STWR - Share The World's Resources

Hassan Isak Nour's grandfather settled this village in southwest Somalia with the optimism of a pioneer. He plowed large fields, planted sorghum, and dug a 200-foot-wide bowl-shaped hole to capture rainwater. For 57 years, it held water, and the village prospered and grew. But late last year, the water catchment dried up.

For the people of Goobato, 200 miles northwest of the capital, Mogadishu, that meant disaster. The next morning, the village's 400 women began what has become their daily trek to survive. They leave at 2 a.m. to walk 10 miles to the nearest water source, and return home seven hours later, each carrying five gallons of water.

Throughout vast sections of the Horn of Africa, specialists say, a searing drought already is the worst in a decade. Oxfam, the aid agency, says the drought is the worst in 40 years in some areas.

In Goobato, no one remembers a drought this severe. Already, in recent days and weeks, dozens of children and thousands of animals have died in Goobato and the surrounding area from diseases linked to severe dehydration and malnutrition, UN officials and villagers said last week.

"What will happen here is beyond my imagination -- it is something I don't want to think about," Nour, the village elder, said last week, standing on the rim of the empty hole his grandfather had dug. ''Because if we don't receive rain in the next few months, many, many people will die. Everyone will leave this area. The village itself will die."

The United Nations has issued urgent funding appeals for Somalia and the rest of the drought-affected region that includes four countries in northeastern Africa, and plans to update its needs next month. Some donors are already considering or committing millions of dollars in fresh aid. The US Agency for International Development has targeted $248 million in emergency food aid this year to Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Djibouti.

Conflict and lawlessness in the Horn of Africa are making it far harder to get aid to those who need it. In particular, Somalia's pirates and warlords are disrupting shipping routes and delaying food deliveries.

In Wajid, Somalia, a dusty, hot outpost 20 miles south of Goobato where wind gusts coat skin and hair with sand and dirt, UN officials say the situation has reached dire proportions. Malnutrition rates have exceeded 25 percent in some areas. Cattle deaths are already nearing 30 percent of the herds and could top 80 percent by April, according to the UN.

"We are getting reports all the time that many people, most of them children, are dying, and that many, many animals are dying," said Ibrahim Conteh, the World Food Program's deputy head of its office in Wajid. ''All around us, malnutrition is dangerously high."

Every day for the past few weeks, several hundred people have left their villages and walked up to four days to reach burgeoning camps for displaced people just outside Wajid. The camps are scenes from a subworld of deprivation -- children caked with dirt running around rows of tiny rounded huts made of twigs and covered with colorful quilts or T-shirts ripped in two, and adults whose legs approximate walking sticks lying down to rest.

"We have water here -- we thank God for that," said Xadix Abdi, a mother of seven who walked two days to reach the camp. She said seven people, six of them children, had recently died in her village of Marmal ''because of the drought."

She said life in the camps also was becoming increasingly difficult as the numbers of people multiply. ''It is very, very hot, and we go without food for two, three days sometimes," she said. ''Today, if my family or the agencies don't bring food, we will have nothing for dinner and nothing tomorrow."

The East African drought is the latest of periodic severe food and water shortages that have plagued Africans for the past several decades. Emergencies in the last year alone have affected millions of people in Niger and Mali in western Africa, and parts of Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania in the south.

But relief agencies are especially concerned about the situation in semiarid regions of Somalia, western Kenya, southern Ethiopia, and Djibouti because of the combination of too little rain for two years and too much violence and insecurity in several areas.

The biggest security problems are in Somalia, which has had no central government for 15 years.