The woes of Kilimanjaro

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 11:30:00 +0000

This is not the place William Kiwali remembers from when he was a child. A thin man with good posture and stained teeth, Kiwali gestures to the steep hillside below him, where rows of parched cornstalks lean at oblique angles, brown and shriveled under the equatorial sun. "Our corn is very dry now," says Kiwali, "because the winter rains did not come." This is the third year his community has gone without the crucial late-autumn rains. A generation ago, the area was characterized by reliable rain, thick fog and generous streams. "The rivers were full," Kiwali says, and his family's coffee, corn and bananas thrived. Now the rains are irregular, many streams run dry, and the corn, a staple food for Kiwali and his neighbors, doesn't thrive as it once did.

Kiwali looks over his shoulder at the sleeping volcano, which looms more than 14,000 feet above his village of Kifuru Juu, just half a mile from the trekkers' paradise of Kilimanjaro National Park. For over 250 years the legendary snows, rains and forests of Mount Kilimanjaro have sustained families living along the verdant slopes in the mountain's rain shadow. Now, Kifuru Juu and hundreds of other communities that blanket the mountainside are suffering from the changes to their environment. "When I was little, there was a lot of snow on the mountain," Kiwali says. "Now there's not much snow and the water has dried out."

Salon.com > Kate Cheney Davidson

The woes of Kilimanjaro