“We are currently not even able to take our children to school because we used to sell our livestock to pay the school fees and buy uniforms. But now we can’t afford to pay the school fees so the children stay and help us to search for fruit.”
Ekiru Longolea is about 80 years old, with a family of 8 children to support, and lives in Isiolo County in Kenya. He used to have a large herd of livestock, which have either been killed by the drought or stolen. All he has to live on now is wild fruit but that’s becoming increasingly difficult to find.
Ekriu is often forced to walk up to 10 miles to collect water for his children.
“The droughts have been constantly coming, we have lost our livestock and some of the villagers are not taking their children to school. We eat acacia pods and other wild fruits that we have to boil for a long time before we can eat. This has become our way of life. Recently we were given some new animals by the church but we have lost a lot of them to the current drought.”
“Over the past 7 years the droughts have become more frequent and more severe and we have had no time to recover. Every time a drought comes, the few animals that survive are soon hit by another drought. This has caused the livestock figures for each one of us to go down. The current drought started about two years ago and before we recovered it is here with us again. That’s why we are so badly affected.’
Firstly, it has wiped out our livestock, which forms the basis of our economy. Secondly, because it there isn’t enough rain, even those few people who used to practice subsistence farming cannot grow any food so there is nothing to rely on at all. To make things worse, because of poor rains even the wild fruits are becoming scarce. The trees no longer produce as many fruits as we used to get before. There is also competition from wildlife that has to survive from the same fruits, so this makes our situation very difficult.