Somaliland: Living at the 'Mercy of the Rain' in Somaliland

Jul 2, 2015 | Katie Riordan, Al Jazeera
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It has been particularly dry this year in parts of Somaliland, the internationally unrecognised nation-state that broke away from Somalia in 1991. Small, frequent droughts have left the land and its inhabitants parched. On a bumpy single-track dirt road just south of the capital Hargeisa near the Ethiopian border, a woman squatted over a shallow tire track imprint carved out in dried mud. The small crevice pocketed what little remained of a long-overdue recent rain. The woman, using a plastic yellow jerry can, scooped at the diminutive amount of water.