Uganda's Lakes Receding as Dry Spell Hits Hard

Dressed in a soiled T-shirt and a white pair of trousers, John Byansi cuts a figure of a typical small-scale Ugandan farmer in the countryside. His trousers are ripped around the knees, with the lower part on the verge of falling off. But standing on the edge of what was a shoreline of Nyaguwo Lake in Opeta village, Pallisa district five years ago, Byansi, a fisherman, looks happy. He smiles from ear to ear. In his foreground are freshly tilled fields and a rice garden. A group of children are playing about in the wreckage of wooden fishing canoes which were abandoned by fishermen when the lake’s shoreline started receding. It is just over five years since the fishermen first noticed that the edge of the water in the lake in Gogonyo sub-county was receding.

http://www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1444930/ugandas-lakes-recede-dry-spell-hits-hard

Erin Bourgois

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