Haramaya
Voices from a Vanished Lake
ADDIS ABABA—Chala Ahmed, 26, hit the jackpot eight years ago when he won the US visa lottery in the bustling eastern Ethiopian town of Haramaya. His first thought was that he would build his mother a big beautiful house. His next thought was that the new home, painted a rosy pink behind a high white gate, should be erected on the shore of Lake Haramaya, the huge stretch of placid water that gave his hometown its name.
Haramaya
Voices from a Vanished Lake
ADDIS ABABA—Chala Ahmed, 26, hit the jackpot eight years ago when he won the US visa lottery in the bustling eastern Ethiopian town of Haramaya. His first thought was that he would build his mother a big beautiful house. His next thought was that the new home, painted a rosy pink behind a high white gate, should be erected on the shore of Lake Haramaya, the huge stretch of placid water that gave his hometown its name.
It took Ahmed almost eight years of long-haul trucking before his family's house was completed. He sent money home regularly and relatives reported back on progress.
Ahmed had heard the lake was shrinking, that the shore he knew was no longer at the lake's edge and that the quiet waves retreated a little further each year. His family tried to warn him, but Ahmed was thousands of miles away and his memories held firm despite disturbing reports through crackling long-distance connections.
He came home to Haramaya for an extended visit in January. When he arrived it was night, dark and quiet. Ahmed slept off his jetlag, woke the next morning and stepped out into early sunlight. Staring across the vast empty field he watched local farmers herd cattle and goats through the empty lakebed that was once Lake Haramaya. Then he sat down on a dusty patch of sparse grass and cried.
"When I left the lake was full, there were resort houses and all of the local marriages happened along its banks," says Ahmed a month later, dressed in a Minnesota Vikings jersey and crisp jeans. "Now the lake has become a field."
The Chat is Always Greener
Other Ethiopian lakes may be headed for similar fates. Like Haramaya, lakes in the Rift Valley such as Awasa, Abiyata and Ziway are reporting shrinkage. The forces converging against these lakes read like a nightmare laundry list of twenty-first century environmental ills.
"There's the erosion, population increases, irresponsible local farming practices, and industrial overuse of the lake," says Bushra Mohammed Reshid from the Harar water and sanitation department. Drought, climate change, and government disinterest also make the list as he pushes down a finger with each guilty party.
Reshid is standing—his tan dress shoes partially submerged by soft earth—in a field of onion sprouts in the basin of another retreating lake, Adele, just a few miles past Haramaya. A few years ago this farm would have been underwater.
Local farmers catch a lot of the blame around these parts for having abused the nearby lakes. They're accused of having relentlessly extracted and pumped water from Haramaya, until the lake, a closed catchment already suffering from increasing temperatures and erratic rainfall, drained like a bathtub with the plug pulled out.
Their reputation was further sullied, especially among nearby Harar's 91,000 residents, when a group of rogue farmers was accused of sabotaging water pipes serving as the city's sole water source, breaking connections and siphoning off the escaping water for their own irrigation purposes. A few of the farmers are still in Harar's jail for the offense.
"All the farmers irregularly pumped water out of the lake. We tried to draft a policy to the [regional] government that would regulate water usage, guaranteeing usage to farmers that lived adjacent to or on the boundary of the lake," says Reshid, "We were tyring to elongate the life of the lake. But they said ‘No. This is a natural resource and [the farmers] have a right use it irregularly.'"
But farmers have been working in this region for generations, and while population growth in both rural and urban areas has strained delicate water resources, a little bitter leaf with deep thirsty roots deserves at least some of the blame for the disappearance of Haramaya.
Chat, a mild stimulant chewed by people throughout the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and by diaspora populations from both regions, is the only crop you'll see in the hilly farmland here.
This area is famous for its ability to grow quality chat for export, and the mid-sized leafy bush sprouts from distant terraces, bounces off the back of careening delivery trucks, and hangs in moistened plastic bags from the hands of half the people on the street. There's even a daily flight carrying fresh chat—thought to lose its potency after 48 hours—to chat-hungry neighbors like Somalia, Egypt, Kenya and Tanzania.
Girma Moges
Photo: Alex Stonehill
The region's chat revolution in relatively recent. Twenty years ago this area was committed to growing staple food crops by the communist Derg government. When a less centrally dictatorial government came to power in the mid-1990s local farmers became free to follow the market, which led them straight to chat.
In many ways it has been good to the area. The local economy has grown alongside the lucrative mono cash crop. Tacky chat mansions with blue reflective glass windows and oversized columns rise from the landscape, and the towns along newly constructed Harar Road are bustling.
But chat is a mixed blessing. Most problematic are its long, anchored roots which require concentrated watering. This demand is intensified by chat's ability, with heavy irrigation, to produce multiple harvests throughout the year. International chat prices skyrocket during the dry season, meaning that the motivation among farmers for water use is strongest when the land is least capable of providing.
"You see, in order to grow chat, in order to irrigate chat you need to extract lots and lots of water, and water is free,"says Dr. Tena Alamirew, Academic and Research Vice President of Haramaya University, which sits beside the empty lake.
