"Like An Umbrella Had Covered The Sky" - The Locusts Arrive In Kenya

[hatrack]

When the dense, dark smudge started blocking out the daytime sky, many in a sleepy pastoralist hamlet in northern Kenya imagined it was a cloud ushering in some welcome, cooling rain. But the hope soon turned to terror when the giant blot revealed itself as a swarm of fast-moving desert locusts, which have been cutting a path of devastation through Kenya since late December.

The sheer size of the swarm stunned the villagers. “It was like an umbrella had covered the sky,” said Joseph Katone Leparole, who has lived in the hamlet, Wamba, for most of his 68 years. When the insects descended, the community quickly gathered to try to scare them off, using one arm to beat them with sticks or bang on metal pots, and the other to cover their faces and eyes as the bright, yellow insects teemed around them.

EDIT

enya is battling its worst desert locust outbreak in 70 years, and the infestation has spread through much of the eastern part of the continent and the Horn of Africa, razing pasture and croplands in Somalia and Ethiopia and sweeping into South Sudan, Djibouti, Uganda and Tanzania. The highly mobile creatures can travel over 80 miles a day. Their swarms, which can contain as many as 80 million locust adults in each square kilometer, eat the same amount of food daily as about 35,000 people.

Officials say the infestation poses a risk to food security, undermines economic growth and, if not controlled soon, exacerbate communal conflict over grazing land. In addition to the 12 million people already experiencing acute food shortages in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, the locust crisis now poses a potential threat to the food security of over 20 million others, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, a U.N. agency. “The magnitude of the problem is just so big,” said Cyril Ferrand, who leads the organization’s resilience team for eastern Africa. “The locusts are a moving target and we are racing against time.”

EDIT

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/world/africa/locusts-kenya-east-africa.html

[WhiteTara]

1. I was eleven when we had a grasshopper invasion

and a small locust (compared to this one) almost immediately after the grasshoppers. It was traumatic. Every time you stepped outside, you were instantly covered in hopping buzzing insects. I still can't bear to have bugs get on my body!