Ugly sights welcome you to parts of Garissa County on a normal day. Homes are quiet, as if deserted, but inside are hungry people, evading the scotching heat outside, which has left them exhausted, helpless and hopeless.
A few children try to utilise any little found strength to play, but soon they are overcome and lie under whatever shade is available. Some fall asleep, but flies targeting mucus overflowing their noses and ants biting their dry and bare legs won't let them.
Away from home, livestock and wildlife equally struggle. The stench of death is real. Several animals have starved to death, and their carcasses lie nearby.
In some places, like Qarmaddha in Ijara, buffaloes are stuck in mud just before they get to what is left of a drying water pan. Even as you walk away unable to help these God's creatures, you know they will be dead, soon. It is devastating.
The situation is worse in Ifo, at the Dadaab camp. A woman and her three children are not just hungry, she just lost her months-old baby "to hunger".
And there is now talk that many refugees are crossing over from Somalia and Somaliland to Kenya in search of food. Yet the situation is equally bad in Kenya.
In Kilifi, Marsabit and Kajiado, humans and livestock starve. Even the booming hay business in Kajiado has not countered the livestock deaths. They need to sell the same livestock to get money for hay.
So where do humans turn for help?
Last Saturday hundreds of Muslim faithful, including Garissa Governor Nadhif Aden Jamaa, gathered for a "Salatul Istisqa (prayers for rain)" at Garissa Primary School. May Allah answer these prayers!
The children in these places are denied their rights, and their future is clearly being designed for failure.
If they can't eat, they won't go to school. If they do not go to school, how will they escape poverty? How will they contribute to nation building?
Their nutrition is threatened for lack of food; any food, forget the balanced diet. These families are losing so much.
Beyond the diseases they suffer as a result of the scorching heat, and in some cases flooding, thoughts and desperation, not knowing what tomorrow holds and where to run for help after their livelihood is snatched, is recipe for mental and other health problems.
In this day and era, having climate refugees; men and women leaving their otherwise peaceful homes to squat somewhere in tiny rooms in camps, just for food, is stripping them of dignity.
I pray that huge global polluters pay for the sufferings of people in the Horn of Africa, and in Nigeria where record high flooding is causing untold misery.
The loss and damage suffered by victims of the flooding and drought will not be rewarded in heaven, neither are these same victims to blame for the harsh climate.
The cause of global warming is known. The culprits are known. We must just not have any new fossil fuel projects now.
African governments already spend too much from their GDP to tackle climate crisis, and this is stagnating the continent's economic growth.
As the world heads to Egypt for the COP27, developed nations must take bolder steps at addressing and paying for loss and damage. The agenda on compensation for climate induced economic losses should yield good results for this lovely continent.
For now, the Horn of Africa is not war-torn, it is climate crisis-torn, and we cannot take it anymore.
The writer is Interim Communications Manager at GreenFaith
