Healing a drought

Traditional healers in Kenya have been appeasing ancestor spirits to try and bring a devastating drought to an end. The prolonged drought combined with an unprecedented loss of traditional healing plants, due to the lack of rain, means that while illness is on the increase, the natural remedies they and their communities depend on are disappearing fast.

Daud Sheikh, head of the traditional healers council in Dadajibula, says that this time the drought is different: "We have never witnessed such a problem before and we suspect that we have done something wrong or an ancestor is not happy with what we have been doing."

Back in the city, Director of Kenya's Climate Forum - Benjamin Akavasi - points out that climate change is altering weather patterns and suggests that: "these changes will affect traditional healers everywhere in the world ..... the most important thing is they should go back and take advantage of indigenous knowledge available in coping with the problem."

The healers traditionally utilise leaves, roots and tree bark to treat all their community's ailments. Patients have long visited them in Dadajibula, once a bustling town and centre for traditional healing for a wide region of countryside. Healers are usually paid in goats and cattle, but since many have lost their livestock they could no longer pay, even if there were medicines for the healers to offer. The drought is effecting all the pastoralists. Without rain their livestock dies. Without livestock they have no money for health, education, food or clothing. At the moment, Dadajibula has been reduced to a ghost town.

Source: www.trust.org/alertnet/news   ALERTNET/Abjata Khalif

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