Supporter: Erin Gray

When drought hits and families are struggling to survive, the solutions don’t always have to be complicated or expensive. As I learnt from our team in Ethiopia last year, something as simple as a sack can mean the difference between hunger and happiness for a farming family.

Our team has been helping communities in Ethiopia since the first signs of drought began more than two years ago, bringing fresh water, food, medicine and supplies to those who need them most. But where a few crops can still grow, in the Oromia Region on the edge of the dry zone, our team has also found a straightforward way to increase harvests and give families more food to go around.

When maize and sorghum crops are harvested, farmers traditionally store them in pits dug below ground. The grains are used to make injera pancakes, the staple diet for most families in this part of Ethiopia, so it’s important that they last as long as possible. But drought makes for a meagre harvest to begin with, and pests, bugs and mould all take their toll, leaving up to 40 per cent of the harvest ruined.

Last year our local staff decided to find a way to stop so much of the harvest going to waste.

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Change was a theme that kept cropping up during my visit to Myanmar earlier this year. The changes the country has seen since my grandfather lived there in the 1940s. The changes Cyclone Nargis brought in 2008 to the thousands of families it affected. And the changes that Mercy Corps is helping people make in their own lives.

This month is certainly no different. With signs of political shifts in Myanmar, as well as historic visits from U.S. Secretary Hillary Clinton this week and UK International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell earlier this month — the people of Myanmar are set to see yet more change in 2012. There’s a sense of momentum building, and the words of Hla Nu, a 49-year-old grandmother I met earlier this year, seem more apt now than ever.

Hla Nu owns a tiny noodle shop in a remote village. She spoke to me between serving customers and shooing her grandchildren out of the way. When I asked her how her life had changed over the past few years, see cackled and chided me: “Things are always changing,” she said. “Sometimes for good, sometimes not. We can’t ever know what’s next. We can only look forward.”

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At only 18, Saadia Farah is one of the many thousands of mothers that Mercy Corps is helping survive the drought crisis in East Africa.

Her story is hard, but unfortunately far from unique. She lives in the tiny village of Bilil Burbur in northeastern Kenya, in an area scorched by the drought and more than 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the nearest water source. Her children — one-year-old Amina and three-year-old Abdihakim — were shy, quiet and lethargic at her side as she talked.

“Life is very difficult for us now. The drought has taken everything we had. My husband goes away for weeks at a time with the few goats we have left, to find water and food for them. Sometimes he is gone for a very long time. Mostly I spend all my time just waiting for him to come back and worrying about what we will do. It is very hard.

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Once upon a time in northeastern Kenya, there was a huge stretch of land called Wajir. In the language of the people who lived there, that name itself meant ‘Once upon a time...’

Once upon a time, the land in Wajir was green, the rains came often and life was good.

Grandmother Halima, her son, his two wives and their seven children travelled far and wide with their camels, donkeys and more than 300 goats. Though they journeyed many miles and three of Halima’s grandchildren were born unable to walk or talk, they were happy. The children rode on the camels and they all kept moving, never settling in one place and enjoying the freedom to go where they liked. The family had milk to drink and meat to eat and life was good, just as it had been for generations before them.

But then, one day the rains stopped.

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These are the children of Qaraa. Covered in dust, thin and dazed, they are on the brink.

They and their families were once nomads, travelling with their animals from place to place. But two months ago they stopped where they found themselves, eight miles from the nearest water point on a dusty roadside, because they couldn’t continue any longer.

The last of their cattle and camels had died. They were too weak to continue and simply had no place else to go. They stopped out of desperation, abandoning the only life they knew, with no means to provide for themselves and no alternative.

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