dissonance

I'm calling this the official beginning of the rainy season. After no
rain on Sunday or Monday, it POURED on Tuesday, for hours. So much
water. A trip to the south towards the end of July will be a welcome
respite.
That said, it's incredibly, desperately dry in the south. The
situation is dire - we heard several trip reports during a staff
meeting yesterday. It's quite desperate: not only livestock are
dying, but now people as well. I think everyone's at a loss of what
to do. The food security unit generally focuses on livelihood
projects, not on "lives" per se, but at some point there's little you
can do to improve livelihoods if the people are sick and dying of
starvation. Food aid isn't the answer, and even if it were, there's a
shortage of that now as well. Aid is highly limited in quantity this
year. I think everyone feels like their heads are up against the wall
right now, and people in this unit are concerned about the future of
pastoralism in general, since it's becoming increasingly
unsustainable, as droughts increase in frequency AND intensity.
Ordinarily, a pastoralist community needs 10 years to fully recover
from a drought (and in the past, that was usually possible), but now
the droughts are coming every few years, in this case every 2 years,
and more and more people are being forced out of this livelihood
system. It's complex and disheartening...