ETHOPIA: The Ethiopian government is following the example of socially-conscious landlords in Ireland during the 1840s by promoting famine-relief projects in rural areas worst affected by drought.
Under the Food for Work programme, able-bodied peasant farmers earn the equivalent of €1 a day per head building rudimentary roads in outlying areas.
The women gather stones from fields while the men lay them in a neat carpet on the roadway. There is nothing else for them to do in the Zuway Dugda district, south-west of Addis Ababa. The fields that should be yielding crops are now bone-dry because it has been seven years since they had a decent rainfall.
If it doesn't rain this year, more than half of its 103,000 people face starvation.
Located in the Rift Valley, the district has a classically African landscape of acacia scrub, informal hedgerows of cacti, succulents and thorn-bushes, groups of circular thatched huts and dusty rutted roads which will never see tarmac, all set against the backdrop of dark mountains.
The convoy of nine Land Cruisers carrying the Minister of State for Overseas Development, Mr Tom Kitt, and his Ireland Aid party whipped up a small dust storm in sun-drenched Zuway Dugda on Thursday as soon as it veered off the smooth EU-funded main road from Addis.
Mr Kitt found himself surrounded by at least 200 local people armed with hoes, spears and other implements from working on the roadway. However, they were in a happy mood, knowing that aid was coming - maybe to pay for pumps to bring desperately-needed water from a nearby lake.
"Unless we improve irrigation here, there is no hope," one official from the Disaster Preparedness Commission warned.
Lake Ziway is maddeningly close, just three kilometres away, but bringing some of its water to the arid fields would require significant capital investment.
Nearer its shore, the land provides good grazing for cattle and shoats (a cross between sheep and goats). These days, they have been joined by a herd of 100 camels, driven there by a pastoralist farmer and his young son, Hussein, from drought-stricken Matahara, 200 kilometres away.
Hussein, who doesn't know his age (he looked about 10 and malnourished from living on camels' milk), told us they had left their home three months ago in search of better grazing. "When it gets green again in Matahara, we will go back," he said. But nobody knows whether the rain will come.
Through an interpreter, I asked Hussein if the local people objected to the camels grazing on their land, but he said there was "no problem" because they share the same tribal lines.
It is clear, however, that the remaining grass won't last unless it is replenished by a good rainy season.
Self-help has become the order of the day in Zuway Dugda, as elsewhere in Ethiopia. A nursery has been established to grow 100,000 trees to replace the numerous acacias chopped down to make charcoal in recent years. People now appreciate that trees are needed for sound environmental reasons.
Mr Kitt also visited a local health centre, where he met women with malnourished babies. Since water is so scarce in the area, the children were unwashed and showed symptoms of conjunctivitis, scurvy and malaria. The nearest hospital is 100 kilometres away.
Some of the older children showed us their school copybooks, neatly written in their own language. One 17-year-old boy with surprisingly good English said he had improved it by reading books and listening to radio. All he wanted to do was to lead "a simple life" on the land of his forefathers.
Whether he gets a chance to do that depends on the weather. Unless the rainy season comes in April, allowing seeds to be sown successfully, there will be a famine. Trócaire, the Irish aid agency, is working with the local Meki Catholic Diocese to see what can be done to avert the worst.
