Aragged group of men, women and children emerge from their aqals, the round temporary shelters made from a few bent branches, planted in the midst of scrub and acacia trees in sub-Saharan plains.
The Calvin Klein and Nike labels on the men's fake designer T-shirts mock their desperate circumstances. Only a few children have the energy to come forward and meet the visitors from the charity Concern.
ILLUSTRATION MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
This is Barwaqo village which houses around 250 families displaced by floods that have pushed the Shabelle river, south west of Mogadishu in Somalia, some 12km beyond its banks, engulfing hundreds of homes and tens of thousands of hectares.
The immediate cause is almost twice the seasonal fall of rain. However, these families are also the victims of a civil war that began in 1991, with the overthrow of the dictator Siad Barre -- a civil war of which the world has largely grown tired and forgotten.
It has been on hold for the last two years while the provisional federal government in Nairobi consider peace talks involving all the feuding clans.
This has led to an uneasy peace between the warlords who have carved up the country. But that doesn't help the people of Barwaqo.
In the absence of any government or infrastructure they look to Concern for aid through the provision of emergency kits, which includes items such as plastic sheeting to cover their shelters and cooking pots.
"The [Barre] government had a department which removed the silt from the river and ensured it had a capacity to carry the water," said Mohamed Mahamud Rirash, an agronomist working with Concern.
"Another problem is that farmers themselves sometimes deliberately cut the riverbank to get water for themselves and finally maybe farmers pay some gatekeepers, who control levels, to keep the gates shut to ensure they can have some water for their land. All this leaves things in a state that, when the really heavy rains come, they are caught out."
It is hard to overstate the devastation caused by the war: Famine in 1992, as well as the war, killed around 600,000 of Somalia's 9.8 million population. No one really knows exactly. Eighty percent of educated Somalis emigrated after the clan-based militias destroyed, dismantled or looted anything of value, removing every aspect of modern civilization, right down to the copper wiring beneath streets used for telephones.
For most of those years Concern stayed in Somalia. At first it was an emergency feeding program. Individual nurses ran feeding stations for 1,200 each. The conditions were extremely dangerous. A mother and her child were killed by a single stray bullet as she breastfed at one of the stations.
Concern also fell victim to the violence. In 1993 Valerie Place, a Dublin nurse, was shot through the heart in an ambush on the road to Baidoa. She was 23. In the mid-1990s, as the security situation grew gradually worse, Concern sought to help return those displaced by the war. But in 1995 when the UN military mission, Unsom, retreated leaving many dead, Concern was forced to suspend its activities. It returned to help in 1997 following the devastating El Nino floods when tens of thousands were displaced from their homes.
Gradually, the main focus of Concern's work has changed from emergency aid to development, providing an infrastructure of support in the absence of government.
The aim is for sustainable development that concentrates on the poorest of the poor. These people have no reserves and the tiniest change in weather, the failure of a crop, or a fresh bout of fighting makes them immediately vulnerable.
Concern is concentrating on the Lower Shabelle region where agriculture has traditionally been paramount and even now, with thousands and thousands of hectares lost to scrub and acacia trees, accounts for an estimated 54 percent of the country's agricultural production.
The political and economic instability has brought low the most self-sufficient farmers. Concern's goal is to bring some security to their livelihoods, improving techniques, restoring canals, water gates, and to help build self-supporting farmer associations, particularly focusing on the role of women, especially those who head the household because of the death of their partner.
They have helped start five women farmers' associations in the Lower Shabelle region. Each one has 20 women and more than 90 percent are widows. At Twofiiq in the Kunturwarey district, the charity, which has also helped build a school in the village, provides seeds to the association for five cash crops: Onions, tomatoes, lettuce, sweet peppers and carrots.
The women toil in the broiling sun, backs bent, feet bare, working for hours at a stretch with a mattock, for most, the only tool for every job. Between them they have more than 100 children to support and range in age from 20 to nearly 60.
Fatuma, 40, a mother of six, was widowed seven years ago. "We want to reach a goal to help ourselves. The men say we can't produce but we don't care. We want to produce something and we will."
But seeds are not their only concern. Ishaaden, 55, a widow with six children explains what a huge difference a simple mosquito net would make to their lives in a village with a high incidence of malaria. "I am working here because my husband died and my boys are gone. But it's hard to work during the day if we are kept awake at night by the mosquitos."
Khadija is the guddomniye, or head, of the association. She was left with eight children to fend for after the death of her husband.
"I once had my own farm but couldn't manage once my husband died. We used to have a donkey cart but it was stolen. Now I carry everything on my back. The best thing Concern has done is to teach us that we can do something for ourselves," she said.
Elsewhere in the district, Concern has sought to persuade farmers that to go forward they must, in one sense, go backwards. "Most places in the world went hoe, animal and then tractor," said Abdullahi Abdi Yarrow, also an agronomist.
"Somalia jumped from the hoe to tractor but now we are trying to persuade the farmers associations to move to oxen for ploughing."
There are very few tractors still available in Somalia, spare parts are extremely difficult to get and the cost of hiring them is high for impoverished farmers.
Moalin Abdullahi is a 44-year-old Koranic teacher with six children who farms around three hectares of land on his own behalf near the village of Mureykan. He plants maize, sesame and beans. Abdullahi drove a tractor for 20 years but he is now convinced that for sustainability the oxen are better. "If you hire a tractor you have it once -- oxen you have all the time. Tractors are very heavy and compact the soil, and the roots find it difficult to get in. Following oxen you have time to weed as you plough."
It is a matter of pride to Concern that all their staff who work in the country are Somalis. Abdi Rashid Nur joined Concern just after the charity arrived in Somalia 12 years ago to tackle the famine that accompanied the civil war. He now heads the team of 40 and has no doubts about how much worse things would be if they were not there.
"When you see a child who has been saved at a feeding station in 1992 and you then see that same kid coming through a school that Concern helped build and know he is now ready to go to university, you know you have made an impact. Long-term development is not about two to four years -- but 10 to 15 years."
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry