Still Scraping for Pearls in SomaliaOne of the top favourite songs of 1994 was “Pearls” by Sade, from the album “The Best of Sade” and I, like everyone else, knew all the words and sang along lustily; but it was not until recently that I found out their meaning …

“There is a woman in Somalia; Scraping for pearls on the roadside
There’s a force stronger than nature, Keeps her will alive
That’s how she’s dying, She’s dying to survive
Don’t know what she’s made of, I would like to be that brave
She cries to the heaven above: There is a stone in my heart
She lives a life she didn’t choose, And it hurts like brand-new shoes…”

Apparently the song is about the poverty in Somalia and a mother who was walking down a dirt road looking for “pearls” of barley or rice that had dropped off of relief trucks with which to feed her children, and how difficult life in Somalia was under the poverty and the scorching sun of the drought.

 Still Scraping for Pearls in Somalia

Well, they are still scraping for pearls in Somalia! At least they are in Somaliland, the internationally unrecognised nation-state that broke away from Somalia in 1991, due to many years of small but frequent droughts that have left the land parched and pose a huge threat to the pastoral way of life in Somaliland.

“On a bumpy single-track dirt road just south of the capital Hargeisa near the Ethiopian border, a woman squatted over a shallow tire track imprint carved out in dried mud. The small crevice pocketed what little remained of a long-overdue recent rain. The woman, using a plastic yellow jerry can, scooped at the diminutive amount of water.”

[Source: Al Jazeera]

Farmers say the 2015 drought is far worse than last year’s and farmers have to travel far further than normal to find grazing and water for their emaciated and dehydrated livestock. The protracted dry season should have ended a few months ago already but the skies have yet to open with generosity and many animals are dying, as is plant-life.

The nomadic lifestyle usually suits the people in this area, and they enjoy traversing the land with their cattle, sheep and goats in search of greener pastures, but this year they are having problems in finding any in this currently devastatingly arid land.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), who tracks rainfall, Somaliland received less than 25% of its normal rainfall this year. Many individuals have moved eastwards in search of water; some farmers have lost all their livestock and are worried because they have no other skills so urbanisation would not help them.

We hope that when the rains come these farmers will be able to go back to normal and that searching for pearls on the side of the roads will soon become a thing of the past in a land where severe droughts over the past few years have left millions starving.

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