Across West Africa a new food crisis is looming over a population that has already endured three of them since 2005. The last—in 2010—affected 10 million people.
But with early action, the hardship and loss so many have suffered through in the past seven years could be softened and that’s what Oxfam America’s humanitarian workers Isaac Massaga, Julie Savane, and Greg Matthews are taking the first steps to put in place. They are just back from Boulal, a collection of villages in the north, where they were working to identify the greatest needs and the responses that would best fill them—now, and longer-term.
“We’re in a good position now to mitigate the serious consequences of an acute food crisis and to help people not resort to selling assets and cattle to meet their basic needs,” said Matthews, speaking from the Oxfam office in Dakar, Senegal’s capital.
Selling valuables—livestock, farm tools—is one of the strategies poor families without cash employ as a last resort when faced with no other way to get food: They’ll use the money to buy it in the market. But in selling these important assets, they are also limiting their ability to make a living, and that drags them deeper into poverty. Halting that cycle is key to averting a crisis.
During the last growing season, rainfall in Louga was erratic, said Matthews, sometimes coming in great gushes and sometimes not at all. For the crops—millet, cowpeas, and peanuts—the result was dismal. The yields are off dramatically.
One farmer Matthews spoke with said he and his family had just consumed the last of the millet they had harvested in the end of October—300 kilograms worth. That was five times less than he would get in a good year. And the next planting season is still four months away.
How will people manage? Some, like the millet-grower, will pursue petty commerce, such as hunting for wood that they can sell as fuel in the market. But for many herders facing lean times, their strategy is to migrate with their livestock in the hope of finding pasture elsewhere.
In Boulal this year, that migration has started much earlier than usual, said Matthews.
“The hardest months for pastoralists are April, May, and June—right before the rains begin,” he said. “But they’re starting to experience that now, in the beginning of February, so most of their productive animals have already started to migrate.” That means families must take their kids out of school prematurely and abandon other livelihood efforts, like gardens and small shops, that could help support them.
Poor harvests are also adding to the stress herders are feeling. With fewer crops pulled in from the fields that means fewer leftovers of leaves and stalks to feed to the livestock. And as the health of their animals declines, so does the value of sheep, goats and cattle.
Coupled with all of this, said Matthews, are climbing prices in the markets. A 50-kilogram sack of rice that once could be had in a trade of one sheep now costs a herder two or three.
“Because of all this, people are starting to employ early coping strategies,” Mathews said. “They are starting to change the way they eat and manage their finances to prepare for a long, hungry season.”
But even as they take these steps, the future hangs heavily.
“People are really worried about what will happen a month from now,” Mathews said. “Most of the food reserves are already exhausted.”
Among the responses Oxfam is weighing are cash transfers—a tool that would allow hard-hit families to carry on as they would normally. With cash, they could buy the essentials they need during this critical period but not have to sell vital assets to do it, said Matthews. A second approach might be to help herders get access to fodder for their livestock, which provides both food and income for families.
But longer-term, the goal is to help communities become more resilient.
“The bottom line is working with communities to take charge of the issues and find solutions themselves,” said Matthews, pointing to a milking cooperative that had worked successfully in the area for a while. “It’s not about money. It’s about having, at the base community level, the desire to work together and the capacity to manage working collectively.”
Estimable lives in a very small earth-walled home near a drainage channel running along a dirt road. The land around her is almost all mud and the road is under a foot of water in places. Floods plague her village, called Lameau, in the community of Grande-Saline in Haiti’s Artibonite River valley.
This is one of Haiti’s most productive agricultural areas, and over the years, the government and international donors have built a network of canals and channels, to divert water to dry areas, and drain out the wet ones. Small villages line these channels. Just after the harvest, many are drying their rice crop on tarps on the side of the road, near their small homes, some of which are quaint wooden houses that resemble gingerbread cottages. Others are more modest earth-walled dwellings. Children play and swim in the channels, laughing and splashing in the sun.
It looks idyllic but the Artibonite River valley can be a tough place to live, Estimable says. “When there’s too much water in our houses, in our fields, we get upset stomachs. It’s very hard to live here with so much water.” The lack of clean water in 2010 after one particularly rainy period coincided with a cholera outbreak which killed 300 people in this area, according to local officials.
Grande-Saline’s mayor, Erole Romeus, drew up a plan to clear out the mud and vegetation choking six kilometers (3.75 miles) of the secondary channels like the one near Estimable’s house. He’s also hired heavy equipment to widen them to handle more water flow. The project is employing two 132-member work teams in a cash-for-work program that provides much needed wages of about five dollars a day for 12 days. The project prioritizes hiring people living near the channels. About 2,000 people in 400 households live in this area and will benefit from better flood control.
Sansion Morisette is one of the workers; she has just spent the morning raking weeds out of the narrow channel running along the road next to Estimable’s house. “It’s about time we started this work,” she says. “I’m out on the street now because water destroyed my house in Rossignol. Take a look around you, we’re lucky if we can get two bags of rice out of our harvest sometimes, the water just eats everything we grow.”
