Saving Stripes

Category: Rangeland management | Date: Sep 25 2009 | By: savingstripes

Sorry we have not posted in some time; we have been on vacation and haven’t been online much!

Getting back to our Ethiopia trip – we are nearly finished relating the important parts of the trip.

Day 7 saw us out the door of the Yabello Motel by 7:30. Back to the kindergarten restaurant for some breakfast ful, before we met Aliyu from CARE.

We then headed out to look at some of the sites where Aliyu and CARE have been working. As in Awash, the Borana community in the Yabello area are maintaining large fenced kalos – areas that are not grazed during the wet season and are kept as a dry season reserve for lactating cows, calves, and weak animals that can’t make the journey to the dry season grazing areas. Aliyu and CARE have been working with the community to do some restoration of these areas.

Since bush encroachment is one of the main problems here, Aliyu has been encouraging the families that keep each kalo to cut the undesirable trees (leaving some trees of the more desirable species). This is followed by a controlled burn to help kill the trees and freshen the grass. The result, from what we saw, is quite impressive. See how visibly different a kalo is from far away!

The land inside these kalos is covered in grass, with hardly a patch of bare soil visible.

Outside the kalos, there is a lot of bare ground and trails, as well as more trees.

Now the trick is to figure out how to expand this model to slowly restore more of the rangeland. (The restored areas are quite large – about 80 hectares – but a drop in the bucket on the scale of the whole rangeland).

Also as in Awash, the government is encouraging pastoralists in Borana to take up some agriculture. Already many of the valley bottoms – where the soil is most fertile – are being cultivated with maize and tef. The government is building a long pipeline to bring in ground water for irrigation. This scheme, though admirable in its intent to help people, seems even worse of an idea in Borana than in Awash. Ground water pumped in from far away to water fields in marginal agricultural land sounds like a recipe for environmental disaster – what happens if the soil gets poisoned by salts and becomes infertile?

After our tour of CARE’s work, we headed south along the main road to Moyale (the Kenyan border), passing through some areas heavily encroached by bush and other areas in better condition. We stopped at the small town of Dubluk to see one of the incredible traditions of this region: the so-called “singing wells.” These wells have been maintained by Borana pastoralists for centuries. They are dug into the ground in areas underlain by limestone. The two we saw were probably about 20 meters deep, but apparently there are some that are much deeper. Each well is accessed by a long ramp that ends in a mud-fashioned trough.

The trough is where the animals drink from. The herders fill the trough by hauling buckets up from the well. A human bucket chain brings the buckets up from the surface. Although we didn’t see this in action, we’re told that the men often sing while doing this to keep up their spirits.

The wells were a fascinating and awe-inspiring sight. It was quite special to see this centuries-old tradition in action, to contemplate how many millions of animals have drunk from these same wells, and the rich knowledge the Borana possess about the land in which they live.

From Dubluk we continued south, getting a chance to see still more of the landscape, until we came to a fascinating volcanic crater. This crater is about 400 m from rim to floor and has at its center a completely black soda lake.

Here, too, the Borana people have been toiling for centuries – in this case, hauling out salt. To get the salt, people have to dive into the lake and pull out the crystals or “salt mud.” The best quality salt is sold for human consumption, but much of it is used as a feed supplement for the livestock. Especially during the wet season, salt can be a critical addition to the animals’ diet. Apart from the interesting human side of this site, it was also quite a dramatic physical setting, with the sharp walls of the crater and the black lake at its core.

By the time we returned to Yabello it was long past lunch-time. We met with a few more people at CARE and a local government research center and then grabbed an early dinner. We were very happy to feast on shiro at our now-familiar kerosene-smelling restaurant.