AP – The winter grassland fire that blew up along Colorado’s Front Range was rare, experts said, but similar events will be more common in the coming years as climate change warms the planet – sucking the moisture out of plants – suburbs grow in fire-prone areas and people continue to spark destructive blazes.

“These fires are different from most of the fires we’ve been seeing across the West, in the sense that they’re grass fires and they’re occurring in the winter,” said professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan Jonathan Overpeck.

“Ultimately, things are going to continue to get worse unless we stop climate change.”

Flames swept over drought-stricken grassy fields and neighbourhoods northwest of Denver on Thursday with alarming speed, propelled by guests up to 105 miles per hour. Tens of thousands were ordered to flee with little notice.

“I came out of Whole Foods, which is about a half mile from ground zero, and felt like I had to jump in my car and make a dash for my life as the smoke and wind and nearby flams were

engulfing the area,” Susie Pringle of Lafayette said in an email. “It was scary!”
Three people were missing as of Saturday, and at least seven were injured but no deaths were reported. Officials estimated nearly 1,000 homes and other buildings were destroyed.

Many whose homes were spared remained without power while temperatures dropped to the single digits. The blaze burned at least 9.4 square miles.

The cause of the blaze is still under investigation, but experts say its clear what allowed it to spread so fast.

“With any snow on the ground, this absolutely would not have happened in the way that it did,” said snow hydrologist in Boulder Keith Musselman. “It was really the grass and the dry landscape that allowed this fire to jump long distances in a short period of time.”

Three ingredients were needed to start this fire – fuels, a warm climate and an ignition source, said fire scientist with the University of Colorado, Boulder Jennifer Balch. “And then you add a fourth ingredient, wind, and that’s when it became a disaster.”

Temperatures in Colorado between June and December were the warmest on record, Balch said. The grasses grew thick because they had a wet spring, but saw no moisture until snow flurries arrived on Friday night.

“All of Colorado is flammable, our grasses are flammable, our shrubs are flammable, our trees are flammable,” Balch said. “This is a dry landscape that is flammable for good chunks of the year, and those chunks of time are getting longer with climate change.”

The lesson learned throughout this event is that the “wildland-urban interface is way bigger than we thought it was”, Balch said. That means a wider area is under threat of wildfire.

That border area – where structures built by people meet undeveloped wildland prone to fire – has always been the foothills, she said. Firefighters in Boulder consider the interface west of Broadway – a busy road that passes through the center of town. But Thursday’s fire sparked east of that line, next to thousands of houses that have sprouted up on the east side of the Rockies since the 90s, Balch said.

“There were stretches between Denver and Fort Collins that had no development, but now it’s just like one long continuous development track,” Balch said. “And those homes are built with materials that are very flammable – wood siding, asphalt roofing.

“We need to completely rethink how we’re building homes.”

The other important change is understanding how these fires start in the first place, she said.

“There’s no natural source of ignition at this time of year. There’s no lightning,” she said. “It’s either going to be infrastructure-related or it’s going to be human caused.”

“The way we live in the landscape and our daily activities make us vulnerable,” she said.

Over the last two decades, 97 per cent of wildfires were started by people, according to a recent study by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Causes have ranged from accidents at construction sites, to a car with a hot tailpipe, to tossed cigarettes.

“I like to say, we need Smokey Bear in the suburbs,” she said. “We need to be thinking about how our daily activities can contribute ignitions or sparks that start wildfires.”

Unless people stop climate change by cutting back on fossil fuels, wildfires will threaten communities, Overpeck said.

“There’s little doubt in my mind that the conditions conducive to really bad wildfire, whether it’s grass or forest, are only going to get worse,” he said.

As more people move to areas where wildfires occur, the threat goes up.

“We’re building towns and cities and infrastructure and so it’s just a matter of time before we have whole towns burning down like we had in California and events like this in Colorado.”

OUAGADOUGOU, BURKINA FASO (AP) – In her dreams, Eveline Zagre believes her two sets of twins share premonitions and make demands of her – buy a chicken, beg for money.

