Supporter: Bija Gutoff

Our programs in Ethiopia address harmful traditional practices such as female genital mutilation. Photo: Berehanu Eshete/Mercy Corps

Discussions include community members, traditional institution leaders, and local government leaders — both men and women. Photo: Berehanu Eshete/Mercy Corps

In many places around the world, women have less visibility, power and status in their communities than do men — an imbalance that makes women more vulnerable to threats, coercion and abuse. Violence against women can be sexual, physical, emotional or economic. Because it arises from power differences based on gender, it's called gender-based violence, or GBV. (Men and boys can be victims of GBV too, but the vast majority of victims are women and girls.)

The risk of GBV increases during conflicts, emergencies and natural disasters — the very environments in which Mercy Corps works — because these crises cause social structures to break down, making women even more vulnerable. Mercy Corps takes very seriously its responsibility to mitigate the risks of GBV and protect people in the communities we serve.

As part of our agency-wide effort to ensure that all our programmes carefully consider issues of power, vulnerability and GBV, we recently sent GBV specialist Kevin McNulty to observe our programmes in the Horn of Africa.

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Ibrahim Sirat, field supervisor for Mercy Corps' drought response programme in Wajir, NE Kenya. Photo: Bija Gutoff/Mercy Corps

Yesterday I wrote to our supporters about my recent trip to Kenya and Ethiopia, where people are suffering the terrible effects of the worst drought in 60 years. Soon after the email went out, I got this message from Ibrahim Sirat, field manager of Mercy Corps' drought response in the Wajir area of NE Kenya. Ibrahim and I worked together during my visit. His message reminds me that a crisis like this is never simple. Rain alone does not solve all the problems; in fact, it creates new ones.

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We’re outside the Mercy Corps office in Gashamo, Ethiopia – a bone-crunching nine hour drive from Jijiga, the regional capital. It’s early in the morning, and the noisy generator is cranking out its last few minutes of power before we shut it down for the day. Here we only have the electricity we create with our own generator, and that only at night. There’s no cell service, no internet. The guys who work in our office here are at the front lines of Mercy Corps’ work to ease hunger and suffering in remote rural Ethiopia. They make do with very little in the way of comfort. The only critters that seem to thrive in this environment are the cockroaches: I’ve never seen bigger ones.

Our team is loading up the jeep with the weekly allotment of supplies for the mobile health clinic site we’ll be visiting today: antibiotics, analgesics, deworming medicine, vitamin A (a common deficiency), soap, mosquito nets for pregnant and lactating women, cough syrup, fortified cereal, Plumpy’nut, cooking oil.

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Mercy Corps cash for work project at Camp Idle (eed-lay), near Gashamo, we are paying workers to build water storage facility, will hold 200,000 liters to supply an entire village, build resilience to future droughts. Photo: Bija Gutoff/Mercy Corps

On the road halfway between Gashamo and Jijiga, we spent the night with a local family. As we sat and talked on the front stoop, the evening was pleasant, the full moon bright. Then in a matter of an hour or so, I watched the clouds roll in and the stars wink out. By the time I bedded down, rain was drumming hard on the roof. It was a wonderful sound.

So does that mean the drought is over?

Not by a long shot.

I talked with several of my Mercy Corps teammates to get a clearer picture of the cycle here. “We are hearing about some scattered rain in parts of Ethiopia,” said Mohammed Sheikh Osman, the head of our Jijiga office. “So for the time being, we can stop trucking water to Gashamo, which has been a real hotspot of the drought. As of Tuesday in that area, people have adequate water to drink.”

But in three areas in the southern region of Oromia, where there is no rain yet, or where slight scattered rains are not sufficient, we are continuing to truck emergency water.

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When Istohil Sheik Ahmed Abdi brought her 9-month-old son Sahane to the Mercy Corps mobile clinic in her area, she hoped to learn why he was so weak. The baby cried constantly, was vomiting and refused to nurse. He had a high fever.

Istohil and her family live as pastoralists, relying on their animals for milk and income. The drought had killed all their livestock except one camel. They were so poor that Sahane had no clothes. He weighed less than seven pounds.

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