Kenya

Jordan Wilson, Pulitzer Student Fellow

In Africa's refugee camps, having access to basic health care isn't easy. Resources are limited, safety is uncertain, and aid agencies have to work harder to save lives. Ernest Waititu spent an evening riding along in the only ambulance serving Kenya's sprawling Kakuma Refugee Camp. The camp is home to more than 40,000 refugees from more than 10 countries in Eastern Africa.

Last November Foreign Exchange aired a special edition, focusing on the nearly 1 billion people around the world who lack access to clean water and sanitation. The host, Daljit Dhaliwal, highlighted Pulitzer Center's work on water issues in east Africa and how those reports were then used to frame an interactive web portal to engage the public, and in particular students and educators, throughout the world.

At the crack of dawn when women and children in other parts of the world wake up to take warm showers and sit down to breakfast, women and children of Kakuma in Turkana Region of Kenya wake up to a different exercise: to walk for miles in the hunt for water. Upon their arrival at the "water source" the real work begins, as they dig the ground for water in the essentially dry gulch that goes by the name of Tarach River.

At the crack of dawn when women and children in other parts of the world wake up to take warm showers and sit down to breakfast, women and children of Kakuma in Turkana Region of Kenya wake up to a different exercise: to walk for miles in the hunt for water.

When the flight attendant announces that we should prepare for landing, the plane plummets fast towards the hills at a speed that makes me think about the will which has remained on my to-do list for a while now. The plane steadies, only for a while, for when it hits Loki's runway it is with a thud. Never before had I felt a stronger urge to perform that old ritual of bursting into applause when a plane touched down.

A dispute over a one-acre island in Lake Victoria that has fueled talk of war between Kenya and Uganda is but one instance of increasing conflict over shrinking water resources throughout Africa.

Such conflicts pit ethnic groups, races and nations against one another and are likely to get worse, fueled by a toxic mix of climate change, environmental ruin, mounting droughts and famine.

Kenya's Lake Turkana, was in the spotlight in the just ended World Water Forum here, when a claim that the country's second largest lake faced the threat of extinction due to plans to dam Ethiopia's River Omo — the lake's main inlet.

Ms Ikal Angelei told the forum that the Government of Kenya had "traded off," the people of Turkana in exchange for hydro-electric power to be supplied from Ethiopia after the damming of the river.

Alex Amend, Pulitzer Center

Today in the Washington Post Pulitzer Center grantee Sharon Schmickle reports on a serious wheat rust epidemic in Africa, the first in 50 years.

A virulent new version of a deadly fungus is ravaging wheat in Kenya's most fertile fields and spreading beyond Africa to threaten one of the world's principal food crops, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.

Stem rust, a killer that farmers thought they had defeated 50 years ago, surfaced here in 1999, jumped the Red Sea to Yemen in 2006 and turned up in Iran last year. Crop scientists say they are powerless to stop its spread and increasingly frustrated in their efforts to find resistant plants.

Pulitzer Center grantee Barry Simmon's documentary, "Sons of Lwala," will be recognized by ABC World News Tonight, January 30, 2009. " Since the film's debut in April 2008, it has garnered many awards including the 2009 Dartmouth Martin Luther King Junior Social Justice Award for Emerging Leadership. Themain subject of the documentary, Milton Ochieng, who along with his brother helped build their village's first clinic is ABC's Person of the Week.

Mariam was the victim of double bad luck: First, that mosquito gave her malaria. Second, it was cerebral malaria, a form of the disease that is so severe it often kills children.