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ansgar-martinsson · 4 years

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Fair Winds and a Following Sky - Part One

Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, United Airlines Ticketing Area, Dallas, Texas, 3:32 pm, 18 July

Her name was Sháńdíín. In English -- Sunshine.

Yet, her mother, when she spoke English, refused to use that particular translation. According to her mother, the name, especially when shortened to Sunny, was too “fucking hippie-ass” for her tastes. Her mother had once said that the name reminded her of blonde, suntanned white girls in bikinis, feet full of sand, hearts full of selfishness, and heads full of nothing but air.

Therefore, when her family had moved to Flagstaff, and it was time to register for school, her mother translated her only daughter’s name from the Navajo to Fair Sky, giving her also the day to day name of Anna. Not quite dazzling, not quite as brazen, kind of boring really - yet pleasant, beautiful, calming.

But calm was not at all what Sháńdíín was feeling at the moment. Far from it. Totally the opposite.

She hadn’t slept a full night in at least two weeks, although it felt like two months. Two weeks...two weeks full of anger and fear and out and out turmoil, of fits and starts of dreams, both nightmarish and full of longing. She’d dreamed the eagle form of her dead father, the piebald rabbit that was her dead mother. These little family visits were not pleasant ones, full of terror and blood and pulpy, torn flesh. She’d dreamed the haunted eyes and hollowed cheeks of her dead husband, of blazing fire, of screaming, dying horses, of police sirens, of the loss of her... of her....

Of everything.

But she’d also dreamed... of him. Him. The man who had stayed with her. The man who had left her. The man who comforted her, the man who had wounded her spirit from no fault of his own. And oh, those dreams. The only good - no, wonderful - dreams her spirit had given her those nights. Yet, by doing so her spirit had been cruel. So cruel. The fucking cruelest.

Anna shifted in her seat, the beaded embellishment on her back pocket scraping against the hard plastic chair. She swore under her breath as she shifted forward, leaning her elbows on her knees, her fingers starting once again to work over the keyboard of her battered, ancient laptop.

She sighed, having all but emptied the last of her bank account in a wire transfer to her lawyers. “Some help you were,” she muttered, clicking the mouse with an angry snap of her index finger. “Take my money and fuck off. Never want to see you assholes again.”

Sitting back in a huff, she crossed her arms over her chest, bounced her knee beneath the table, and stared at the legal invoice on the screen. Time spent for phone calls, court appearances, research, all for what? For nothing. She’d hired those goons to defend her on the advice of her friend, Sheriff Nappa - or so she’d once thought he was her friend.

Things had been different that morning. Harry Nappa was no friend that day. He drove his squad up to her ranch house -- correction -- what WAS her ranch house, lights flashing in her driveway. With a scowl, he served her with a writ. A writ, signed by the Honorable Judge Laura Kerwin in the case of Travidge Property and Mortgage, LLC v. Travidge, ordering her to immediately vacate, to wit, the heretofore foreclosed upon and sold premises forthwith, no later than ten o’clock AM on this date of June 18 anno domini blah blah blah...

In other words, in spite of her lawyers’ lame-ass efforts, she’d had no more than an hour to pack her things and get out of the house before the not-so-smiling and not-so-friendly Sheriff Nappa cuffed her ass and threw her in jail.

She’d complied, but she’d had no choice. She knew -- she couldn’t afford bail, couldn’t afford her lawyers, and frankly, she’d run out of ammunition, both figuratively and literally. Besides, the thought, the very thought of confinement, of a lack of freedom, made her spirit panic, made her shudder to the core. She’d fought long enough, her mother had said in a dream. She’d fought valiantly, and sometimes, her father had said, it was okay to lose.

Lose one battle, win another. When the hogan door closes, the roof opens. Or something all esoteric and Navajo-ey like that.

But now, she couldn’t even see the battle in front of her. There was nothing -- a mist, a dust, a cloud of smoke, but no fire to warm her, no spirit to guide her. She, for all intents and purposes, had nowhere to go. Out of Nowhere and into nowhere. She’d laughed -- a dry, mirthless chuckle at her mind’s joke, but it wasn’t funny.

Not funny at all.

Her parents were dead, she’d no siblings, no aunts, uncles, cousins, no one. Since her father had left the Reservation when she was a small child, she knew no one in the tribe, and besides, Monument Valley was hundreds of miles away.

