Flooding & Drought in Northern Kenya. December 2006.

Following the floods many roads surrounding the town of Mandera, Northern Kenya, were submerged. They had only began to being passable a fortnight after the flooding. In December 2006, I flew into Wajir and other areas of Northern Kenya with the NGO Save the Children. The area had been cut off by road due to heavy flooding in the region. Following months of drought, common sense would have dictated that rainwater would have been beneficial to the 3.5 million in Northern Kenya said to be caught in the grips of famine. But the flooding had only exasperated already dire conditions there: By inundating the parched soil and displacing families and thereby creating more refugees. Refugees for whom it might be said, it was almost impossible to deliver humanitarian aid due to the impassable nature of the roads north from Nairobi. By the time we arrived in Wajir near the border with Somilia, the extreme heat had evaproated most of the water within a week. The stagnant pools left behind though had become breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitos. Cases of malaria and of toher water-borne diseases in the local hospitals were rising sharply. In an era of global warming with increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, it is hard to envisage an easy path out of the constant cycle of drought and flooding that perenially grips not just Northern Kenya, but an area extending all the way up to the Horn of Africa.