Mayor Romeus says the project in Grande-Saline should take the community a long way towards reducing flooding, especially during the annual hurricane season. “Every time it rains, we can have 200 to 300 small houses destroyed,” he says standing on a flooded road next to the drainage channel, where scores of workers in white t-shirts are clearing away plants and other debris.
“We started talking about rehabilitating these channels as a means to deliver a durable solution to the people here,” Romeus says. “We came to Oxfam America because it is an organization that is interested in helping vulnerable people reduce the risks of disasters.
“Since we cleared all this out, people will probably have an opportunity to harvest. But if we did not, in another week we would have been in danger: the people, crops, and animals.”
Oxfam is devoting $20,000 for this project, which is covering about half the costs and supports the cash-for-work component, wages for heavy equipment operators, and fuel. It’s part of a larger program to reduce vulnerability to disasters in the countryside, and make it easier for people to make a living in farming, an alternative to the overcrowded conditions in Port-au-Prince.
Sancion Morisette is optimistic that the newly rehabilitated channels will help them. “Now I know that when it rains, the water will flow in the channel and go directly to the sea.”
]]>Balcha, a 36-year-old widow, has brought us to her home here in the Ethiopian community of Mallima Bari as a sort of bench mark—a way for us to understand where she is in her life at this moment and where she’s determined to go now that she has access to irrigation and the support of a network of other small farmers like herself.
“I will reconstruct my house and show you a better house,” says Balcha firmly. “When I change my house, I will make you coffee.” In Ethiopia, ceremoniously serving guests coffee—three piping hot cups per person—is an important social tradition.
Recently, Balcha joined a group participating in a project launched by Oxfam America’s partner, Sustainable Environment and Development Action, or SEDA. Tapping a well that they helped dig and that SEDA and Oxfam outfitted with a pump and pipes, Balcha and 34 other farmers are funneling water to nine hectares of land--about 24 acres, or a little more than half an acre each. Now, at last, they are free from worry about whether the rain will come on time and in sufficient quantity to guarantee their harvests. With a flick of a switch, they have water on demand—water to feed their crops and build their dreams.
Sitting in front of a field crowded with tall corn, Balcha beams with a surety that would not have been possible a year or so ago. Grief consumed her then: Her oldest child, a 9-year-old boy, had drowned one day while she was away working as a laborer. His dream had been to go to school and he had begged her to send him. But Balcha didn’t have the means.
“He asked me, ‘please, my mom, buy me an exercise book,” she recalled. Her answer? “Next year I can buy you an exercise book and clothes, but this year we don’t even have food.”
Two months later, she said, the terrible accident happened.
In the year that followed, burdened by needs that she could barely meet, Balcha said she thought about leaving her family and running away.
“I was confused,” she said softly.
It was around then that she learned of the irrigation project and the opportunity to join it.
“I was suffering before I joined this project because I didn’t have my husband. I didn’t have any support,” said Balcha. ”Now I have clothes for my body, food for my stomach, and my field is in good condition. When you are hungry, you can’t think of getting satisfied. When you are thirsty you can’t think of getting enough water. But now I’m satisfied.”
Balcha’s story speaks for others in a district where many rural residents make their living by raising animals and cultivating crops on fields fed only by rain. But it’s a hard life—and sometimes an impossible one. In this Central Rift Valley, severe food shortages are a frequent problem.
Without money to put into better production—fertilizer for plants, and infrastructure for irrigation—farmers can’t easily coax much from their land. Instead, like Balcha, they rent their fields to investors who can afford the technology to reap bountiful harvests. And sometimes, small farmers become day laborers on land that is theirs, working for someone else’s profit instead of their own.
But for the group now tilling this 24-acre plot, a reliable source of water could change their lives and the lives of their families. The project is part of a broader Oxfam America water program, set to run through 2020, that works with communities and local partners to help some of the poorest Ethiopians in moisture-stressed regions access water for their fields and animals and manage the resource in a sustainable fashion. With water comes food—and resilience.
Here, in Mallima Bari, the hope is that farmers will begin to cultivate valuable market crops—onions, tomatoes, green peppers, cabbages—that could boost their incomes. From the sale of their harvests, participants, who have formed the Mallima Gale Small-Scale Irrigation Co-op, will pool 10 percent of their earnings toward keeping the irrigation enterprise running. One of the biggest costs is fuel, now running at about 17 birr per liter—close to $4 a gallon. It takes about six liters of fuel each time a farmer pumps water through a half-acre field.
But it’s not just the pump and water that have brightened prospects for Balcha, it’s the deeper connection she has made with her neighbors in the irrigation group and the spirit of cooperation.
