Tag: Ethiopia

Dying children reflect brutal toll of Somalia drought

Mustafa HAJI ABDINUR – June 9, 2022

Arbay Mahad Qasim has already lost two children to a vicious drought, and now the Somali villager fears she could lose a third as her malnourished toddler Ifrah awaits treatment in a Mogadishu hospital.

Barely out of her teens, Qasim is among dozens of weary parents crowding Banadir Maternity & Children Hospital, which has become ground zero for the starvation crisis sweeping across Somalia as a record drought grips the Horn of Africa.

Entire villages have been forced to uproot their lives and flee their homes after poor rainfall destroyed crops and killed livestock.

When the rains failed for a fourth consecutive season last month, UN aid agencies and meteorologists warned that a famine was looming in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia.

But for many Somalis like Qasim, who has been surviving on government handouts for the past few months, catastrophe has already struck.

Two of her children died of hunger in the last 18 months.

When two-year-old Ifrah’s tiny body began to swell, showing symptoms of severe malnutrition, Qasim wasted no time, spending a day traveling to Mogadishu from her village in the southwest in a desperate bid to save her youngest child’s life.

https://www.spacedaily.com

Over 7 Million in East Africa on the brink of starvation

ETH – April 12, 2021

(ETH) – A new report coming out of Africa is revealing that over 7 million people across six East African countries are at the brink of starvation as communities have continually faced existential threats from violence, flooding, covid pandemic, as well as a locust infestation, according to a new warning from the evangelical humanitarian organization World Vision.

World Vision that operates in nearly 100 countries, has sounded the alarm that thousands of children could potentially face death or long-term health consequences if the international community fails to respond quickly to East Africa’s worsening crisis.

One of these voices is Debebe Dawit, who is the program manager for World Vision’s humanitarian emergency affairs team, who also recently visited Ethiopia and witnessed firsthand the impacts of poverty in the East African country and reported that the situation is “severe.”

“The situation is very severe in East Africa, and particularly Ethiopia. Over 2 million people are in need of food assistance,” Dawit told The Christian Post in a Thursday interview. “Among conflict, COVID-19, flooding, locust infestation, all these are adding [an] additional burden to the community.”

East Africa has been pounded by disaster after disaster. Even Before the pandemic began, several countries in East Africa had already faced a widespread locust infestation that reportedly impacted hundreds of thousands of hectares and damaged croplands and pastures. Then it was large-scale flooding that destroyed crops that had already been ready to harvest. The devastation impacted the food supply for 4 million people in the region.

https://endtimeheadlines.org

750 killed at Ethiopian Orthodox church said to contain Ark of the Covenant: report

Anugrah Kumar – January 18, 2021

Around 750 people were killed in an attack on an Orthodox church, which is said to contain the Ark of the Covenant described in the Book of Exodus in the Bible, in northern Ethiopia’s war-torn Tigray region — home to thousands of churches and monasteries — according to reports.

Hundreds of people hiding in Maryam Tsiyon Church in Aksum amid an armed conflict were brought out and shot to death, and local residents believe the aim was to take the Ark of Covenant to Addis Ababa, the Belgium-based nonprofit European External Programme with Africa reported in this month’s situational report, released on Jan. 9.

“The number of people killed is reported as 750,” it said. The church, the most ancient and sacred of Ethiopian Christianity and also known as the Church of St. Mary of Zion, belongs to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.

“I’ve not heard more than rumours about the looting of the Arc from Maryam Tsion, but if it’s true that up to 750 died defending it, it is conceivable that the attackers didn’t stop there,” said Michael Gervers, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, according to The Telegraph.

“The government and the Eritreans want to wipe out the Tigrayan culture. They think they’re better than rest of the people in the country. The looting is about destroying and removing the cultural presence of Tigray,” Gervers explained.

https://www.christianpost.com

At Least 500 Ethiopian Christians Reported Slaughtered in Relentless Attacks Since June

– September 4, 2020

An Ethiopian Christian leader called for an international inquiry into the slaying of hundreds of Christians, including pregnant women, children and whole families, in ongoing Oromo Muslim extremist attacks in the parts of the Oromia regional state, extending south, south-east and east of Addis Ababa, since the end of June. According to reports, more than 500 were killed.

The coordinated killings, targeting Christians from a wide range of ethnicities including Oromo Christians, began soon after the alleged assassination of a popular Oromo singer, Hachallu Hundessa, who was shot dead on 29 June, while driving in the outskirts of the capital.

The attackers are from the Oromo ethnic group, which has traditionally been Muslim, and are members of Qeerroo (meaning, “bachelors”), an Oromo male youth movement.

In door-to-door attacks on Christian households the Qeerroo extremists arrived in cars and, armed with guns, machetes, swords and spears, sought out and slaughtered Christians. Children were forced to witness their parents being brutally murdered with machetes.

https://christiannews.net

Africa’s Huge Locust Swarms Are Growing at the Worst Time

Matt Simon – April 16, 2020

As the coronavirus pandemic exploded across the world earlier this year, another even more conspicuous plague was tearing through East Africa: locusts. The voracious little beasts are particularly fond of carbohydrates like grains, a staple of subsistence farmers across the continent. Back in January, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicted the worst was still to come, and that by June, the size of the swarms could grow by a factor of 500.

And now, at the worst time, a second wave of locusts 20 times bigger than the first has descended on the region, thanks to heavy rains late last month, according to the FAO. The swarms have infiltrated Yemen and firmly established themselves across the Persian Gulf, having laid eggs along 560 miles of Iran’s coastline. New swarms are particularly severe in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

“The timing is really horrendous, because the farmers are just planting, and the seedlings are just coming up now since it’s the beginning of the rainy season,” says Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer with the FAO. “And it’s right at the same time when you have an increasing number of swarms in Kenya and in Ethiopia. There’s already pictures and reports of the seedlings getting hammered by the swarms. So basically that’s it for the farmers’ crops.”

“This represents an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods,” FAO officials wrote in a brief last week. All this is happening while the region locks down to stave off the coronavirus pandemic, and as travel restrictions mean experts can’t get to countries to train people. It’d be hard to imagine a more brutal confluence of factors. “The problem is that most of the countries were not ready, and are now invaded with swarms,” says ecologist Cyril Piou, of the French Agricultural Research Center for International Development, which helps economically developing countries with agricultural issues. “The solution is to try to control as much as you can.”

https://www.wired.com