drought relief in ethiopia - Food for the Hungry

bringing water and relief to ethiopia
PHOENIX, AZ, March 15, 2006—A long, severe drought continues to affect more than 11 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. Food for the Hungry Relief Director Matt Ellingson says the drought has caused enormous loss of livestock and crops, leading to loss of livelihoods and increases in malnutrition rates in many areas.

In Borena Zone of Oromiya State in southern Ethiopia, farmers and pastoralists have been waiting desperately for rain. They do not have enough feed for their livestock, their ponds and traditional watering holes are dry, and malnutrition rates are high, in spite of food distributions by the government.

Ellingson says a number of schools had to close their feeding programs because even though they received food from the international community, they did not have enough water to prepare the food, forcing a number of children to drop out of school. But thanks to Food for the Hungry Ethiopia’s emergency outreach, Ellingson reports that eight schools have resumed their feeding programs, and children can now return to school.

Food for the Hungry-Ethiopia has been trucking in water in tanker trucks and using "dewatering" pumps to lift the water to the schools’ cisterns. More than 1,500 children, as well as their families, now benefit from this emergency response. And parents now worry less about how to feed their school-aged children in this difficult time.

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