“We have very good collaboration,” says Balcha, noting that she had her fields plowed with the help of co-op members and their oxen. Ethiopians measure their land in hectares. One hectare is nearly equal to 2.5 acres. Balcha’s irrigated plot of corn measures a quarter hectare. In addition, she has a half-hectare of rain-fed corn and a quarter hectare of Ethiopia’s staple grain, teff, which is also dependent on the rain.
New agricultural techniques she learned through SEDA could help her crops do better than they have in the past, and the results so far have made her optimistic. She is planting her corn in rows now instead of broadcasting it loosely, and expects the December harvest will produce enough to feed her family as well as some to sell.
“Physically, it looks healthy,” says Balcha. “When you look at it, you get encouraged.”
And with that feeling of encouragement comes the taste of possibility: For Balcha, that means school for her children—an opportunity she never had.
“Had I had an education, I would have been someone better than I am now,” says Balcha. “I’m in darkness myself. I want them to be in light.”
]]>It's the Gurracho River, tumbling through boulders and swelling across the lowlands below, its roar muffled to a whisper-a whisper of possibility—by the brush climbing the steep banks.
In this drought-plagued corner of Ethiopia's West Arsi Zone, the river has long called out to small-scale farmers scratching a living from land fed only by rain. Without resources—money, engineering skills, heavy machinery—families in Dawe kebele had no easy way to tap the river's potential as an irrigation source even as they hungered for what it could bring them: reliable harvests, food on their tables, and desperately needed income for household essentials, like medical care and school fees.
But now, from the head works deep in the brush above where Magarsa and Saworo live with their nine children, a new network of pipes, concrete-lined canals, and earthen channels is funneling the precious Gurracho River directly to 404 farmers tilling 200 hectares of land, or 494 acres. The water is changing their lives.
With support from Oxfam America, the Rift Valley Children and Women development Organization, or RCWDO, began working on the Ejersa small-scale irrigation project in 2007 to help local families increase the income from their farms and expand their employment opportunities. Fed entirely by gravity, the new system is allowing farmers to cultivate their fields year round—whether it rains or not—and to grow food not only to eat but to sell.
"We are encouraging farmers to engage in the production of high-value crops for the market," says Hussien Dalecha, a program manager for RCWDO. "If you simply depend on traditional practices and growing maize and wheat one time a year on small plots, that's not sufficient for household consumption and expenses."
But with access to fertilizer, improved seeds, and most important of all, water, farming families can make their land highly productive—in some cases more than tripling the value of their yields. Coupled with the infrastructure, farmers have also received training in new growing techniques and the importance of diversifying their crops. At a neighborhood nursery, managed by the farmer's cooperative, neat rows of onions, peppers, kale, and tomatoes-among a variety of other edibles-serve as examples of what's possible. And farmers are taking the lessons to heart.
"We have farmland but lacked knowledge," said one farmer, Obbo Bshura. "As a result, we often couldn't feed our family on the meager yield of crops...Through the project we were taught irrigation methods and diversification techniques that were previously unpracticed in our community. Our production increased."
For Magarsa and Saworo, irrigation has brought their family a new sense of certainty, a feeling that, with hard work, their dreams do stand a chance of materializing.
"I have the confidence hereafter I can easily keep my children in school,"said Saworo, 45, who longed to be able to continue beyond the ninth grade himself. "I was eager to be a nurse or a doctor before. But it was a problem for me to continue my education. I didn't have any support from anywhere. If I can't achieve my ambitions, my child should go."
And one of them has. The couple's oldest son, Guta Bati, 22, graduated in July from Kuyera College with a nursing degree.
To help pay for his schooling, his parents sold a cow in December, one of the few that remained from their herd of 30. In recent years, drought has taken a toll on their livestock: Some of their animals died and they sold others when their crops failed and the family needed money to buy food.
But now, with river water promising more bountiful harvests, education for the rest of the children may not require selling valuable assets: their crops may be profitable enough to cover school fees.
The family has access to one hectare of irrigated land. By August, the corn Saworo had planted earlier was ready for harvest at a time when few other farmers around had any. In a bowl passed among visitors, a snack of roasted kernels—sweet, smoky, and a little crunchy—disappeared quickly. Saworo sold a quarter hectare (.62 acre) of corn for 7,592 birr, or about $446—a sizable sum during a season of the year when normally the family has little cash available.
"It's a good income for me," said Saworo. "This is really big money."
And he wasn't going to let it lie idle. He planned to buy improved seeds—tomatoes, beets, and cabbage—for his next crop.
Magarsa, too, has had significant success with the corn she's cultivated, seeing the yield from the half hectare (1.2 acres) she works climb from 12 quintals ( 2,645 pounds) in 2009 to 32.5 quintals (7,165 pounds) this year.
"I am totally in a different life," she said, "being able to feed my children and selling the remaining (corn) to support the children in education, planning for reinvestment."
Nearby, at the home of Bushura Tasho and Jaware Aliyi, the irrigation project has helped boost income enough for the family to plan on putting a new roof on their hut. This one will be made of corrugated metal.
"Water can make a difference," said Aliyi. And not just for the farmers.
