Medical supplies being unloaded at K50 airport.
ICRC/P. Yazdi
Mark Snelling of the British Red Cross muses on his recent visit to drought-hit Somalia, where rains have finally begun to fall.Day 2
A valuable skill for any aid worker is the capacity to absorb competing and incompatible realities. Early this morning we sat in Nairobi airport, watching the tourist throng - jet-lagged on the way in, sunburned on the way out. Two hours later, our Red Cross flight lands at K50, a sun-blasted, flyblown airstrip just beyond the southern suburbs of Mogadishu. No souvenirs here.
My first expectations are defied before we even land. We fly in over the Juba River, which looks full almost to the point of bursting its banks. The landscape around it is vivid green. "Lots of rain," beams a Somali Red Crescent worker and fellow passenger.
Uncomfortable as it is to admit, the small part of me looking for an easy, ready-made story feels a pang of disappointment. I have always tried to resist the standard angles of starving, skeletal children. Disaster pornography is rarely a useful contribution to understanding. Nevertheless, it's clear that this is not going to be straightforward.
We're met at the airstrip by Mohamed Ibrahim Dualeh, one of the 13 field officers who form the backbone of the ICRC operation around Somalia. I met him four years ago on a field trip to Mogadishu. It's wonderful to see a familiar face, here of all places, and he greets me warmly. But it's clear times have been hard.
Fighting in Mogadishu between Islamic militias and a coalition of powerful warlords has resulted in some of the worst clashes in the capital in a decade. On the back of the drought, the renewed violence has come at a bad time.
To the north and northwest of us lie the regions of Bakool, Hiran and Galgadud, bordering Ethiopia. In a normal year, pastoralists pass back and forth across this frontier, heading for areas where rain has replenished pasture land. Since rains failed on both sides last year, they have had nowhere to go.
To the east lie Bay and Middle Juba, Lower Juba and Gedo. A mixture of farmers and cattle herders live here, dependent for their income on the cattle trade across the border with Kenya. But when the rains failed in northeastern Kenya too, the livestock market collapsed.
We're headed south into Lower Shebelle region, which lies between the Juba and Shebelle rivers. It used to be the breadbasket of Somalia, but the more fertile riverine farming land has turned it into a destination for thousands of people who simply abandoned their homes, farms and decimated herds, fleeing both the drought and the continued fighting between Somalia's warring clans.
We set off on the road south followed by a Toyota pick-up carrying our guards - 13 men in all, packing an impressive collection of AK-47s and Russian PKM belt-fed machine guns. Somalia and Chechnya are the only two areas in the world where the ICRC employs armed protection. Given the threat of kidnapping and robbery, it's too dangerous to take chances.
The ICRC, which has been operational in Somalia since the late 1970s, earned widespread respect in the country for its flexible and effective response to the 1992 famine. But deteriorating security forced it to relocate its Somalia delegation to Nairobi in 1994.
Since then, it has come to rely ever more on field officers such as Dualeh. Their intimate knowledge and far-reaching contacts with every sector of Somali society - from warlords and clan elders down to community groups - yield a unique level of access.
After about five hours on what's left of the road, we reach Brava, once a key port on the Arab trading route between Oman and Zanzibar. Much of the handsome Swahili architecture remains, together with the ruins of Italian colonial buildings.
We're received by Abdullahi Halane. He was the district commissioner in the Barre government and somehow remained at his post despite the collapse of the government. He now acts as a local leader, trying to provide some form of authority in a community left entirely to its own devices.
He estimates that about 20,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) have arrived in Lower Shebelle region since the end of last year, placing a heavy burden on host communities already weakened by soaring food prices and a collapsed livestock market.
"Week after week, the number of drought IDPs is increasing. But the farmers will have no food until the harvest, and the pastoralists' animals are weak and producing no milk," he tells us.
To read Mark's Day 1 blog, click here.
To read Mark's Day 3 blog, click here.
To read Mark's Day 4 blog, click here.