"During the Communist regime there was the law of common property—nobody was thought to own the water so everybody just took out however much they want," says Professor Tena,. "Today, as long as they can fuel their pumps it's still all free, so nobody gave even the slightest attention until the end, until the very last moment."
The Man Who Chased a Lake
Girma Moges is angry. He was here on February 10, 2004 when the pump he managed for ten years stopped forever, and he's still here now. His office as Chief of Haramaya Water Supply is still housed amid the cracked dials, rusted gears, and abandoned pipes of the pump house that once brought water from Lake Haramaya to Harar. Four years after the pumps finally stopped, he's still angry.
"Nobody took care of this lake." He barks through a mouth dotted with gold-capped teeth. "Nobody cared for it or cleaned it; they just used it and used it." He continues, gesturing in every direction to communicate the scale of blame.
Past the pump house are the strange atenuated structures Moges tried to build as he frantically pursued the retreating lake. The progression of his desperation is memorialized by a series of long pipes sagging on corroded supports that stagger out in stages towards the center of the now bone-dry basin.
When that inevitable day arrived four years ago and the pump sputtered to its final end, Harar was thrown into what is locally referred to as "the emergency," a three month period when no water flowed from any pipes.
Aid tankers filled the role until another stopgap solution was found. A borehole was dug into Haramaya's empty lake bed, and new pumps were erected. Scientists warned that the underground remnants of the lake would last only a few years.
Like most who had a front row seat for Lake Haramaya's destruction, Moges readily presents a long list of guilty parties. He says that Harar Beer Brewery irresponsibly used and polluted Haramaya's water, and he resents farmers who took the lake for granted. But he seems most disillusioned by an apathetic government that stood by and let it happen.
Threatened lakes are becoming an increasingly familiar story around the world. The infamous Aral Sea in Central Asia was almost completely drained by Soviet mismanagement and over-irrigation. Lake Chad in central Africa has been shrinking for decades due to overuse and continuous intense droughts. Last year, lakes around the United States including Lake Superior in Michigan and Lake Okeechobee in Florida reached record lows.
"We need to green our politics," says Negusu Aklilu, Director of Ethiopian NGO Forum for Environment. Aklilu's organization is preparing to launch a campaign to educate policymakers in the country on environmental issues. "Right now development is happening at the expense of the environment. We need to get people thinking about the future and get politicians thinking twenty years down the line with every decision they make."
But Moges worries that nothing has been learned from Haramaya's death and bitterly predicts that many other Ethiopian lakes will know this fate in coming years.
"When a man is a little sick nobody wants to give him medicine," Moges concludes, quieter now, the ruins of his pump rattling in a hot wind. "Once he's dying maybe they give him a little medicine, and once he's dead they are sorry."
Planting on receding lakeshores
near Haramya, Ethiopia
Photo: Alex Stonehill
God's Job
Ahmed Dawid, a farmer along Haramaya's far bank and father of four is no chat millionaire. And he certainly is sorry. He's sorry that his family, once able to make good money from farming, now has to scrape together a living raising livestock that graze on the prickly grass growing in the former lake's basin. He's sorry that they can only keep their subsistence crops alive by chasing the last of Haramaya's water into ever-deepening muddy pits hand dug into the lake's bottom.
"Right now I have my children in school, and I hope that they will be able to find jobs" Dawid says, placing a weathered hand on the shoulder of his small daughter, who carries his newborn son in a bundle on her back "but I know that there are few jobs and that they may have to come back to me. If that happens I will divide what little I have and we will try and make do."
Unsustainable and unregulated agricultural practices coupled with burgeoning populations have caused serious environmental degradation throughout Ethiopia and other parts of Africa. A lack of awareness of environmental issues and deep poverty conspire here and the poorest of the poor continue to suffer first from environmental devastation.
"The developed world can't just blame us for misappropriating resources. When we're misappropriating resources we're doing it for survival," argues Aklilu for Forum for the Environment, "The rich, they do it for luxury."
When asked why he thinks the lake dried, Dawid follows a universal farming tradition and blames city people and the weather. Harar city simply uses all the water for themselves, he explains, while farmers' families are forced to drink dirty groundwater and watch their crops shrivel. Regular droughts don't help. The long rainy season can't be counted on anymore, despite a few recent good years, and the lake has lost hope of replenishment.
A higher power also plays a role in the equation. Dawid still hopes that the lake will come back, believing this could be possible if fate wills it. When asked what his family will do for water once the last of Haramaya's underground water is depleted he responds, "That is God's job," the rough scratch of shovels in a nearby water hole thumping steadily behind him, "only God knows."
Widowed by the Water
Jamal Hussein, 60, worries that the whole region is being punished for its sins. Hussein, a fisherman on Lake Haramaya for 42 years, is heartbroken and looking for answers.
Extreme weather has been on the march. A massive flash flood that killed hundreds in nearby Dire Dawa two years ago, rivers that once flowed year-round slowly turning seasonal, and the steady dwindling of the area's many lakes would have anyone looking for supernatural explanations.
