Drought victims in Kenya are receiving a helping hand from a Holloway charity worker who has travelled to the stricken country.

Hannah Burrows, of Biddstone Road, has been working in Sericho, a town in Kenya’s Eastern province, to help ActionAid run feeding programmes for 3,180 children at nine schools and provide clean drinking water for 5,000 people.

Sericho residents say they have seen no rain since 2008.

Saving lives

The 26-year-old, who is normally based at ActionAid’s headquarters in Bowling Green Lane, Clerkenwell, said: “So many women here say that the drought has killed all their livestock, their husbands have left and now they don’t know how to cope.

“At the moment, ActionAid is working to provide food and water to save lives, but in the longer term we’ll be implementing projects like repairing boreholes.”

Boreholes reach deeper into the ground to provide access to more water when a drought strikes.

Hannah added: “We’re also appealing to the UK public to help with long-term support that’s funded through our child sponsorship programmes.

“We’re asking for people to step forward to sponsor a child in need in the region.

In Sericho, Hannah has also spoken to women relying on the monthly food distributions. Twenty-five-year-old Dahabo Adan, a single mother of three children, is one of the women whose story she has heard.

Her husband used to own 50 goats, but during the drought of 2009 they all perished and her husband has since left. Dahabo now works as a maid to support herself and her children, but has been forced to send one of her daughters to live with her grandparents in another town.