Tiny figures emerge from the bush, barely able to carry the old vegetable oil bottles that their mothers have entrusted to them. Women wrapped in bright cloths and wearing headscarves leave the shade of the acacia trees along the verge.

The truck shudders to a halt and a 100-litre barrel of water is retrieved from beneath the passengers crammed aboard.

With a minimum of greeting, the vegetable oil containers and jerry cans are filled and the truck is on its way again.

Fetching water is women’s work in this part of the world. But in parched northern Kenya — where a two-year drought is threatening to plunge the country into famine and change for ever an age-old pastoral way of life — fetching water means begging at the side of the road.

Bishara Muhammad, 40, hefts a half-filled bottle on to her hip. “There’s nothing to eat,” she says.

“The cows are finished, the goats are finished. We have no work, nothing. Even the camels are finished which means there can be little chance for us. Our only hope is the road.”

Her family’s 50 camels have been reduced to two. All the cattle are dead. Only a handful of goats survive.

Her husband and male relatives have led the hardiest animals over the border into Somalia in search of pasture. The women and children are left to fend for themselves.

“Our biggest worry is the children, getting enough maize for them,” Bishara says.

Around her, the other women and the stick-thin children slip silently away to wait in the shadows for the next truck.

The story is the same all along the track from Wajir to El Wak, a stone’s throw from Somalia. It cuts through a dusty land, where only termite mounds and leafless acacias grow. This is the epicentre of the drought in Kenya. About 3.5 million people need food aid to survive the year.

The aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières has determined that 20 per cent of children around El Wak are malnourished — well above the 15 per cent emergency threshold.

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