Not a Drop to Drink

Not a Drop to Drink

In Cameroon's Desert, Coaxing a Living from an Inhospitable Land

Story by Lauren Wilcox | World Ark Contributor
Photography by Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Dourum, Far North Province, Cameroon -- In the bright, dusty months that mark the dry season here,there is water, but it is just out of reach.  Rivers dwindle and disappear, crops turn to sticks in the sandy fi elds, and the only green in the landscape is the leaves of deep-rooted trees. Women and children crouch in the empty riverbeds, digging up muddy water for drinking and washing.

Madame Mederbeh, a wiry woman of about 50 with a level gaze, lives in Dourum, in a mud hut with a thatched roof. Like virtually everyone else in her village, she farms for a living, cultivating her crops by hand on rented land. Without irrigation, the planting is utterly dependent on the seasonal rains: millet in the rainy summers, sorghum in the dry winters.

Even in the best years, there is scant margin for error. A year’s harvest of seven or eight bags of grain is her primary income, and must provide a daily meal as well as a source of spending money for emergencies. In recent years, Mme.  Mederbeh says her job has gotten harder. Year-round farming without fertilizer leaves the soil depleted, and the once reliable rains are now irregular and infrequent. Standing in her stony field in a pair of green flip-flops and a bright blue and red dress, she gestures heavenward. 

“It used to be you could look at the sky one week and know it would rain the next,” she explains through a translator. “Nowadays, the rain is unpredictable. You have the first rain, you plant—but then the crops are not so good.”

“Not so good” is, very often these days, not good enough. This year, Mme. Mederbeh’s entire harvest was two bags of millet, which she keeps propped against the mud wall in her sleeping hut for safekeeping. It is stark evidence of what scientists worldwide are warning, and what she and the thousands of others who coax a living from this remote, arid land have struggled with for years: Overuse of the land, along with climate changes, are throwing an already fragile system into precipitous decline.
See a map of the Lake Chad River Basin

Not a Drop to Drink

Vicious Cycles

What is happening to Mme. Mederbeh and her village is happening to people across the Lake Chad River Basin, the populous region in northwest Africa that includes Lake Chad and parts of several countries around it. Lake Chad became a poster child for global warming when the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” used NASA aerial photos of the lake to show its dramatic disappearance over the last 40 years. In fact, say some experts, the lake has been waxing and waning for millennia. While global warming is a root cause of the region’s woes, it is not the whole story.

The story of the Lake Chad River Basin is as much a human one as one of climate change: It is the story of how, in response to a changing climate, human mismanagement and overuse of land and water is turning this fragile area into a virtual desert with near-famine conditions.

Change in this region is a constant, and for centuries the people who made their homes here learned to live with that. They planted and harvested crops in accordance with the seasonal extremes: regular, even torrential rains from May to October, and dry, dusty weather from November to April. The basin lands flooded regularly, which was a boon to subsistence farmers who planted in its rich soils. Even the lake itself, because it is extremely shallow, fluctuated dramatically throughout history. According to the Global International Waters Assessment, a recent study of the region published by a branch of the United Nations, over time the lake changed from massive to tiny and back again. Those who fished its waters for a living followed its changing shoreline and shifting rivers.

Madame Mederbeh tends the dry farmland where she cultivates crops year-round.

But recently, in addition to these rough, regular cycles, a more troubling change is affecting the area. The Sahel region, which runs through the lake basin to the north (just below the Sahara Desert), has been gradually drying out for some 5,000 years. And over the last 30 years, the region experienced what the U.N. water report calls “the most substantial and sustained decline of rainfall measured anywhere in the world.” The trend is linked, in part, to rising ocean temperatures and thus, concludes the U.N. report, to global warming.

As these droughts intensified, people from the Sahel region, many of whom are nomads, moved southward to find more arable land. But the droughts continued to spread. The lake shrank, rainy seasons became shorter and milder, and the dry periods stretched longer.

