SHALANBOOD, Somalia — The sand moves like a tide here, swallowing lanes, schools and low-slung homes on the edge of the Indian Ocean. Among the dunes, hundreds of farming families who fled Lower Shabelle’s contested villages are piecing together life in makeshift shelters, rationing water by the cup as fighting and failed rains erase the certainty of the past.
Families from Mushani, Garilow and Barire streamed into the outskirts of Shalanbood in November after government forces and African Union troops clashed with Al-Shabab across Somalia’s breadbasket. The exodus collided with prolonged drought and a fresh surge of windblown sand, compounding a hunger and water crisis in a district already stretched thin. Local authorities say nearly 1,000 families have arrived since November.
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Nuur Mohamed Abdullahi, 56, a father of 17, left his vegetable and grain fields behind and now shelters his family beneath patched cloth and sticks 11 kilometers from the coastal town of Merka. “We find it very difficult to get food. Sometimes we eat only once a day,” he said. “People who are better off help us with small handouts, but it is not enough.”
The new encampments rise directly on the sand, which whips through the huts in searing afternoon winds and chills the air at night. With no piped supply, water comes from a borehole where 20 liters cost about 20 cents — a small sum that still outstrips many households’ means. Nuur waits for neighbors returning from the pump to top off a single jerrycan when they can. “For a family as big as mine, one jerrycan is not enough,” he said. “We use it only for drinking and sometimes to cook one meal. On some days the adults stay thirsty so that the children can drink.”
Before the flight, Nuur planted tomatoes, peppers, maize and beans last August. None survived. The drought withered his fields ahead of harvest, wiping out his investment in seeds, plowing and pesticides and leaving him with approximately $400 in debt. Creditors from his home village call constantly. “All I can tell them is that I have nothing,” he said.
The losses ripple through his household. Ten of his children were enrolled in Koranic school in Mushani, where he paid roughly $50 a month. Since the family fled, they have been out of class. Schools in parts of Shalanbood have been disrupted as sand drifts into compounds and roadways, while others charge about $6 per child each month — an amount the family cannot manage.
On the other side of the settlement, Abdullahi Ibrahim Ali counts out slices of flatbread when there is any to divide. He supports a family of 10 by odd jobs that have mostly vanished as farms fall idle and small businesses shutter. His wife walks to neighborhoods on Shalanbood’s western edge, where the dunes have not yet reached, to ask for cooked food. Some days she returns empty-handed, and the family goes to bed hungry.
“We queue for water at a nearby brackish well,” Abdullahi said. “It is never enough for us. If we try to buy more, we cannot afford it, so we must ration what we have even for washing and bathing.” The family sleeps in a fragile shack of branches and plastic sheeting donated by local residents. It bakes by day and turns cold at night. Four of Abdullahi’s children, once in Koranic school, have no classes to attend now.
What keeps him awake, beyond hunger, is the moving earth itself. “The sand is covering houses in the town. In some places it rises higher than the buildings, like waves in the sea. It has changed people’s lives,” he told Radio Ergo. Abdullahi also carries about $330 in debt for food and farm inputs he purchased in Barire before fleeing. The last crops he planted in October were destroyed by drought and pests before they could mature.
Shalanbood’s sand encroachment is not new, residents say, but in recent months the dunes have advanced with unnerving speed, driven inland off the sea and piling over fields, paths and schoolyards. The drift has narrowed the margin for survival: water points silt over, day labor dries up, and families with no cash cling to the charity of neighbors who are themselves under strain.
“These families are facing serious problems, especially food shortages and lack of medical care,” said Shalanbood District Commissioner Nur Osman Rage. He said the local government had recorded nearly 1,000 displaced families since November, arriving just as the town’s economy faltered under drought and sand. “People used to depend on farm work and daily labour, but those opportunities are now very limited,” he said. “Businesses in the town are also few, so there are no jobs for the displaced.”
Officials say they have alerted federal authorities and humanitarian agencies, but assistance has been scant. In the meantime, needs stack up: emergency food as harvests fail, safe water at affordable prices as shallow wells turn brackish, and medical care that families can reach and pay for. Without help, parents like Nuur and Abdullahi must choose who eats and who studies — choices that etch long-term loss into children’s lives.
The fighting in Lower Shabelle — part of a broader government offensive against Al-Shabab — has deepened a climate shock that alone would have strained the region’s resilience. In Somalia’s breadbasket, where harvests once anchored household budgets and markets, the combination of conflict, drought and drifting sand is dismantling the systems that kept people afloat. It is also closing off the pathways to recovery: land lies unplanted, debts mount, and classrooms sit empty beneath dunes.
For now, survival rests on a thin web of neighborly aid and day-to-day improvisation: a borrowed jerrycan, a shared pot, a tarp tacked tighter against the wind. It is not enough to outlast a season, let alone rebuild. “All we want is to work our land and send our children to school again,” Nuur said, looking toward the buried road back to Mushani. “We are waiting for peace, and for the rains.”
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
