 "Photo: Karel Prinsloo/The Associated Press")
DELA, Kenya — When 64-year-old Jimale Irobe was a young man, he guided his herds of cows and camels through knee-high grass.
These days the scrubby blades barely reach his ankles even in the rainy season, and there is never enough grass to go around. The cattle cannot feed, and the nomadic families that depend on them for milk and meat cannot survive.
So Irobe scrapes out a living by selling charcoal made from burning the trees in the fields where his father’s herds once grazed.
“Now there are many people and the rains are not coming,” said Irobe, whose wisps of beard can’t conceal gaunt cheeks.
The traditional way of life for Kenya’s roughly three million nomads is rapidly giving way under the pressures of increasingly severe and frequent droughts, coupled with a rapidly rising population. In one particularly drought-prone district in Kenya, up to a third of the herdsmen have had to settle permanently because they have lost so many animals.
As they gather in one place, they strip the nearby land of trees and grass to make houses. Their few remaining animals consume the last blades of grass. Eventually, as has happened in the northern village of Dela, there is just a cluster of tired, hungry people in the sand waiting for aid.
Instead of their traditional grassy huts among thorn bushes and the spires of termite mounds, the nomads live in makeshift settlements where the only shelter is domes of twigs covered in scraps of cloth and plastic. Instead of roasting a goat by the campfire, more and more of them rely on handouts from foreign charities.
“Write my name down,” 70-year-old Halima Haroun implored an Associated Press journalist in the northern Kenyan town of Dela, thinking registration for aid was taking place. She pinched a withered arm to show how thin she is.
Arid northern Kenya has always suffered cyclical droughts, but Dela residents say the dry spells are becoming longer and more frequent. A 2006 study by Christian Aid in neighboring Mandera district found that droughts had increased fourfold in the last 25 years. At the same time, the region’s population has increased fivefold since the 1960s.
The report referred to the nomads as “climate change canaries,” noting their existence in some of the world’s harshest and driest terrain makes them the group most immediately vulnerable to small fluctuations in temperature and rainfall. A third of pastoralists in the Mandera region had already lost their herds and had moved to settlements, the report said.