Her family by marriage, the Travidges, had wanted nothing to do with her, not since the death of their golden boy, Charles, her husband. The Travidges had, ever since Charlie had announced their engagement, made her feel unwelcome, unwanted, as if she didn’t belong in their world of wealth, swimming pools, big blonde hair, botox, and power -- of high powered cattle trading and property speculation.

Really, she knew she didn’t belong, no matter what the Travidges thought.

In fact, it was the Travidges, she’d suspected, who had set fire to her barn, killing her horses and cattle, destroying the one source of steady income she’d had - that of boarding and training. She’d had no proof, and, of course, she’d had no insurance. From that day on, her finances had spiraled out of control - one day, she couldn’t pay her cable bill, then her credit account at the Farm Store, next, her truck insurance bill, her grocery bill, and then finally, her mortgage.

Her mortgage, which was held, of course, by -- you guessed it -- the Travidges.

So, yeah, can’t really go knocking on Big Mamma T’s door, can I?

And so, for lack of a better place, she found herself at the immense, bustling international airport, a drive of four hours from her erstwhile home, peering up at the departure display.

Eenie, meenie, miney, mo.... where to go, oh where to go.

She had two hundred and two dollars left in her bank account, and a credit card - eight thousand four hundred dollars of credit remaining on it. That morning, in her hurry, she’d managed to take most of her clothes and her toiletries, stuffed willy-nilly into Charlie’s old suitcase. She’d also remembered to take her documents, including the only-once-used passport, which was now slid into the inside pocket of her woven handbag.

The blue and white display shifted momentarily, the list of flights shuffling down, adding more flights as the time ticked by. It was the third screen from left that had caught her eye, then - the screen where the cities and connections beginning with the letter S were listed.

Sacramento, St. Louis, San Diego, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Shanghai, Spokane, Stockholm....

Stockholm....

He was from Stockholm... or maybe just Sweden, but since Stockholm, from what she knew of it, was the largest city in that country, it was all she had to go on. But... him. Him. He’d visited her in her dreams these past few weeks, breathing in and breezing out. The memory of his smile, his touch, as clear in her mind as if he hadn’t left, as if he’d been sitting beside her day after day.

I wonder....

She shook her head upon a breathy, sardonic chuckle. “No way in hell,” she muttered to herself. “You’ve tried to find him for a year, what makes you think you’ll find him now? What makes you even think he’s in Stockholm? What makes you....”

She eyed her computer, still sitting open on the small table in front of her. It had been weeks, months since she’d tried to find him, since she scoured the search engines for his name, or what he’d told her was his name, and came up empty. She glanced at the departure monitors. The flight to Stockholm wasn’t set to leave for another four hours.

Maybe, just maybe....

She moused her browser open to Google, selected “news” and typed in her search.

Alan Easterberg Stockholm Sweden

Images of and news articles by the same Swedish magazine reporter popped up in her search, the same man who had kept getting in her way, the same man she’d run across every time she’d tried to find some presence of Alan online. Albin Easterberg was the name, and from the images of the man, Albin was definitely not Alan.

She sighed, her mouth twisted, head shaking in disgust, in annoyance at that flicker of hope, of that childish, asinine wanting. She berated herself, her anger and self-loathing communicating through the harsh swipes of her finger against her mouse’s scroll wheel. “Fucking stupid girl,” she muttered “stupid girl.”

And then she saw him. Or at least, in the tiny Google thumbnail, what she thought might, just might have been him. Or at least, it was someone different than she’d seen in her past searches.

She clicked on the image, and it was brought into full view along the right side of the browser window. Still not enough, so she clicked on it again, and the browser took her to the underlying page from whence the image was pulled.

It looked like a news magazine from the layout, or maybe a blog, she couldn’t tell, given that the page was written in what she’d surmised was Swedish. Lots of umlauts and incoherent consonants and strangely shaped accents sprung from the page -- the language looked a lot like her native Navajo in a way.

She leaned forward and studied the man in the image. He was tall, his velvet tuxedo hanging perfectly off of his frame. It was a candid photo, one of the man standing at a bar, his shine-shod foot casually perched on the brass rail beneath, an expensive drink in his hand. His face was in three-quarters view, eyes a keen and knowing blue, nose long and blade-like, cheekbones high and defined, jaw a straightedge line embellished by a razor-precise goatee. His hair was combed back and pomaded, yet slightly overlong, strands of rebellious curls fighting for dominance at the back of his head.

He was looking down at the shorter man, the eponymous Mr. Easterberg, a wry quirk pulling at the corner of his straight, tight mouth. To Anna, not only was the man looking down at Easterberg, he was looking down upon Easterberg. It was unmistakable, the dislike in the man’s eyes, but, she thought she could see it because she knew him. She knew him, and she’d been witness that hidden glower in his eyes before.

