Above: Imagine walking six hours for a drink of water. Loko
Dadacha is learning to adapt and prepare for drought’s
devastating effects.
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By Coco McCabe/Oxfam America
It’s midday in the tiny village of Gutu Dobi, in southern Ethiopia, and Loko Dadacha, a widow who is supporting her family single-handedly, has been at work since before dawn. That’s when she rises to milk her animals, fix tea for the family (two of her six children, plus one grandchild, are living with her) and get a jump on the exhausting task of keeping water in the house—a chore that often involves her trekking six hours round trip to a distant pond with a big green jug on her back. (When full, it weighs 40-plus pounds.) In the daylight that’s left when she returns, Dadacha may climb trees to cut the leafy branches as fodder for her livestock, scour the landscape for wood to chop and sell, and tend to her crops, if it’s rained enough for them to survive. Read more
Unfortunately those of us in Addis are not fully aware of the seriousness of what’s going on in the rest of the country. Thanks for the article.