As the couple discussed the progress they were making, a woman with two donkeys wandered into their yard. She was there, she said, to purchase some of the surplus corn. Her plan was to buy about 150 birr worth (just shy of $9), load up the donkeys, port the corn to a distant community that had none, and sell it there for a slight profit of between 40 or 50 birr, or a little less than $3.
"The irrigation has already made a market here," said Dalecha, the project officer, noting how the benefits were reaching beyond farmers. Food, grown right here, was finding its way into the broader community—a community that in the past has had to depend on food aid during times of crisis.
"Relief food is aid is very expensive," said Dalecha. "Instead of feeding the people, this kind of [irrigation] scheme is very recommendable."
Oxfam America has been collaborating with communities and a variety of partners on projects like this since 1994, helping to provide families with water for their fields, for their animals, and for use in their homes. Oxfam's new long-term water program, set to run through 2020, is now focusing on three regions: Amhara, Tigray, and Oromia, of which the West Arsi Zone is a part. The program aims to strengthen the resilience of communities in the face of climate change by helping people access water and manage it sustainably for crop and livestock production.
The Ejersa small-scale irrigation project in Dawe is also part of a larger undertaking called the Global Water Initiative, or GWI. Funded by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, it's a coalition of seven international organizations, including Oxfam America, working on the challenges of providing clean water to some of the poorest people in the world for their homes and livelihoods.
]]>In a country where most farmers depend on rain to feed their crops and guarantee their harvests, that question is omnipresent: It's about survival. And there's no sure way to answer it.
But there is a way to manage the uncertainty it breeds, and Biru, with steady steps, is slowly freeing herself from the constraints of an increasingly erratic climate. Her tools? An entrepreneurial drive and—now—weather insurance for her crops through a program that has grown to reach more than 13,000 farmers in Tigray since its launch in Adi Ha in 2009.
Biru, a 50-year-old mother of six children, was among the first farmers in this rocky northern region to invest in the insurance when Oxfam America, together with the Relief Society of Tigray and a host of partners, began offering it as a way to help families build resilience in the face of repeated drought. If there is insufficient rain during a critical period of the growing cycle, farmers will receive a payout for the crop they have insured.
And even those too poor to have cash on hand can get insurance: They can pay for their premiums in exchange for working on projects that help their communities reduce the risk of future disasters , such as by planting trees to preserve the topsoil. Of the 13,195 farmers now insured, 91 percent of them, or 12,064, are trading their labor for their premiums. And many of the households that have bought insurance are headed by women—3,610 of them.
Biru has been able to pay for her insurance with cash. This year, she bought a package for 200 birr, or about $11.75. It will cover her teff, a tiny grain and a staple of the Ethiopian diet used to make a bread called injera.
In Adi Ha, the weather has not been severe enough—yet—to trigger a payout. But Biru is convinced that investing in insurance is a smart move and that the program should be scaled up to reach farmers in other parts of Ethiopia. Without the cushion insurance provides, families who lose their harvests and have nothing to fall back on could be forced to migrate far from their homes or to sell precious household resources—like a cow—to buy food.
"This insurance is very good," said Biru. "It's saving our assets in a bad year."
And perhaps it's that confidence that is also helping her take other well-considered risks that are allowing her to build a more secure future for her family.
In 2009, the first year weather insurance was available, Biru joined a group of 10 farmers and together they bought a pump to irrigate some of their crops. Her contribution was 4,000 birr—or about $235. In 2010, with the proceeds from an abundant harvest of peppers, Biru was able to pay off the loan for her share of the pump.
Soon after, she took an even bigger plunge: With a new loan, she invested 14,000 birr, or about $823, in her own pump, available to use whenever she needs it. In August, she had already reaped 2,000 birr-worth of peppers from her field, and was looking forward to continuous harvests in the future.
"This is more productive compared to maize," said Biru. "Maize you harvest once. This you harvest every week."
Peppers won't be her only cash crop from this newly irrigated land. Scattered amidst the plants are 60 orange tree seedlings and 30 mango tree seedlings.
"If we manage it very well, we can start the first harvest (from the trees) after four years," Biru said.
For all Biru's progress, farming in Tigray is not an easy undertaking. And one of the biggest challenges, she said, is the cost of fertilizer. The price keeps climbing.
"It's 1,000 birr per quintal (or about $58 for 220 pounds)," said Biru, recalling when it was a fraction of that price two decades ago. "Our land can't perform well without fertilizer, but fertilizer is very expensive…Most of our money is invested in fertilizer."
But most of her pride is invested in her children: all six of them have been able to attend school. Her oldest son has a degree in accounting and a daughter has a degree in engineering. Three of the others are still making their way through, while a middle son has decided to stop his education and assume—eventually—responsibility for his parents and the land they have worked so hard to cultivate.
Weather insurance may make his job, and the job of countless farmers like him, easier in the years ahead. The initiative is now set to expand into three new countries with the help of the World Food Programme. And its focus has broadened to promote a variety of tools that will help rural families build their resilience including access to credit, the encouragement to save, and steps to reduce the risks of disaster.
]]>Unfortunately, that’s just what happened in September and October 2010. Abdoulaye N’Dao, a gregarious retired electrician with grey dread locks says the flooding in 2010 “was the most difficult compared to earlier ones… there was a lot more water.” He says his house had water up to his ankles in some of the rooms; he and his extended family of 25 people were bailing water out of the house and its courtyard for days. “Maybe crocodiles and frogs can live like that,” he says months later sitting in his now drier courtyard, “but not people.”
The heavy rains of 2010 triggered the fifth year in a row of serious flooding in Pikine, and capped off one of the rainiest years for Senegal since 1971. Dakar got a total of 20 inches, more than twice the normal amount of annual rainfall. Oxfam already was working with an organization in Pikine called Eau-Vie-Environnement (Water-Life-Environment, or EVE for short), and deployed $295,000 from Oxfam’s “Saving Lives 24/7 Fund” to help EVE respond.
The needs were urgent in Pikine: Oxfam and EVE estimated that 150,000 people in 3,600 families were badly affected, either completely displaced or living in flooded homes. With help from Oxfam, EVE planned an aggressive response, which included:
A fast survey of the worst-affected areas of Pikine, to identify families in the most need: EVE and Oxfam decided to focus its assistance on 2,812 families (roughly 30,000 people) primarily in seven of Pikine’s 16 districts.
Supporting 116 pumps, to remove water from 643 homes, 7 schools, and 18 mosques: EVE supplied fuel for pumps that moved more than a million cubic meters of water, which is something like 264 million gallons, enough to fill more than 400 Olympic swimming pools. This took 15,000 liters (about 4,000 gallons) of fuel. EVE worked with local authorities to help remove water from 228 roads in Pikine.
Removing waste: household garbage and other waste pose a severe health threat, so EVE supported the removal of 3,000 cubic meters (roughly 105,000 cubic feet) of garbage.
Delivering sand: to build up low-lying areas and shore up buildings at risk of being submerged, EVE delivered 10 truckloads of sand to each of seven districts in the city.
Promoting good hygiene: EVE distributed 2,806 hygiene kits with soap, bleach, clean buckets for storing water, mosquito nets, and water purification tablets. In follow-up visits, EVE estimated that 93.8 percent of the households it visited were using adequate methods to treat water, and that these and other measures likely helped reduce diarrhea cases from 3.12 percent of the households to 1.48 percent.
Direct financial support: With funds from Oxfam, EVE allocated 40, 000 CFA francs (about US$80) to more than 1,500 of the most severely affected households, so they could buy food, medicine, and clothing.
Abdou Diouf, the executive secretary of EVE, says Oxfam did not just provide some assistance during the crisis and then withdraw along with the flood water. “This is the first time since Pikine has experienced these floods, that an [international] organization has intervened during the flooding and has decided to continue intervening after the flooding,” he says during an interview in his office in Pikine in April. Diouf says EVE was able to use a small amount of money left over from a grant from Oxfam to deal with floods in 2009 to prepare for the 2010 rainy season. When the heavy rains hit in 2010, volunteer assessment teams were already in place and trained to take action.
Oxfam also is supporting EVE’s work in 2010 to help local governments to lobby for funding they can use to improve drainage systems, and keep the pumps running in chronically flooded areas of the city.
Diouf also says the cash transfers represented “… a revolution in our intervention this year. People really appreciated this; I had people coming to the office here to specifically thank EVE and Oxfam for the money.”
Each recipient got about 40,000 CFA francs, which is about US$85. It’s unusual for an aid organization to provide money instead of food, clothing, water, and other assistance. But it allows those affected by the flood to spend the money on what they need the most, rather than what an aid organization decides is best for them.
When Assiatou Niang got her cash, she immediately thought about food. “We had no food, so I bought a bag of rice,” she says. With 30 people living in the household, including most of her nine children as well as those of her injured sister, food was a priority. “I also needed cement to repair the house, and I needed money for daily expenses around the household.” Niang is 58, and recently widowed. The cash helped her feed her family and cover other expenses for about a month over the winter.
Distributing cash is also economically efficient, according to Isaac Massaga, Oxfam’s program officer based in Dakar. “If you distribute rice in a community, you are preventing the local dealers from selling their own stock,” he says. “By helping people access food in the local market, we also help suppliers, and at the same time it helps maintain the market.”
EVE and Oxfam found a credit union that supervised the distribution of the funds to only those with vouchers provided by EVE according to the results of its household surveys. EVE transferred more than US$130,000 to families in Pikine.
]]>Their mission? To build some of the 700 latrines Oxfam is helping to fund in the Petite Riviere area of the Artibonite province, where the deadly waterborne disease first broke out in October. It has now reached every province in the country, aided in its rapid spread by Haiti’s poor infrastructure: 50 percent of Haitians don’t have access to clean water, and more than 80 percent don’t have latrines.