As the population in the basin increased and its climate changed, residents scrambled to control the region’s declining resources. The old, often nomadic way of living, adjusting to the cycles of the seasons and occasional shift in lake and river levels, was no longer convenient or productive enough. The area’s regular flooding interfered with the growing large-scale agriculture industry, which needed reliable sources of great volumes of water. Over the last 50 years, the number and size of dams and other diversions to natural water flow increased sharply.

As massive irrigation projects along the lake and rivers shunted water away upstream, they touched off changes throughout the basin. There were fewer fish and less vegetation for animal fodder and firewood. Without floods to fertilize the land, the soil became increasingly poor. Even projects designed by well-intentioned engineers to intensify food production along the rivers caused harm as they drained valuable wetlands.

These water-management practices, together with the area’s intensifying droughts, set off a vicious cycle. As streams were diverted, plant life throughout the basin thinned; without plant cover, soil temperatures rose, rainfall evaporated more quickly and erosion worsened. Scientists think that the loss of vegetative ground cover may be a significant factor in the disappearance of the monsoons. As less water is recycled into the atmosphere by plants, less falls as rain.

As the regular cycles of the seasons become unpredictable and population pressures increase, so does the mismanagement of the land by the increasingly desperate poor. The land is stripped of vegetation as people graze their animals and scavenge for firewood, and the natural fertility of the soil is exhausted as farmers plant too often and too densely. Agricultural productivity declines, along with the economic activity that accompanies it. In the Nigerian section of the lake, entire villages and major roads are buried under sand dunes as the desert extends southward. Many people are becoming “environmental refugees,” following arable land as it moves southward. Fishermen chase the lake’s retreating shoreline.

Tensions flare between villages and nomadic tribes, who battle over scarce grazing land and water.  Villages in the southern half of the basin, their populations booming, are unable to support the influx.  Civil strife erupts where resources are scarcest.

Indeed, many local leaders have attributed conflicts throughout these areas to the worsening environmental situation. In nearby Darfur, Sudan, this situation has reached crisis proportions; at least 200,000 have died since fighting broke out there in 2003. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called it “no accident” that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought in the Sahel, where precipitation has declined 40 percent since the 1980s, and he attributed strife in Burkina Faso, Somalia and the Ivory Coast to “a similarly volatile mix of food and water insecurity.”

While large-scale conflict has not yet come to the Chad River Basin, resource scarcity makes it vulnerable.  During Heifer’s visit, rebel activity broke out in Ndjamena, Chad, just over the Cameroonian border, and northern Cameroon was flooded with refugees escaping the violence. 

Daily life is already changing as violence encroaches. Life here always required a certain amount of resourcefulness and flexibility, but the land was rarely uninhabitable, and in the small villages scattered throughout the periphery of the region, people were generally able to secure a living, albeit an extremely modest one. Today, as ordinary activities become difficult and sometimes impossible, people must expend an extraordinary amount of energy simply to survive.

Not a Drop to Drink

It is best to eat together, in the sunlight

Daily life in Mme. Mederbeh’s village, an amiable combination of individual responsibilities and group efforts, has, in recent years, become steadily more taxing and less productive. Although free from the effects of dams or other water diversions, Dourum and the surrounding areas suffer severely from drought. While the residents of these remote areas are generally not aware of global climate change, they are acutely aware of the changes in their own area and describe their increasingly laborious efforts to draw a living from the land.

The rainy season, when much of the growing and harvesting takes place, was always a time of hard work.  But these days, with less rain and fewer crops, Mme. Mederbeh and other village residents work almost constantly to make the most of it. Mme.  Mederbeh, whose husband died 17 years ago, has a tougher day than many.  Since her husband died, she says, she has two jobs: men’s work and women’s work (roughly divided in her culture into field responsibilities for the men and home responsibilities for women, though most women also do some work in the fields).

Women and children in Barza must carry water from wells and parched riverbeds every day. As sources dry up, villagers have to go farther or dig deeper to find drinking water.

She rises early, at 4 or 5 a.m., to take care of her household tasks: fetching water from the well more than a mile away, sweeping the house, washing the dishes and collecting sticks from the surrounding countryside to burn in her open-pit fireplace. “If I have eaten the night before, I eat the leftovers,” she says. “Otherwise, I don’t eat.” After taking care of her house, she heads into the fields.

