World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008 - (Page 20)

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 fields, 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. 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 Madame Mederbeh tends the dry farmland where she cultivates crops year-round. PREVIOUS PAGE: Martine Makitahar stands in her millet ﬁeld while children from her village look on. Her land yielded a much smaller crop this year than normal. 20 September/October 2008 | WORLD ARK www.heifer.org http://www.heifer.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008

World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008 Contents Letters For the Record The Good Life Asked and Answered Digging Up the Past Not a Drop to Drink Facing the Ogres of Progress Mixed Media Heifer Bulletin Heifer Spirit World Ark Market Calendar First Person

World Ark Magazine - September/October 2008

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