Imagine there’s no food or water left wherever you live - your children are starving and the only way to save them is to drag them on a 80-mile hike to secure humanitarian aid.
Your animals all died so you have no food or water to bring on the journey and don’t even know if you’ll all make it alive - but you have to try.
You carry babies on your back while pulling the toddlers that can walk along behind you.
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It’s almost 40 degrees so the family rests in any shade you can find during the hottest parts of the day and walks from dusk to dawn.
You’re one of the lucky ones and have a man to protect you from rapists and attackers on this long and treacherous walk towards help.
You’ve seen other women making the same gruelling journey on their own with a dozen children as their husbands walked off and left them despite taking them as child brides and putting many babies in their bellies - and they haven’t been so lucky.
But you’re not so fortunate that all of your little ones make it and you have to bury your three-year-old by the side of the road.
This is what life is like for women across Somalia right now, where around 3 million people have been internally displaced because of climate crisis induced drought, leaving many on the brink of famine.
It’s not likely to happen to us in the global north any time soon - but that is the reality for millions living where the climate crisis has caused havoc to weather patterns, leaving them without the rains they need to survive.
I’ve been here since Monday, listening to stories of these women as they try to piece their lives back together at Internally Displaced People’s camps with the help of aid organisations like Trocaire.
I’ve also heard horrific tales about farmers who watched helplessly as their animals became skins and bones before their eyes, before taking their last gasps and falling to rot where they landed.
The haunting look in the eyes of people who don’t know if their family will have any food or water to get their many children through another day will stay with me for a long time.
And the worst part of it all is - they don’t even know they are paying for the mistake wealthy nations made when they started polluting our whole planet with oil and gas.
As I write this column from Mogadishu, the fact we still haven’t stopped doing what has caused their pain and suffering in the first place, sticks in my guts.
As they starve and die and bury their children and elderly - we are still going about our daily lives as though there is no climate crisis at all.
We don’t think twice about jumping in the car for a trip to the shops we could easily make on foot; tucking into meat every night of the week, throwing out food or buying clothes from sweatshops halfway across the globe.
It’s very easy for us in the so-called ‘first-world’ to turn a blind eye to the fall-out from our everyday decisions because marketers and public relations firms have done such a good job hiding the truths behind what they sell us.
But when you’re in a place like this - it makes you realise just how insignificant having the best new trainers, dress, car, phone and house is.
Because for people in Somalia, even their most basic needs are not being met.
They live in thrown up shacks with dirt floors, drink dirty water from the river, have no sanitation provisions worth talking about and aren’t even guaranteed a meal a day to help them stay alive.
A few thousand miles away, we have our own problems - but nothing like the scale of what I have seen here.
If we had even one baby a week dying from hunger or malnutrition there would be absolute outrage - here there are hundreds. And it’s all down to climate change.
I don’t know about you - but I don’t want that on my conscience.
We need to be doing everything we can to consign killer oil and gas companies to the history books - that means less plastic, less fuel and going electric if you can.
It means calling out the politicians still harping on about gas and gas derived hydrogen.
It means standing up to fracking and new fossil fuel infrastructure and it means doing everything you can not to waste food and add to the emissions on this planet by driving your car on journeys you could easily make another way.
It may be too late for the hundreds already dead in the Horn of Africa, but we have to think about their children that make it.
Plastic
The world’s mounting plastic problems really hit home for me this week in the Somali region of Gedo - where it was everywhere.
It gathered in unsightly piles across open land, hung from trees and got stuck in thorn hedges which became more plastic than plant.
In a country where births and deaths are not even registered and people are starving to death, I’m sure plastic waste is the last thing on anyone’s minds.
But there’s a much bigger conversation to be had here - and it has to do with the responsibility of plastic producers.
Most people in Somalia can’t even read or write - so how on Earth would they ever know how toxic and problematic plastic is.
They are used to hunting animals, buying grains from reusable sacks and getting water from the river when there is some.
Before plastic and iron sheets descended I would say everything they used to build homes was environmentally friendly.
It’s all well and good for the likes of Coca Cola to argue against stopping single use plastic in countries with recycling schemes - but what about places like Somalia where there’s no such thing.
Single-use plastics, like oil and gas, need to be consigned to the history books right around the world and it’s time giants like Coke stepped up to the plate.
Prime opportunity
In some ways countries like Somalia have the perfect opportunity to build their society in a way that’s better for the environment.
With so much infrastructure already in place in our wee country, its hard to undo years of bad policy decisions like putting cars above all else when it comes to travel, building huge gas networks or subsidising farmers for basically decimating biodiversity.
Would you believe Trocaire funded Luuq Hospital in the Gedo region of Somalia runs completely on solar panels?
The €150,000 roof installation powers everything from oxygen masks to operations, lighting and fans.
The charity is also teaching displaced women and men how to grow crops with much less water using permaculture principles, which cuts out pesticides and works in harmony with the soil.
That’s the kind of thinking we could be doing with at home as the solutions to the problems can also be much cheaper than painting yourself into a corner of neverending consumerism - whether it's for fertilisers, gas, oil or seeds.
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