A dog tethered under a shade wakes up, looks at us piteously, stretches and lies back. This is very peculiar of a dog, and perhaps, it has been lying there since God knows when. Welcome to Magdalena Nthoki's home.
Magdalena looks through the door, holding her one-year-old baby who is breast-feeding in one hand. She dashes back to the house immediately and picks two wooden stools. A toddler follows her outside in small steps. It is her two year-old daughter who appears weak and sullen.
Her eyes are very white. She quietly sits on the ground next to her mother.
Magdalena does not waste time to let me know that she is a widow and a mother of eight children. My children are dying and I have no one to turn to.
As she wipes away tears, the children start streaming in one by one, dragging their feeble feet in weak steps, thanks to hunger pangs. They are coming from a spot behind the house where they have been quietly lying, having missed their lunch.
Magdalena says the children are too weak to walk. Kise the dog, too, cannot bark at strangers because of hunger.
For the last two days, I have not cooked, because I have nothing to cook. I only cooked some thick porridge, three days ago out of the little maize flour that I had. Even the sufuria is still lying there, she says pointing at her a kitchen, a tiny shack without a door.
She explains that there is no need to repair it as there is nothing to do or keep inside. This time, some of the children who were alert are now worn out and have started dozing off.
House flies are doing rounds around their mouths and running noses. Their mother just looks at them for the second time and sheds more tears.
I get the feeling that Magdalena is living in another Kenya. Not the one in Nairobi, and not even the one that our political leaders are living in. But a forgotten rural Kenya, where women and their children have long continued to suffer in times of calamities.
Inside the kitchen', there is no sign of a fire ever being lit and only a dry unwashed sufuria and a wooden spoon is lying at a corner where the children placed it after the porridge was over.
Five of her children have not gone to school because they are hungry and too weak to walk there.
Her chicken pen is empty. I had five chicken. I sold three and we ate the other two. That was about two months ago and the last time we ate some meat, says Magdalena. I look at the tree, only a handful mangoes are left and I wonder what else is next for her family.
They seem trapped between a rock and a hard place. A look at the children tells you that water has also been a big challenge to Magdalena. Their faces are white and the clothes are tattered and stained.
Some of them are soiled and they are oozing a strong stench. The home paints a picture of hunger, destitution and poverty. Magdalena is a resident of Makuyu, one of the sub-locations of the vast Kiambiti location in Maragua district.
A trip to the well is very draining because of the long distance. She has to descend to the bottom of the hill and carry water uphill, about ten kilometres. There used to be a seasonal river nearby but it has long dried up, she says.
She also spends a lot of time at the well, away from her children. The queues are always very long and to get the water is a very long struggle as everyone is scrambling for the same because as it is the only watering point we have around here, she explains, adding that at times, she would take almost a whole day or night at the well.
Magdalena, does casual jobs in people's farms for a livelihood, but without rains, they are hard to come by. Today, she says, she had gone to check whether a woman who gives her some casual work to do had any. She was unlucky.
I have just come back. That is how it has been for the past two weeks since the rains have failed and there is no money. Even those people that would hire us for a small fee are going through the same difficulties. The worst thing is that no one is able to help the other as we are all suffering.
It is a very sorry state. With eight mouths to feed, no food, no job, no resource that she can sell, Magdalena stares into uncertainty. She is not sure of where and when she would get her next meal. She is also not sure whether her children would be strong enough to make it for the next meal, if at all.
Area chief Patrick Mwai Mwande says they are in need of emergency relief. He explains several lives have been lost in the area in due to poor diet.
He adds that out of the about 16,000 people in the Kiambiti location, only about 20 per cent of them can afford two meals a day.
The rains have failed twice, he says, and since the population is fed by agriculture, many lives are at risk of starvation.
And with the high rates of unemployment, the residents have been burning charcoal for sale but they cannot continue because trees have been depleted.
The situation is very bad. Residents need emergency relief food. Since August last year, we have never received relief food, he explains.
Nearby at the home of Wambui Mburu who is about 70 years old, her husband lies in bed unable to lift himself up. Hunger.
Her husband, Mburu Njoroge, has just gulped a bowl of porridge, but he is too weak to support himself. Wambui has had mangoes for lunch, she says, so that the sick Mburu, can have some porridge. The other day, she sold some mangoes her only source of incomeâ€â€and used the cash to buy a kilo of flour.
She, too, is not sure where her next meal is going to come from. I can only hope that the Government will intervene. We are alone as our children stay very far, she says. She cannot recall when they last received relief food from the Government.
And it was only a two-kilogramme container of maize flour. We are a forgotten lot, she says.
Amidst this biting hunger and poverty in Kiambiti and Makuyu, World Vision has been in the area for about 15 years.
I have just been here for about two years now, says Dr Gachengo Muriu Matindi, a food security officer for the Maragua food security recovery project. He explains that they have been working with farmers in Maragua and for those that we have dealt with, the case is very different.
He further explains that since they work under a specific budget, it is hard for them to reach the entire population. But still, I harbour the feeling that 15 years is long enough.
Currently, the food security project is working with 1,100 farmers up from last year when they only had about 800. Dr Gachengo blames the people of Makuyu and Kiambiti for what he calls over-dependency on maize farming. The levels of poverty and unemployment are very high, says Dr Gachengo.
But there are those farmers that we have worked with and although most of them consumed their produce while it was green, a few are now harvesting maize from their farms and milking diary goats, he says.
Gabriel Njoroge is one of the 365 farmers who are beneficiaries of a diary goat project.
Like most Kiambiti residents, Gabriel did not get any farm produce but he is happy that he is not buying milk. Another farmer, Margaret Muthoni, harvested water and used it to cultivate maize.
But Gabriel and Muthoni are only a few full stomachs in a pool of hunger. Dr Gachengo calls for education of farmers on cultivation of indigenous crops. They have been quite unreceptive to the indigenous drought-resistant crops as they place a lot of value on maize. But I think, that is the way to go if we need to kick out hunger and break the cycle of poverty.
President Kibaki has declared famine is a national disaster.
Thousands of families in Machakos, Makueni, Pokot, Tana River, Kwale, Kilifi, Baringo, Turkana, and Nairobi and Mombasa slums cannot put food on the table.
The Government has appealed for international assistance amounting to Sh32 billion (out of an estimated Sh37 billion that is required) to rescue an estimated 10 million Kenyans from starvation.
As a medium term intervention, President Kibaki said the Government would make available about 93,000 tonnes of fertiliser at affordable prices.
We will also reduce the price of seed by 10 per cent, he added. The Government would also make arrangements to provide affordable ploughing services in rural areas, he said.
The looming famine may extend to mid-year, according to Early Warning System Network.
The analysis suggests that there will be no maize in the market from May through the onset of the harvest in the middle of July, said the organisation in the Kenya Food Security Update of January 2008 released last Friday.
It said grain from strategic reserves was being milled and sold at a subsidised price of Sh130 per five-kilogramme bag to vulnerable people. However, the impact was small due to low quantities involved, distribution problems and delays in implementation. – Daily Nation