For some of the families in this rice-growing region, that’s about to change. The latrines are part of a multi-pronged effort, including a public health education campaign, Oxfam has launched to help 125,000 people in this area stop a disease that hadn’t surfaced in Haiti since 1960. By the end of November, cholera had already sent more than 34,000 people to the hospital and killed more than 1,750 across the country.
Oxfam is also tackling the outbreak in Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second largest city, and in Port-au-Prince, the capital. There, intensive efforts to provide clean water, sanitation services, and public health education to people displaced by the January 12 earthquake has prevented any known cases of the disease from cropping up in the camps where Oxfam works.
Along with the household latrines in Petite Riviere and the construction of 50 school latrines, Oxfam is planning to drill 50 boreholes to be fitted with hand pumps and repair three water networks to provide people with greater access to clean water. But as important as those initiatives are, stopping cholera requires education—how to prevent it and how to treat it and to know to seek medical help when diarrhea and vomiting starts.
In coordination with the ministry of health, Oxfam has taken to the airwaves in Petite Riviere, broadcasting information on how to prevent cholera. It has trained government community health workers as well as peer educators on key messages and they are fanning out to spread the word. Equipped with battery-powered bullhorns, Oxfam health promoters are trekking through fields and across canals, sharing vital information with farmers as they work.
“Members of the community are very keen about what is being said,” said Mario Guerrero, the cholera program manager in Petite Riviere. “They have the feeling when they go into the trainings that there’s no way out if you get it.”
But after people have learned something about the disease and its transmission?
“They have the idea you can do something,” said Guerrero.
Doing something is what Erntz Jean and the team of volunteers were all about: With materials provided by Oxfam—wood for walls and a roof, and a slab to cover the pit—they were helping their neighbors build the first latrines many of them have ever had.
“That’s how we do things here,” said Jean, standing near the just-built wooden structure covering the latrine of Lozina Cena. “We help each other.”
The team picked up their tools and wove between the hedges and small houses to their next location: a narrow pit, six feet deep, just beyond the canopy of a giant mango. They got to work sawing two-by-fours, hammering, and preparing the frame for the housing of the latrine.
“Everybody here is very happy about this. Not only me—everyone in the area,” said Jean, who was among those who received materials to build a latrine. A carpenter by trade, he said he never had the money to build one before this.
“As a carpenter, if there was work, I’d be working and I’d have the money to do this. But there’s no activity here—no jobs,” said Jean.
Down the road, Eugene Joseph, a father of five children, had almost completed his new latrine. He spent a part of five days digging the hole—after starting in a different spot in his yard and hitting rock.
“Before, we didn’t use any latrines. We went in the bush or the street,” he said, noting the street—a rough dirt road—was about 40 meters from a canal leading to the Artibonite River from which his family pulls its drinking water.
“We were never sick,” said Joseph.
But the cholera outbreak scared him.
“We thought it would spread around our house,” said Joseph. And so with Oxfam’s help he decided to build the latrine.
“We’re proud of this,” he added.
A few houses away, Charite Estimable, echoed Joseph’s fear. But she wasn’t really worried about herself: She had been treating her water in a sand filter for most of the past year and had received some chlorine tablets from Oxfam to purify it further. It was her children—she has 11—whose health she was fretting over.
“I was afraid for my children in Port-au-Prince,” she said, noting that six of them were now living in the crowded capital.
Estimable’s neighbor, Altagrace Nicolas, also voiced confidence in her ability to keep cholera at bay.
“I’ve always been careful with myself and my children,” she said. “I’ve never been negligent. The reason it spread in some places is because people were not careful.”
To help everyone become more vigilant, Oxfam has been sending out teams for random monitoring of the water families collect and treat with the chlorine tablets the organization has been distributing.
Toting a bucket loaded with a couple of pitchers and a chlorine testing kit, George Van Vulpen and Elie Saint-Cyr, public heath engineers for Oxfam, hit the dirt roads of Akacite and Trankilite, two communities near the Artibonite River. Stopping at one house here, another there, they took a scoop of drinking water, tested it for residual levels of chlorine, and discussed the results with the householders—all with an eye toward encouraging proper use of the tablets. Had they been adding the tablets to the water? When? Were they dropping in the right number of them?
“For sure they’re using them,” said Van Vulpen, packing up the gear after the last sample of the day. “Most of them (the samples) have residual chlorine.”
That was a good sign—and so was the news he picked up along the way.
“In Akacite, they didn’t know of anyone who was sick anymore,” said Van Vulpen.
“We have a feeling that we are doing better than other parts of the country,” said Guerrero, the program manager for Petite Riviere. “Reported cases are going downward—slightly. But downward.”