Not directed at her, directed at Brian Travidge.

Directed at Brian Travidge right before the man had taken a massive swing and punched Brian Travidge’s lights out under the flood lights in Anna’s driveway, late at night, defending her honor against her former brother in law’s drunken advances.

She sat back in her chair, her mind and spirit a whirl. She flicked her gaze up to the departure screen, back to her computer, and back up again.

Her throat tightened and she swallowed hard, her heart pounding a tattoo in her chest. She read, or tried to read the date on the article’s byline.

“15 Juni.”

June 15, she thought, must be. Three days ago. The photo had been taken in Stockholm a mere three days ago....

Decision made, she nodded, reached out and traced a finger down the line of the man’s face. Her breath came ragged, her mouth suddenly parched. “That’s you, Alan,” she breathed. “Has to be you.” She read the name in the caption beneath the photograph. “Ansgar Martinsson,” she chuckled. “So, that’s your name. That’s who you are.”

But to her, he would, no matter what he called himself, always be her Hashke’ Náshdóítsoh. Her man who was like the mountain lion. Hers to name, hers to remember.

And maybe, hers to know once more.

And with that, Anna rose from her chair, packed up her computer and slung the bag over her shoulder. She snatched the handle of her suitcase and strode, the purpose and direction renewed in her step, directly to the United Airlines ticket counter.

“One way to Stockholm,” she said, and slid her credit card and passport over the counter.

#fair winds and a following sky

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newstfionline · 7 years

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Can famine be checked as Africa faces its worst crisis since the 1980s?

Peter Ford, Scott Peterson, Ryan Lenora Brown, CS Monitor, JULY 30, 2017

SIHANAMARO, MADAGASCAR--For as long as she can remember, Vaha Saajinuru, a wiry middle-aged woman with an expressive face, spent much of each day in exhausting drudgery, fetching water. Living on the parched, drought-stricken south coast of Madagascar, she had to make the journey four or five times a day: out of her village, down a cactus-lined dirt road, and across thorny grassland to a muddy water pit more than a mile from her home.

Then she’d walk back again, slowly, so that the water did not spill, a plastic bucket balanced on her head, a jerrycan in one hand and a granddaughter clinging to the other. Sometimes, when things were really bad, she and her family would drink what they call “chocolate water”--whatever they could scoop from potholes in the rust red clay roadway.

“We knew it wasn’t good for our health but we had no choice,” says Ms. Saajinuru.

Now she and her neighbors in Sihanamaro do have a choice as they gird themselves, like millions of others in Africa’s arid zones, to cope better with drought and the threat of famine. With help from UNICEF, they have installed seven community faucets around the village, each set in a cement trough and protected by a picket fence, to provide clean water pumped from a nearby well. “This has changed our lives,” Saajinuru says.

Madagascar’s brush with widespread starvation last year drew little attention from the rest of the world. But over the past 50 years other African countries have come to epitomize the dangers of drought and the tragedy of famine. Today, battered by global warming and civil wars, wide swaths of the continent again face an unprecedented crisis: In Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia, and across the Red Sea in Yemen, 20 million people face starvation, “barely surviving in the space between malnutrition and death,” in the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

Yet the threat many of these people face today may be less grave than it would have been for their parents and grandparents. Over the past two decades, African nations have learned valuable lessons about how to predict, if not prevent, droughts, and how to ward off famine by strengthening the defenses of the most vulnerable.

From Madagascar to Ethiopia to Somalia and beyond, governments, international aid agencies, and the villagers they help are building up “community resilience.” That’s the new buzzword in humanitarian circles: It is seen as key to ensuring that farmers and herders have something to hold onto when drought strikes, rather than cycling endlessly in and out of disaster.

Resilience is a big concept that works in little ways. It could be a water project such as Sihanamaro’s, ensuring that already malnourished children do not get sicker by drinking polluted water. It could be a public works venture in Ethiopia that pays villagers cash or gives them food to build roads or dig wells. Or it could be an experimental farm in Somaliland encouraging goatherds to diversify into growing food crops.

These initiatives won’t prevent drought, nor will they eliminate famine overnight. But by helping people withstand sudden shocks and contributing to longer-term development goals, they are saving lives.