Mme. Mederbeh has four plots of land, one that she rents and three that her husband bought years ago. During the rainy season she spends most of her daylight hours in the fields, bent over at the waist, tilling, planting and weeding with a short-handled hoe.  During the longest days, she may not return home until 5 in the evening. 

Mme. Mederbeh’s workload is made somewhat lighter by help from her husband’s second wife, who still lives in the compound with Mme.  Mederbeh. (Islam is the predominant religion here, and polygamy is not uncommon.) But, as she says, “A man is stronger than a woman,” and the two of them cannot till as much land as she and her husband did together.  If the work is more than she and her husband’s wife can handle, and she has the money, she can rent a donkey for the equivalent of about $10, though she says the recent poor yields have not made this necessary.

If her workload will allow it, she comes home in the early afternoon and prepares a meal—the first of the day—for herself and nine others who live near her. Virtually without exception, meals are millet or groundnuts (peanuts), either boiled like a hot cereal or made into a sort of cake. Occasionally, she will buy a small amount of meat for “festive times,” but otherwise the meal hardly varies. The group eats in the small, bright courtyard of Mme.  Mederbeh’s compound, between the mud huts she uses for sleeping and cooking and the ones used to store grain and keep livestock in at night.  A few small chickens peck in the sand. “It is best to eat together, in the sunlight,” she says.

When the crops are ready, her neighbors help with the harvest, and in return Mme. Mederbeh pays them in a drink that serves as a form of local currency, a fermented brew called bilibili. It is made from millet flour our, which the women grind vigorously by hand on a flat at stone, usually while singing a high-pitched tune “to make the job nicer,” as one of her neighbors says. Bilibili is a reasonably valuable commodity that sells at market for more than millet alone. At harvest time, it is an attractive draw and makes the harvest a bit of a celebration.

Even though the rainy season brings very hard work, it is a time of relative plenty, when the wells and rivers are full, the fields are productive and fodder for animals is readily available. The worst times are during the dry season, when the lush green landscape transforms, almost overnight, into a desert. During the dry season, farming continues, especially if the yields have been low during the rainy season.  The villagers grow crops suited for those conditions, like a special variety of millet. Still, yields are very low. As one of Mme. Mederbeh’s neighbors says, “Eight months out of the year is the hard part.” Other resources are scarce also. The well often dries up entirely during the dry season. If this happens, Mme. Mederbeh walks more than a mile to dig water out of the empty riverbed. She also has a small flock of sheep, which she calls her “savings bank,” and can sell one if she needs emergency funds.

There are virtually no other options for earning a living. Those who can scrape together a small amount of capital may be able to sell goods at the market in Meri, four miles away, and those with a bicycle or motorcycle might be able to sell goods in Maroua, 27 miles away, but very few of the villagers can afford such amenities.  Despite the best efforts of a community that depends on each other, it remains difficult to overcome the stultifying effects of the drought.

Not a Drop to Drink

Breaking the Cycle

People who live here are seeing little benefit from the international efforts to repair the environmental and economical damage in the Lake Chad River Basin. The U.N. and other international organizations started working with countries in the basin several decades ago. In 1998 an environmental organization called the Global Environment Facility mapped out a 20-year plan to change waterdiversion policies and repair the land, but implementation of this plan, according to the U.N. water report, has been “very slow.”

There are significant obstacles to such efforts, not the least of which is finding a way to unify and motivate a vastly varied and fractionalized region which includes eight countries, each with its own interests and (often conflicting) policies, and numerous regional and tribal groups, many of which are nomadic, either by tradition or necessity. Infrastructure is slight and information dissemination poor, making it difficult to educate people about the issues and institute broadranging policies.

As government organizations and international development groups forge a comprehensive plan for the region, work goes on at the ground level to help people make the most of their scant resources and protect the fragile environment. Mme. Mederbeh is

Vilagers in Barza gather vegetation for firewood, their only source of fuel. The practice contributes to the desertification of the area.

one of the leaders of Femmes Ambitieuses (Ambitious Women), a group of 26 women and one man working on a new project with Heifer International to improve nutrition, create more income opportunities and restore overused soil and vegetation.