]]>Dénéus works for Oxfam in the commune of Petit Rivière in the department of Artibonite in Haiti -- an area recently plagued by cholera. She sets out in the morning in a four-by-four truck, seeking out farmers in the fields who may not have heard the radio programs Oxfam has recently broadcast about proper hygiene and sanitation measures to stop the cholera, avoid infection, or the basic steps to help stricken people survive.
Spotting a crew of five men preparing a field to plant potatoes, she asks the driver to stop the truck, and she bounds out the back, moving across the road, down a well-worn path, jumping across an irrigation ditch, to the edge of the field.
It’s best for those accompanying Dénéus to stand behind her when she gets into action: she routinely uses a battery-powered megaphone to greet the farmers, and her words are loud and carry a long way. She asks them if they have already been trained on how to avoid and treat cholera and proper hygiene and sanitation practices. If they seem unsure or say no, she launches into the routine: she explains that cholera is a bacterial disease, can be passed by drinking contaminated water, and can be controlled by washing your hands before putting anything in your mouth. She encourages them to chlorinate water before drinking it, and to take early action to treat people showing symptoms of diarrhea and vomiting with an oral rehydration solution.
Some of the farmers stop, lean on their hoes, and listen, while others keep piling the moist earth into long mounds, in preparation for planting. But even the ones who keep working shout questions as they go: Where can we get soap? What about helping people who are sick? Where do we get the chemicals to treat our drinking water? Dénéus responds to all the questions: She refers people to centers where oral rehydration solution is available in their village, so they can ensure sick relatives can survive. And where to get one of the 35,000 cholera kits Oxfam is distributing, which have all the things they need to keep clean and treat their drinking water.
One topic dominates discussion in each of the 10 or so fields she sees this morning: she urges the farmers, “avoid going to the toilet right on the ground!” This is a major, longstanding problem in rural Haiti since well before the January 12th earthquake hit Port-au-Prince nearly a year ago: with no sewage system, running water, or proper latrines, many rural households must answer nature’s call in the open. Not all households have a latrine, so the farmers ask for advice: it’s simple, Dénéus says, dig a hole and bury the excrement. But Oxfam is also deploying a team of engineers to help farmers with simple materials to build their own latrines as an important step to reducing vulnerabilities to water-borne diseases like cholera. They plan to help install 700 latrines in Petite Rivière.
Dénéus is relentless, she repeats her messages with the same enthusiasm for each group she encounters toiling in the hot December sun, sweat running down the side of her face. “If you don’t think cholera can kill you, go to the hospital, go to the morgue, and see for yourself,” she tells any skeptical farmers.
Passing by a group she spoke with earlier in the morning now taking a lunch break, she stops and poses a question: “Did you wash your hands before eating?” Of course the answer is yes, but when she asks if they used soap, a few look down, but most of them make no excuses: soap is expensive and they are not accustomed to bringing it to the fields with them. Another form of behavior for Dénéus to change: With Oxfam distributing free soap, expense is not an issue in the short term, and eventually she hopes that farmers will improve their hygiene practices in the fields as well as at home.
After a productive morning tour of the fields, Dénéus stops by a few oral rehydration centers in the community of Marqès. These are simple tables stocked with clean water, mixing bowls and cups, and small packets of oral rehydration salts. These tables are staffed by trained volunteers who can teach people how to mix the life-saving solution, and ensure that anyone with a sick family member has access to this essential therapy. Cholera can kill in just a few hours by completely dehydrating a victim, so oral rehydration is essential. Dénéus checks the supplies, and coaches the volunteers on preparing solutions, how to answer frequently asked questions, and asks if there has been any activity at the centers as part of the monitoring Oxfam is doing in the community.
Dénéus has a law degree and is working for Oxfam because she says the right to life is one of the most basic. “I came here to save lives; that’s what Oxfam is doing here,” she says as she leaves the fields after a busy morning.”I’ve only been working here a month, but I’ve seen Oxfam doing good work, and it is saving lives. The rate of mortality is reduced, and the rate of people getting sick is also lower thanks to Oxfam.”
The work of Dénéus and other public health promoters is reaching out to 125,000 people in the region, using the radio and in-person visits to push key messages about good hygiene and sanitation habits. Mario Guerrerro, Oxfam’s program manager in Petite Rivière, says this effort is proving essential. “The training for people to change their habits is making the difference,” he says in his office, looking over the declining mortality figures in a report from the health ministry. “Once people understand, they do their best to treat their water.”
Toward the end of Dénéus’s rounds this one morning, she encounters nearly 40 farmers in a relatively small area she can hit in one stop. She moves through her presentation, answers a few questions, and concludes her visit with a phrase, a promise, and a wish: “Zero cholera!” she shouts, her final words to the farmers.
]]>We know some aid, including from Oxfam, has been getting through in recent weeks and months. But we also know the international aid effort has been too slow – funds from donors have been committed late, and aid on the ground isn’t coming through fast enough. As the people here face their toughest three months until harvest time in October, there’s a desperate need for international political engagement to ramp up the speed and the scale of the response.