In the meantime, there is a life in urgent need of saving at an emergency health center in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, a self-governing breakaway region of Somalia in the Horn of Africa. Nabhan Ismail, his eyes sunken and a feeding tube taped to his cheek, turns restlessly on his bed as family members take turns stroking his tiny body. The family made the journey to this center, run by UNICEF and the Somaliland Red Crescent, after waiting seven days to find a ride from their remote area 100 miles away.

“I am thinking about Nabhan’s health and praying to God that he will get better,” says Ismail Ibrahim, the boy’s teary-eyed young father. “I have never heard of a drought that claimed the lives of the livestock and the lives of people.”

He says “countless” children have died recently of hunger and disease in his remote home district 100 miles away. His herd of 100 sheep and goats has been reduced to just six animals.

Mr. Ibrahim is by no means alone. The United Nations warned recently that 6.7 million people are in urgent need of assistance in Somalia; 6 million people are in the same predicament in South Sudan; in Yemen, 7 million people are on the brink of famine.

“We stand at a critical point in history,” UN humanitarian affairs chief Stephen O’Brien told the UN Security Council in March. “Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations.” Four months later, the outlook is no less grim.

The crises in South Sudan and Yemen are almost entirely human-caused. They are the result of civil wars in which all sides destroy crops or steal livestock in punitive raids, forcibly confiscate food aid for soldiers’ use, and make it too dangerous for humanitarian workers to go to many areas.

But Ethiopia, Somalia, and Madagascar face a different problem: They are at the sharp end of climate change, which is disrupting rainfall and other weather patterns. The current drought in southeastern Ethiopia follows a dry period in the north, which in turn struck only a few years after the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa that brought famine to Somalia. It’s a succession of extreme weather events that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago.

“No rain, no water, no pasture, no milk, no food,” laments Halima Gawsole, a thin and muscular herder with hard eyes, listing the chain of misfortunes she has endured since the rains stopped coming in southern Ethiopia a year ago.

Now she and 30 members of her extended family are on the move, trudging down the road through a parched landscape, their last remaining possessions piled on the back of their sole surviving animal, a weary donkey. They had heard the government was handing out water and sacks of grain nearby and had come to see if it was true. “We have lost everything now,” says Ms. Gawsole.

Next door, Somalia is living through a drought that, residents say, is even worse than the one that killed 250,000 in 2011. It has forced hundreds of thousands of people from their grazing lands into makeshift camps with no sanitation, such as one on the outskirts of Burco, a desert town 110 miles east of Hargeisa.

A straggly collection of sticks and rags, the settlement--which residents ironically call “prosperity camp”--offers little protection from the oppressive heat and wind-whipped sand. The only relief is brought by a water truck that comes daily.

“Water is life, but what about food and something to cook it with?” asks Farah Robleh, whose veins stand out on his forehead above his gaunt, gray-stubbled cheeks. He once herded 200 goats and sheep and 20 camels. He has just 20 goats left. “I don’t think anyone can live here anymore,” he sighs. “We have no options. We are only waiting for help.”

In Madagascar, the large island off the southeast coast of Africa, the situation is less grim, but droughts that used to come in cycles are now semipermanent. In 2016 El Niño made the rains even more irregular, “and last year was the worst that I’ve experienced,” says Audin Rabemiandriso, the doctor who runs the health clinic in the dusty, ramshackle coastal town of Ambovombe.

Desperate to buy food, locals first sold their goats. Then they sold their prized humpback cattle. Finally, they sold their kitchen pots. There was nothing to cook, anyway, besides leaves and bitter cactus fruit.

Droughts are inevitable, and likely to strike more often and more harshly because of global warming. But famines are avoidable. It’s a question of doing the right thing. And, critically, of doing the right thing at the right time.

That’s why the UN and aid groups are increasingly unleashing a new weapon in their quest to prevent famine--warning the world early and often. In 2011, when a quarter of a million Somalis died of starvation, half of them had already perished by the time famine was officially declared. It was that tragedy that prompted the UN to sound the alarm in advance, last February, about the current impending disasters.

It worked, sort of. International donors stepped up quickly, and the famine that had been declared in two districts of South Sudan has been beaten back. Elsewhere in the country, though, the situation is worsening and a million more people need immediate aid now than in February.

In Madagascar the world reacted quickly to the creeping food crisis last year because international aid workers had long been present in the country, one of the poorest and least developed places in the world. UNICEF saw that food was growing alarmingly scarce as early as 2015, when government doctors and nutritionists carrying out routine health checks began reporting skyrocketing levels of child malnutrition.

