[Resending] Somalia's perfect storm

I’m in Bosaso as we speak. This is a video from an hour ago. Not the best quality but you can see how the rain has affected us so far.

Today has been surprising mainly due to the lack of warning from the local government. No one was informed of an upcoming cyclone and it caught all of us by surprise. Water in most parts of the city has already reached ankle high and the rainfall as of 10:52pm is still falling hard.

The floods are getting worse. A lot of the homes are poorly build and are at risk of collapsing. Makeshift camps and IDP camps are also at risk.

Apparently there is a new set of locust swarms heading towards us from Ethiopia and central Somalia. The floods have cleared in Bosaso but has ruined the already fragile roads in the city.

I’m an entrepreneur. I mainly export livestock to neighboring Gulf countries.

Floods could be minimized by developing a drainage or sewage system that could reduce floods. The infrastructure here is almost non existent especially in small villages and towns.

My vision for Somalia is for us to be more self-reliant so that we could react to situations quickly and efficiently. We can do this by investing in our infrastructure, building greenhouses, and educating our youth on the effects of climate change.

In Bosaso there has been extreme heat waves during the summer to the point where almost 80%(estimation) of the residents left for cooler towns and cities. The prices of vegetables also have increased and employment opportunities is at an all time low.

Bosaso is already a semi-desert climate where farms are nonexistent. I have heard from family members that the locusts have drastically diminished crops along with profits in other parts of Somalia.

My mother lives in Somaliland and is a farmer trying to help with food security in the region. The locusts have been ravaging the area the last couple of years and they had to resort to very unconventional methods to protect their crop and many farmers have lost all their crops. I also have family in the North East within the path of Cyclone Gati.

The cyclone came to my attention through my timeline at, I don't know, maybe 5:00 a.m. when I woke up. I saw something about a cyclone and I was like, "Whoa, what's going on?" It was barreling down towards exactly the regions that I'm very familiar with.

My mom is from the Somaliland region and my dad is from the border between Puntland and Somaliland. Family in Somalia is a lot more extended than nucleus family: your cousins, your third, fourth, fifth cousins and stuff is very involved.

And, although where my mom is right now is much more inland, I just thought to myself, "This is potentially going to affect them as well."

I was like, "All right, let me pick up the phone and call my mom." I called her and the first question I actually asked her was, "Is it cloudy around you," and she said yes. The reason why that is surprising is because it's the drought season in Northern Somalia. Usually, this time of the year, you really don't see much of any clouds or anything like that. She said, "Yeah, it is cloudy and it's been cold over the last couple of whatever, the last day or something like that." I said, "There's a thing called a hurricane."

I explained to her because there's no Somali language for exactly this sort of weather system, but I said, "The thing that used to hit America," because she would worry any time there was something coming towards the Gulf Coast. She would be like, "Are you guys okay?" I will say, "No, we're far away but it's a problem." So, I told her something along those lines, "It's coming through and you guys need to be careful." I said, "The family up west, out east, probably are also exposed."

So, while she was on the phone with me and I was sending her some clips from the tracking websites, she called up a couple of people. One person, I really don't know how all the families are tied together, but it's someone who is supposed to be a family member and she knew. That's the one person she worried about because he was going to go to a coastal region, and so she called him up and found him. He was in Bosaso. He said, "Well, we don't know anything about what are you talking about, but it will be God's will. Whatever happens happen, but thank you."

In the US, in the system we're both familiar with, we have tracking systems, people are prepared, there are emergency alarm systems, et cetera, et cetera, that track every aspect of the potential disasters, right? But over there, people are just exposed in ways they really can't do much about. I mean, probably the majority of the country will find out whoever gets hit will find out when they're about to get hit. There won't be some alert system that goes out and tells them what to expect. Maybe they're watching TV, and so potentially there are fishermen in the sea that have not been warned. There are families on the coastal regions that have not been warned and will find out the really hard way. All of these things are ... It was concerning.

She called up a couple of people, informed whoever she could but now, it's a wait and see situation because there's no organized governmental system to either evacuate or help with disasters or this and that.

And so, I dug a little deeper. It turns out this is one of the first, the only thing that has hit Somalia in the history of tracking of this. I was looking a little deeper and apparently there are other weather systems developing within that same Arabian peninsula, that region.

And so, the question is, is this going to be a new seasonal thing that Somalia experiences and that region experiences? Obviously, when the temperature patterns of our oceans changes, obviously, new weather systems will develop in areas we didn't know before or that didn't have them before.

