeds, fertilizer, hand tools, and animal fodder.
This isn't the first time that members of ACT and the JRP have provided food assistance in the region. Indeed, giant warehouses in Kombolcha and Dese, as well as smaller ones located in rural communities, all built during the famine of the 1980s, remain empty and waiting today, ready to be pressed into service once food arrives.
Aid officials always worry that such repeated assistance could create dependency among farmers, yet workers on the ground here believe the opposite is true. "People aren't expecting food, and only get it when they really need it," said Ken Soerensen, a relief consultant for DanChurchAid. "Far from producing dependency, after farmers have lost their crop for yet another year, food aid helps provide the strength and hope for them to go out and plow the fields and sow the seeds one more time. Rather than dependency, food aid creates hope."
According to Kidane Mariam Gebray, former general secretary of the Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat, the religious faith of rural farmers keeps them from losing hope. "Farmers in this country are all believers, be they Christian or Muslim," Kidane said. "So they never lose hope. They believe that next year will be better. That's their faith and their tradition. No matter what has happened, when the rains come they forget about the past and sow their fields."
Seeking alternatives to vulnerabilityWhen not scrambling to provide emergency assistance to hungry highland families, ACT member organizations here are helping people develop alternatives to complete dependance on rain-fed agriculture.
In Cherety, for example, LWF helped local residents build a small-scale irrigation system alongside the Humo River in 1998. Today, 886 families benefit from the project, which provides water for 172 hectares. Rather than getting one harvest a year at best from rain-fed agriculture, today farmers in Cherety get as many as three crops. Trees have been planted and flourish alongside irrigation ditches.
"People were ready to migrate from the area because of repeated droughts," said LWF soil technician Terefe Seife. "Now they're not just stable here, but the quality of their lives is improving. And we don't have to worry about providing them with emergency food aid this year."
According to Yasin Noriey, one of the farmers who has benefitted from the irrigation project, besides basic grains, he and his neighbors are also growing vegetables and fruits which provide needed nutrition for their families and fetch attractive prices in local markets. "Before we planted our fields and if the rains came, we got a crop and we'd have enough food to eat. But today, thanks to Allah, we are getting three or four crops a year, and there's enough food for both us and our animals," said Yasin Noriey.
In Lasta, an area just west of Gubalaftu, a survey conducted by development workers from Christian Aid and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church showed that only 2.5 percent of the population had access to safe water supplies, and only 10 percent access to latrines. Those two factors caused over 60 percent of the health problems in the communities, the survey indicated. After a small scale irrigation system was built by the community with help from the two ACT member organizations, residents also enjoyed new access to water for drinking, cooking, and washing. As a result, the quality of life-- especially for women, who in rural Ethiopia are the ones who fetch the water and tend the sick-- has shown dramatic improvement.
The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) is responding to the food crisis in Ethiopia through its ecumenical partner Action by Churches Together. One hundred percent of donations to "Ethiopia Famine Relief, Advance #101250" will be used in for this response. The generous giving of United Methodists to the One Great Hour of Sharing supplements the cost of Advance gifts. Give through a local United Methodist church or send financial contributions to: UMCOR, 475 Riverside Dr., Room 330, New York, NY 10115. Call (1-800-554-8583 to make a credit card donation. Click here to make a secure online gift.
Paul Jeffrey is an United Methodist missionary.
Source: Action by Churches Together, http://www.act-intl.org.
Photos: 1. In the remote village of Gubalaftu in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, a woman calms her hungry child. People in the village, in the north Welo region, are eating just once a day, often eating so-called "famine foods," including moss and leaves. 2. A young Oromo-speaking Ethiopian girl in the south of the country. Parts of Ethiopia is suffering from three years without sufficient rain; 8 million Ethiopians, including this girl who lives in a rural village near Yabelo, are at risk of starvation if food assistance doesn't arrive soon. 3. In the remote village of Gubalaftu in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, a man reads scripture. Residents of Gubalaftu are members of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), the international alliance of church-based relief agencies. UMCOR is also a member of ACT, and is working through the Orthodox Church and other ACT members in Ethiopia to respond to the needs of more than 8 million Ethiopians suffering from the current drought. 4. Residents of Dubuluch in southern Ethiopia work digging a new water catchment pond to better utilize seasonal rains when - and if - they fall this year. 5. Women are the ones in rural Ethiopia to haul water, and as a three-year old drought has progressed, women have had to walk farther and farther. This woman walks near the village of Gubalaftu in the highlands of north Welo. Credit: Paul Jeffrey/ACT, April 2000. Click on any photo to see a larger version..