In Niger’s capital Niamey, a gentle-seeming city of sandy-mud colored low houses and a population of around 800,000 people, there are few immediate signs of the food crisis. There are small food stalls along many of the tree-lined, dusty streets and the “petit marche” – or small market – is crammed with stalls selling food and other items. But even in the capital, many people are too poor to pay for sufficient food and the picture in the countryside is much much worse.
We drove two hours from Niamey, along a rough dirt track through the semi-arid, mostly flat and desolate landscape. It’s stony and sandy with a few short dry-looking trees and bushes, though some are turning green where a bit of rain has started to fall. We see painfully thin cattle, goats and donkeys, their ribs visible as we drive by. Men, women and children are hard at work in some patches of land, planting seeds by hand to take advantage of any rain that has fallen. It’s hard work, and often undone again by sudden harsh desert winds.
We stop briefly in the main town in the area, Ouallam, and talk to a serious, welcoming official there, who explains that more than 200 of the 300 or so villages in this area are facing severe food shortages. Due to the drought, thousands of animals have died or are too thin to be sold for a decent price or even to provide a good meal for the herders.
The situation is as bad as the deep crisis of 2005, our host tells us—and worse, even, because people have less money now than they did then. But at least speculators have not managed to drive the prices as high as they did five years ago. And, importantly, this time around the new Nigerien government has recognized the crisis and invited donors and aid organizations like Oxfam to support them in tackling the problem. Now, some aid has arrived – but much more will be needed in the coming months.
Driving on to the nearby village of Tondi Kiwindi, we find a small muddy river flooding the road into the village. Our driver wades across to make sure our vehicle won’t get stuck and we plow through. Tondi Kiwindi is a small community of mud-brick rectangular houses, quiet in the midday heat. The local village leader welcomes us and tells us about the difficulties here and in the surrounding villages.
He talks about how many animals have died, about how little food villagers have, about the difficulties of surviving the next three months until the harvest. The rains here are a month late, though further north they have started.
The village leader thanks us for the work we’ve done with a local aid group to buy sick and thin animals at better prices than villagers can get in the markets, and to provide animal feed and other support such as cash for work programs. He tells us that the women, especially, have taken advantage of the opportunity to earn some income through the programs as many of the men have migrated away to towns to look for work. They’ll return to till and plant the fields when the rains start.
But when the rain really comes, says our host, the river we crossed to get into the village will rise and there will be no access to the community. Can we help, he asks us.
It’s a story across a lot of the region: rains are desperately needed to ensure a good harvest this year, but until October when the crops are ripe, rains can block access and make delivery of aid much harder or impossible. And the rains lower the temperature a little—bringing death to thousands of weakened animals.
In a five-mile ride across the desert from Tondi Kiwindi, we come to a smaller village called Ko Kaina. The situation we find here is utterly desperate: The villagers talk to us of famine and question whether they can survive to the autumn.
We sit with four women who tell us they have nothing left to eat at all. They say that this year is especially bad. Last year at least the animals had enough to eat, but now the cows and goats are dead or dying. In hard times, their tradition is to share—neighbors helping neighbors—but now no one has anything to share.
“Everyone is down, down, down,” they say. “Our stomachs are empty.”
Their last source of food is a small, hard round green pea called “wanza.” It has a bitter taste, but villagers eat it when there is nothing else to consume. To find the wanza, the women set out from the village at 5 a.m. walking miles in their hunt. They ask me to taste one of the peas to see how bitter and sour it is; the unpleasant taste stays in my mouth for an hour. The peas first need drying in the sun then soaking several times in water before they become at all possible to digest.
They show us their only other food – a small bowl of cooked leaves from short small trees that grow in the dry earth nearer to the village. A woman puts a small amount in her mouth and mimics being sick, to show me how ill and malnourished they are on this diet. A short distance away, a small group of children stares at us hoping, I think, that we have brought relief. They are thin and listless.
The women explain that their animals have been weak and dying for months now and no longer produce milk. Some are even too thin to slaughter for food. A few days back, the women tell us, the villagers killed one weak calf before it died. They needed it for food. But four children became ill from eating the meat and had to be taken to a larger village nearby for medical attention. That cost money the families didn’t had and had to borrow—leaving them in debt, too.
People are so weak, the women explain to us, that after a few minutes working in the fields – vital work – they are already too tired to keep going.
“We are weak and dying like our animals,” they tell us. “If it goes on like this, some of us will die and some God will keep alive ‘til the next harvest.”
Oxfam has launched an emergency program to provide support to 800,000 people across Niger, Mali, and Chad. In Niger, the organization is helping 400,000 people by distributing food and supplies to the poorest households. Oxfam is also buying weak livestock at above-market rates to help herders who need to sell some of their animals. Meat from the livestock is being distributed to some of the most vulnerable households. In Mali, the organization will help 200,000 people by distributing food as well as fodder for livestock. And in Chad, distributions of food and seeds are accompanying agriculture support projects, with a goal of helping 200,000 people.