And so, the question really is how far reaching and how lasting this is. Somalia, that region, Africa is an afterthought when it comes to climate change, obviously. And then the countries in the region, they don't really have a technical capacity to understand the climate in a fundamental way and the status changes and shifts in its seasonality and all of that stuff.

My mom is a farmer and she has decided she needs to shift gears. The food we eat comes from Ethiopia and faraway places in the region. She was like, "This is not sustainable and it's really not even predictable, that you will always have the prices in ranges people can afford".

So, she started a farm with all of these citrus trees and guavas and all of these things. She bought about 900 trees and instead of using cash crops to sustain the place, built a model where she was going to use the milk from camels, a staple food of that region, to pay for labor and all of the other costs of the farm.

And so, I think it was a year in when the crops were really starting to develop – and then the locusts came. Then, she had sent me videos. I have the videos. I could forward them to you. [Note: Adnan sent me the videos, but asked me not to share them publicly.]

Basically, just imagine a storm of ... Just the whole sky is covered with this stuff. Literally, if they land on your trees and your farm, they will destroy everything within a day. Mind you, these trees are worth thousands of dollars with a lot of work, these trees take a couple years to get to fruition. There's no one coming to actually help them with any of this stuff. So, now you have these storms every couple of days or literally on a daily basis for five, six days.

What they resorted to was basically they would bring tires and put it on the far ends of the farm and burn them for smoke to ward off the locusts. They have to go to the corners of the farm and light up these tires and it creates smoke, and then somehow they discovered that one other way to fight them would be to bang pots and other metallic objects, so they would hire all of these day laborers in the region to bang it out and make sure that they drove those away.

She's like, "So, there were so many days that we were so exhausted that we just almost gave up and said, you know what, let them eat it. We just can't [go on like this]..." because it's basically a very manual labor. There's no tracking system of this stuff. You just watch and look for the storms coming through and then you bang. That was going on for five days and they were exhausted. They will start daybreak which is, around there, it's 5:00 a.m. or something like that and then they will finish by 6:00 p.m. There will be shifts of people cooking.

They got attacked twice. It was never addressed by any government or any agency.

There is no insurance or anything like that over there. There's no economic department to estimate what the cost of destruction are, but I'm pretty sure if you talk to these farmers, they'll tell you it's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in a region that doesn't have much money and the jobs and all of that stuff lost.

They can't track it. They don't know when it's going to happen again. It's man versus nature. Man versus nature, especially when the disasters are, to some extent, contributed to, as you know, why consumption by people like us out here, the developed world's consumption is contributing to this change in the climate and to these once in a lifetime things that are happening. It's a problem.

Before, it used to be just rain that would worry you, but if locusts are also contributing to the de-vegetation that's happening during the dry season, then you really do have a problem.

I mean, I must say, I mean, we are privileged. My mom technically doesn't need this to survive, to live. Just yesterday, she's always telling me about all of these people who are really in dire poverty. People who are better off are always helping, but they can't take care of millions of people who can be exposed to these disasters.

Mom now employs about, I don't know about 15, 16 people. But if the farm goes away, first of all, that's 16 people who will not have a job.

Now you have also the nomads that basically they will be exposed to the elements a lot more and now you have potentially more famine. And so, what can we do?

There's inequality of expertise in terms of access to actual data and information and reading, understanding how to deal with this stuff and making availability of experts in some of these fields is going to be one of the most important things.

How do you kill a locust? There are, obviously, specialists out there. It probably won't take a lot of resources if there was an organized effort to combat these disasters in these regions, provide the appropriate locust control, whatever, that's also environmentally friendly because we don't want to apply pesticides or whatever to these regions and then kill off and damage the little that is remaining there, but providing the technical know-how for these governments to fight it themselves and then the predictive capacity to deal with it.

The other main thing that really is needed in the region is water management systems. Right now, the only thing that they're using is they're tapping the aquifers. Obviously, that's not sustainable in the long run. These are fossil waters. In a dry region like that, the rainfall is not enough to replenish these aquifers, what happens in the long run we don't know. We already know what's happening in places like California where they have over-tapped the aquifers, so water management systems. You technically can catch the rain water and sustain the environment in a much predictable way.

That's what my mom decided to do. Instead of tapping the aquifer, they dug up two  dams that catch about 14,000 barrels a year. That allows them to water their plants.

I think if you help those two things, obviously, expertise on how to fight some of these things, water management, again, expertise. The third thing is expertise in farming because the land is very fertile. The arable land is huge, and per capita is way beyond what people actually will need over there.