The group is still in the training stages, learning how to use manure to fertilize crops and plant nitrogen fixing trees called vederbia, which help restore nutrients to the soil.  Although some of the farmers’ habits, like overusing the land, can be inadvertently destructive, they also have many good practices. Oliver Shey, a livestock development officer for Heifer Cameroon’s Far North office, says a goal of the program is to build on the knowledge that the group already has. It makes the training easier, and the lessons more salient. For example, they already collect the high branches of the vederbia tree for their animals.  And, he says, “They know the vederbia trees are good for the soil,” and this will help as they begin a vederbia seedling project.

Ultimately, the group will receive 104 sheep of a sturdier species than they currently have. The flock will be bred primarily to sell, with the money going to raise the standard of living of the project participants, improve their diets and provide them with some capital to begin cottage industries in the village. One of the main focuses of the training is to substantially reduce the impact of livestock on the land. The group will learn low-impact grazing techniques, like saving crop residue for feed, and how best to preserve feed for use in times of drought.

The group’s strength is their sense of community. “If they had donkeys, they would rent them to members of the community for cheaper [than the going rates],” Shey says. “They have a culture of sharing.”

Projects like this one, although tiny compared to the scope of the problems, provide a small way forward. They begin the process of healing the land and provide a livelihood to the people who depend on it. The goals Femmes Ambitieuses identified for the project are practical and straightforward: to begin raising animals; to secure a year-round water source for their village; to start a dressmaking workshop for income; to purchase a grinding mill for their community; to help restore the soil through agroforestry; and to build a meeting hall for the group to use, instead of the large tree under which they currently gather.

Individually, participants’ goals are more immediate and more modest.  Some seem reluctant to speak about the future at all, looking down in silence when asked about their plans.  When asked about her hopes for the project, Mme. Mederbeh shows a visitor her sleeping platform, constructed out of sticks, with a blanket stuffed with cotton for a mattress. “After working with Heifer for some years, I hope I can change this bed,” she says.

Not a Drop to Drink

As you can see, my house is made of mud

Two other members of the project, Kaimey and Kokoltam Seinei, a married couple in their early 30s with five children, live in a compound near Mme. Mederbeh. They farm a small piece of land they inherited from his father, as well as one they bought outright. Their crop yields this year are as poor as Mme. Mederbeh’s: one and one-half bags of millet, as compared to eight bags last year.

Like Mme. Mederbeh, the Seineis have a small herd of sheep and two goats to sell for income in emergencies.  Kokoltam Seinei, wearing a forest green suit jacket and pants with no shirt, collects the high branches of the vederbia trees for fodder, using a long stick with a wire hook on the end.  During a break from his chores, he takes out a traditional instrument called the gandjaval—an L-shaped guitar with four strings—and plays a tune while the women in the courtyard sing. 

At the peak of the dry season, women and children must dig water from dry riverbeds.

After some time, the Seineis begin to speak more openly about their hopes for the project. Before farming fulltime, Kokoltam Seinei had a business selling small items at market , which he had to abandon because the crops have been so poor. He hopes to save enough money to buy a motorbike and a table to begin his business again. Also, he is a builder by trade, and he wants to make a more permanent home for his family. “As you can see, my house is made of mud,” he says to a visitor. “I would like to build it out of proper materials.”

“I would like to have money to go to the grinding mill—we spend so much energy grinding flour here,” says Kaimey Seinei. “Also, we eat only millet, and we have no way of flavoring our food. I would like to buy rice and maize.”

She catches up a handful of her traditional, floor-length dress. “This dress you see me wearing is the only one I have,” she says.

More than that, she adds, it is made of imported fabric (not the local handcrafted fabric of which Cameroonians are justly proud). She says this with mock exasperation, knowing it is a relatively trivial complaint, but the other women in the courtyard laugh and nod sympathetically.

After a moment, Kaimey Seinei grows serious. “I would like to buy a bed for me and my children,” she says.  “We would like to pay the school bills with no problem. I would like to eat three meals a day.”