Adin Aden, a sprightly 60-year-old former pastoralist herdsman with six grandchildren to support, organizes his month collecting firewood from acacia trees carefully. “I gather for 20 days and I sell for ten,” he says.
He also collects rocks to sell at building sites for filling and foundations. In the dry language of humanitarian reports, it’s called a “coping strategy”; and it would be hard work for a man a half his age.
But coping strategies are typical in this improvised settlement of displaced pastoralists who lost out in one of the tribal resource
conflicts over water and pasture that simmer in Ethiopia’s Somali region.
Favoured currency
A 100-kilogramme sack, carried to town on donkey-back, will earn him 500 Kenyan shillings (about six US dollars) – the favoured currency among former pastoralist charcoal-sellers in this part of Ethiopia, where rural people do not take much notice of the international border.
The dry-looking acacia trees that provide the raw material are one of the few things that abound in what otherwise resembles a moonscape of sand and boulders in the dry season.
Adin can just about buy enough wheat, sorghum or maize to keep himself alive and help his children and grandchildren. They have to carry it into Moyale and have it milled for porridge, and he says: “We can only afford to eat once a day.”
A different time
But he’s old enough to remember a different time, when pasture was more plentiful and the rains came more predictably.
“We used to be okay when I was a young man,” he recalls. “My mother and father had camels and cattle and we had milk, even meat sometimes.
“We certainly ate three times a day – four times during the rainy season. But now when it rains it just makes it harder work collecting wood.”