"The rains have decreased overall, and the amount of water entering into the lake was less," says Hussein, "and the wind is dry now, so much drier then before," he continues, watching the sun fade around the edges of what he once considered his lake, the lake locals affectionately used to called "Jamal's Fishery."
Biologist have confirmed Hussein's meteorological observations and studies in this area have shown a trend toward warming temperatures and sporadic rainfall that no longer follows traditional rainy season patterns.
"I don't know about overall rain throughout the country," says Dr. Brook Lemma, a biologist and fresh water ecology expert that spent almost two decades studying the disappearance of Lake Haramaya, "But I know this—the temperatures are definitely rising and the rain patterns are shifting, the rains are not normal anymore."
Hussein's hands are clasped behind his back as he looks out forlornly at the empty crater that to him represents his community's sins. An angry goat bleats in the distance. A decade ago, he might have been bobbing above this spot in his little motor boat. Today a cactus grows next him.
But despite his melancholy, the memories come back. First he tells of the joys of a good catch hauling loads of tilapia and catfish into Harar and Dire Dawa's markets. He speaks, a sly smile stretching from hollow cheek to hollow cheek, of being so rich and strong from catching, selling and eating fish that foreign tourists would admire him as he—shirtless—pulled his boat out of the water.
Hussein's body animates as he imitates birds and fish that are now long gone. His head bobs down and then jerks up demonstrating a cormorant swallowing a fish. He waves his body gracefully, face turned to the darkening sky in the movements of a giant catfish. It's as though he's trying to conjure the animals back. The young herders headed home through the basin laugh at his antics; they would be too young to remember these creatures here.
"So much was lost," says Dr. Lemma, "I used to see lots of cormorants, and there were ducks and small birds for bird-watching not to mention the many types of grasses and beautiful reeds. They're all gone now."
As the lake dried, the fish burrowed into the mud, seeking moisture. Hussein imagines they found their way through underwater tunnels to the smaller Finkile Lake where he now fishes, sadly watching another lake dwindle. "I think the fish are the same ones," he says hopefully, but admits that anyone near Haramaya when it rains can still smell the fishy mass grave the lake has become.
"When the water of Finkile goes I will turn to begging," says Hussein, heading home for the night, "I am a fisherman and too old to do anything else."
Chat farmer near Harar, Ethiopia
Photo: Alex Stonehill
Blame it on the Rain
Droughts, disappearing lakes, and rivers running dry implicate global warming in the minds of many and recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that sub-Saharan Africa will be hit hard by shifting weather patterns in coming decades.
But the specter of climate change looms as a controversial issue here. Some believe the climate change threat is overstated and that conservation should focus on the human activites that are directly impacting the environment. Others withhold judgment for now, considering the topic too new and the research yet to be done. Still others suggest that Ethiopia is experiencing some of the first effects of climate change and that the country should prepare for more to come.
Whatever the causes, it remains to be seen if the region or the country has fully absorbed the new environmental realities that Haramaya's deaths foretells.
Ethiopia's government promotes its country as The Water Tower of Africa, a reference to the nation's many lakes, rivers, tributaries and projected ground water reserves. The government here is excited by plans of providing not only adequate and safe water to the people, but also hydroelectric power to surrounding nations in the coming years.
In Harar the immediate water crisis has been averted, but some wonder for how long.
Wealthy farmers in Haramaya still pull in good chat money, irrigating their crops via gas powered pump extraction from underneath the lake. Aid tankers sent from the government of Iran and international NGOs bring daily shipments of water to community water taps and tourist hotels in Harar. The emergency pump system is slated to give out just as a government project that will pipe water from Dire Dawa's aquifer to Harar is completed.
"Nobody is trying to work out a national water plan, not for the Haramaya region, not for the country," says Dr. Lemma, who is concerned that current plans don't address larger issues of water management and conservation. "Everybody is talking about what they call ‘development,' we all want development but at what expense?"
A lake, once almost 10 miles around and 25 feet deep at it's center, not to mention its accompanying ecosystem and economy, has vanished. More stand to follow. As governments face pressures from growing populations, shifting weather patterns and intensifying agricultural, industrial and consumptive endeavors, one wonders what the environmental future holds for towns like Haramaya across the globe.
As for Chala Ahmed, he's happy with his family's new home but eager to get back to the United States. He has no desire to resettle in Ethiopia. As a long-distance trucker he's visited every state in the union save Alaska and Hawaii and he's thinking he'd like to move to Seattle. There's a large Ethiopian community there and he thinks it's a beautiful place.
"Lake Haramaya used to be so big it was like the ocean in Seattle," says Ahmed with future plans on his mind, "It was so far across you could hardly see the other side." He continues, "I never thought we'd lose Haramaya because it was a natural thing. You know there is nothing in the world like a natural source of water."
This article originally appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Multimedia originally produced for 1h2o.org. Radio story originally aired on the World Vision Report. Funding for these stories provided by the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting. © 2008 The Common Language Project