Quickly, the agency expanded its nutrition programs to all 193 town and village health centers in the south, screening every child under age 5 and making sure the most malnourished were given high-nutrition peanut-based food supplements. By and large, they succeeded; few children died.

International agencies “were here, ready to go,” says Elke Wisch, UNICEF director in Madagascar, “and we switched gears into emergency mode in a timely fashion.”

To cope with hunger, aid groups are increasingly trying a novel tactic--handing out cash instead of food. In Yirowe, a drought-stricken village in Somaliland, cash transfers have been instrumental in giving locals the ability to hold out.

The goal is to keep people from leaving their homes and joining the flood of 740,000 internally displaced people who are straining international relief efforts. And it’s working. Not only have all of Yirowe’s 655 families stayed put, but they have welcomed 150 families from the nearby countryside.

Concern Worldwide, an Irish nongovernmental aid group, gave the village’s poorest families $65 a month for three months and double that in April. Cash handouts are an increasingly common way of giving aid in many parts of the world. “Cash allows the flexibility for beneficiaries to make empowered choices about what they need most,” says Erin Wolgamuth, Concern’s regional manager in Somaliland.

“Without this help ... we would not even be at a basic level,” notes Abdirizak Ayah Awad, the head of the village committee that chose the recipient families.

Patricia Soavenira has benefited from cash payments, too. She lives in a cramped, low-roofed thatched hut in Ankilimanara, a tiny village on Madagascar’s parched south coast. Ms. Soavenira is one of 55,000 mothers whose malnourished children make them eligible for a $10 monthly handout from a local nongovernmental organization.

Before the payments, Soavenira had sold everything her family owned except one pot and a spoon. Now she has bought five more spoons and another saucepan. She takes weekly trips to a market an hour’s walk away, where she buys rice, corn, and beans.

“Without the cash, we’d just be eating cassava leaves and wild cactus like last year,” she says.

In some cases, local villagers are appealing directly to individuals. Jamal Abdi Sarman, a senior UNICEF staffer in Hargeisa, is a member of a private WhatsApp group using mobile phones to spirit aid money to hungry Somalis.

“From Australia, from South Africa, from Istanbul and California the money goes into the same [bank] account in Burco,” a town in the heart of drought country, where it is used to buy food for the neediest families, Mr. Sarman says.

A handful of herders first sent out an SOS six months ago when their livestock began to die off. Since then, their WhatsApp group--christened Daryeel, which means “caring”--has gathered $255,000 from fellow clan members and other donors on five continents. It has paid for water trucks and packages of rice, dates, sugar, milk, and oil for nearly 1,000 families in 39 villages. But the benefits have spread much further.

Ununley is a tiny desert community of corrugated tin-roofed homes and rustic stick-frame shelters covered with sheets and blankets in Somalia. A handful of modest shops cling to the paved road that bisects the settlement and disappears into the unforgiving Somali moonscape. Ten families here received a share of the bounty that came in and have, in turn, shared it with their neighbors.

“Almost 100 families did not move because of the help for 10 families,” says Safiya Hassan Ibrahim, who distributes the aid with no-nonsense efficiency.

“The assistance came when we most needed it,” adds one recipient, Mohamed Farah. “It changed our lives--we would have died without it, just like our livestock.”

As much as these initiatives help, relief experts say that more “sustained resilience” programs are needed to prevent people from drifting into despair to begin with. Such efforts can take different forms. In Andahive, a village in southern Madagascar, resilience comes in the shape of a new sweet potato.

Prinu Rakutunirina, a leather-faced local farmer, has always grown sweet potatoes, but the traditional local variety was not ideal: It grew poorly in drought and the tubers went bad within weeks of harvest.

Last year he planted a new, more drought-resistant strain, introduced by agronomists with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). But it was no match for the dry weather: Starved of water, the plants withered, twice.

Maybe it was faith or maybe it was desperation, but Mr. Rakutunirina stuck with his experimental variety: He finally brought in a harvest last February.

And what a harvest it was. Yields were double what they used to be, he says, and the new sweet potatoes last for nearly a year. That means he can decide when he wants to sell them. He can also carry his family through the lean season, between harvests, when there is normally nothing to eat.

Rakutunirina was part of a pilot group using the new variety. “Now everyone wants to plant this type,” he says, though it will be a year until the 100,000 farmers using the improved shoots will have harvested enough to spread the variety across the dry south.

“If there is no rain for three months it does not matter how many high-yield seeds you plant,” cautions Jean-Etienne Blanc, an FAO fieldworker. “You’ll get a poor harvest. But farmers are learning about good-quality seeds and how to use them, and next year they will be seeking them out.”

