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Troubled Waters
Lake Victoria's waters have begun to fall dramatically in recent years. Climate change, hydroelectric dam projects and increasing pressure on its threatened resources have some environmentalists suggesting the lake may be destroyed within twenty years.
As featured on PBS's Foreign Exchange with Daljit Dhaliwal.
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Ernest Waititu's East Africa Blog
Heading South Part 2: A Night in the Bush
When our four-wheel-drive pickup truck vroomed off the town of Negele I knew I was in for a giant adventure. Well, I must quickly clarify that I was not here for adventure; Negele is of course not one of those places you go site-seeing. I was here to work, following stories on water scarcity and how it had impacted the people of Southern Ethiopia.
My Romantic Reunion with Africa
Close to 40 hours after leaving Athens, Ohio, I arrived to my destination in Addis. My Emirates flight was not exactly that long...I had two stopovers - four hours in Hamburg and 12 in Dubai. It is the kind of thing you have to contend with when you make a decision to fly cheap.
I made my time in Dubai a little productive, making calls to family and friends. I also had a chance to visit the Dubai Duty Free - perhaps one of the finest testimonies of the huge capitalistic market Dubai has turned into. Then I took some time to catch a beer at The Irish Village right at the airport. It was a very good decision I must say, one which reunited me with my colleagues of The Common Language Project. I had lost contact with them more than ten hours earlier in New York, when they took a different flight. The happy Reunion seemed to prove a point: there is always a way to smoke out drinkers.
Back to Africa on a Water Mission
Some of my toughest times growing up in Kenya were those spent on my way to and from the village river. I call it the village river because it was by and large the only source of water for my village. Never mind the fact that the river was four miles away and was shared among scores of villages along its course.
Like other countries on the east coast of Africa, Kenya has no cold or warm season as understood in the West; rather it has a dry and a wet season. During the wet season, people collect the rainwater in all manner of water reservoirs ranging from small plastic bottles to dams. On a good wet season, the collected water is expected to sustain a family and their livestock for months.