By Abdillahi Jama

MANDERA, Kenya, August 22, 2009 — Ali Ibrahim usually awaits the holy fasting month of Ramadan with unbaralled eagerness.

But this year things are different with a searing drought leaving millions across the Horn of Africa region on the verge of starvation.

“Thirty days of fasting is so hard at this season, especially when we lack basic needs,” Ibrahim, an inhabitant of the remote village of Mandera in Kenya’s Northeastern province, told IslamOnline.net.

“I am just praying to stay alive until I observe this holy month,” added the black bearded middle-aged man.

During Ramadan, due to start next week, adult Muslims, save the sick and those traveling, abstain from food, drink, smoking and sex between dawn and sunset.

Millions of fellow Muslims in northern Kenya and other parts of the Horn of Africa are welcoming the holy month amid a lingering dry spell.

Ibrahim’s seven children, wife and aged mother have been relying on one meal a day for the past two weeks, but they fear the situation would worsen in Ramadan.

“The drought is at its peak,” notes the longtime herder, 47.

His herd of 14 cows, on which he was counting to feed his family during Ramadan, had plummeted.

“I have already lost some six cows and the remaining ones are so weak to provide milk for even the young children.”

Crisis

Activists warn that the situation in Ibrahim’s village is similar across the region, threatening a severe crisis.

“We are knocking on the door of a major regional crisis,” Ramiro Lopes da Silva, World Food Program’s Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa, told IOL.

“The situation is not getting better – if anything, we’re seeing it get worse.”

People in the Horn of Africa region are facing a deadly mix of recurring droughts and a high cost of food.

According to the UN Office for Coordination and Humanitarian Affairs, some 17 million people in the region are affected by an acute shortage of food.

Nearly 20 million, including 4 million children under the age of five, are in need of emergency assistance.

The numbers of hunger-hit people in drought-stricken Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti are expected to rise in the coming months.

“We must all redouble our efforts to protect and assist the weakest,” insists da Silva.

Religious leaders are warning of an impending major catastrophe if peoples’ sufferings remained unaddressed during Ramadan.

“The fasting month is just ahead of us and there is likelihood that people will have to suffer,” says Sheikh Abdiwahab Mursal, Secretary General of the Council of Imams and Preachers in Wajir, a town in Kenya’s North Eastern Province.

He appealed to the Muslim world to reach out to millions of African Muslims during Ramadan to avert an impending calamity.

“The situation is just getting from bad to worse.

“Death is just around the corner.”

Source: Islam Online, August 17, 2009

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