Rural residents across northeastern Africa are also learning how better to conserve water. Consider the case of Mohamed Abdi Madar, a camel herder who roams the scrubland west of Hargeisa. He doesn’t live near a well, but he does now have access to an underground water tank that catches and stores rainwater. It was dug by locals and paid for by Concern.

“Leaving aside the livestock, even the people would start to die without this water,” says Mr. Madar as he pulls up a full bucket to give his two camels.

The concrete-lined tank, 40 feet long by 20 feet across and 10 feet deep, gathers rainwater channeled to it from higher ground and stores it under a sheet of corrugated iron to slow evaporation.

Without the tank, protected from animals by a thick ring of thorn bushes, herders would have been forced to head to a riverbed six miles away. “But we would have gone there only with hope,” says Madar: The riverbed is dry and “we do not have the power or the resources to dig out the water.”

Dependent on the supplies in the tank, Madar and his fellow herders are turning away from their ancestral nomadic lifestyle and taking up agriculture as a new source of sustenance. “It’s not optional, it’s mandatory,” says Mohamed Abdi Yusuf, an elder at another water catchment tank nearby. “Whenever people lose their livestock they start farming.”

Mr. Yusuf has identified a deeper shift that may have to occur if Somalis are to survive recurring droughts--a cultural one. Once upon a time, the camel was “as vital to life as the tendons in one’s back,” as an ancient Somali poet put it, “a living boulder placed by God in the wilderness.”

Today nomadism “is no longer tenable,” says Saad Ali Shire, Somaliland’s foreign minister. Since the 1950s his country’s population has risen sixfold and livestock numbers fourfold, burdening the land beyond what it can bear even when the rains come.

“If we want to keep camels and sheep and goats, then we must change the way we raise them,” Mr. Shire says.

That will mean staying in one place and growing animal feed alongside other crops, such as the vegetables that trainees are about to harvest at the Free Farmer School, 40 miles outside Hargeisa. Young citrus trees, sunflowers, onion, and garlic wave in the breeze. Local elders offer corn and watermelons as gifts to a visitor and emblems of their desire to learn a new lifestyle.

“We gave them seeds and tools to increase their resilience,” says Khaled Taib, a water expert with Concern, which set up the farm. “Now they need some knowledge.”

Modernization and development can help stem starvation as well. This has certainly been the case in Ethiopia, once a poster child for catastrophic famines such as the one that killed more than 400,000 people in 1984. Today, thanks to more than a decade of breathless economic growth, the country’s image is closer to matching that of its capital, Addis Ababa--gleaming, cosmopolitan, and boldly aspirational.

Indeed, Ethiopia has become a regional model for early famine warning and nimble response. This year the country has been plagued by the same drought as next-door South Sudan and Somalia but is experiencing nowhere near the suffering.

The 2015-16 drought in the north of the country “was at least as bad” as the 1984 drought, says Stein Holden, an Ethiopia expert at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in As, Norway. “But because the country is economically much stronger and more stable now, it has been able to provide a lot of the aid itself, without outside intervention.”

Contributing to Ethiopia’s success: a natural disaster management office that amasses stacks of early warning weather data, and a public works program in the lean season that pays poor Ethiopians in cash or food to build the kind of infrastructure that the country needs--water storage tanks, paved roads, and health posts.

“The system Ethiopia has is spectacular,” says Kelly Johnson, a World Bank social protection expert advising Addis Ababa. “It is beginning to serve as a model for other programs in Africa and around the world.”

Ethiopia’s success story is not a simple one. The country’s one-party government has instituted and maintains a firm grip on journalists and political opponents. Foreign aid workers are careful not to offend their hosts by speaking too openly of problems they find.

But, significantly, drought no longer necessarily means death in Ethiopia.

For other parts of Africa, that is, unfortunately, not the case. Despite the lessons learned about alleviating famine over the past quarter century, droughts still occur. For every relief effort that works, another falls short. Hunger still stalks villages.

But aid workers and local residents are getting better at blunting the effects of drought, saving lives as they do. Amid all the hardship, there are individual moments of triumph, too. Back in the emergency health center in Hargeisa, staffers have been working assiduously to save little Nabhan, the infant with the feeding tube. A week after being admitted to the center, nurses say he is on his way to recovery.

“We think he will survive,” says his joyful grandmother, Ardo Mohamoud. “We are so happy!”

#famine #climate change #African famine #Madagascar #Ethiopia #Somalia

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