“Their spirits will enter your dreams and let you know what they want and then you have to get it for them,” she said.

Despite the burden of following their dream directives, Zagre considers herself doubly blessed. The 30-year-old mother of five is raising three-year-old twin girls and 13-year-old twin boys in Burkina Faso – one of the West African countries where twins are revered for having special powers, like healing the sick, warding off danger, bringing financial prosperity and predicting the future.

The country, with its strong cultural embrace of the supernatural, regards twins as the children of spirits, and the mothers of twins as specially picked to bear them.

This deeply rooted perception stems from the days people could not scientifically explain how twins were conceived. In other parts of West Africa, twins are seen as a curse.

“People were afraid of twins because they couldn’t explain… why these children were born two instead of one,” said Honorine Sawadogo, a sociologist at the government-run National Centre for Scientific and Technological Research in Burkina Faso.

Parents of twins would turn to witch doctors who came up with rules they believed they must follow to keep their children and themselves safe, said Sawadogo, who did her doctoral research on the mothers of twins. These beliefs and practices persist today despite the established scientific explanation for how twins come into the world.

Zagre and her husband Ousmane Nikiema visited a witch doctor after giving birth to both sets of twins. For their boys, the parents were given no directives. But a witch doctor told them their girls, Victorine and Victoria Nikiema, needed to beg for money on the side of the road or risk being killed by a family member’s spirit.

“If (the witch doctor) sees a spirit in the compound, you’ll have to take the children to beg to prevent the curse,” said Nikiema, who lives with his family in Burkina Faso’s capital city, Ouagadougou. “(The spirit) might not kill them, but he’ll do something to them. He can make them insane or something similar, or he can paralyse them.”

Throughout Ouagadougou, mothers and their identically dressed twins can be seen sitting on mats alongside roads and begging. They are driven by dream requests and witch doctor instructions, mothers told The Associated Press.

As they beg, visitors offer gifts, like chickens, honey cake and seashells, in exchange for blessings.

“I bless people when they come and give us things, I say may God heal you if someone comes and is sick,” said Marcelline Tapsoba, the mother of two-year-old twins.

As they sat on the ground in their usual spot in the city’s outskirts, Tapsoba and her children were surrounded by other mothers and their twins who also were begging and offering blessings.

Tapsoba said those who receive her blessings often return weeks later to thank her for their newfound romantic or financial success.

Similar scenes play out in Ghana. “If you give birth to the twins in Ghana, you have to follow the twins’ rules,” said Kasim Amadu, a businessman. It is thought that wronged and unhappy twins can lead to personal harm for the parents and others, he said.

Most cultures in West Africa cherish twins, and soothsayers believe they can enhance their communication with the spirit world through them, said Philip Peek, a professor emeritus at Drew University in New Jersey whose research includes folklore and African religion.

Peek, who is the editor of the book Twins in African and Diaspora Cultures: Double Trouble, Twice Blessed, said there is a longstanding global belief that twins have a heightened ability to communicate because of the bond they form in the womb, which allows them to connect to higher powers.

“They communicate intuitively and the ability is certainly recognised in secular terms, not just spiritual,” Peek said.

Not every West African community embraces them.

Twins are considered evil in some neighbourhoods surrounding Nigeria’s capital of Abuja, said Stevens Olusola Ajayi, a missionary who has rescued 19 sets of twins out of fear they would be killed.

Even in countries where they are viewed favourably, twins can be at risk of being exploited for financial gain. Some mothers borrow children from neighbours and pass them off as twins to make more money from begging, said Sawadogo.

It is not easy being the parent of twins. In Ouagadougou, Fati Yougma, 27, said her twin girls beat her in her dreams if she doesn’t obey their demands.

Despite that, Yougma is honoured to be their mother.

Elena Becatoros

SHEDAI CAMP, AFGHANISTAN (AP) – In a sprawling settlement of mud brick huts in western Afghanistan housing people displaced by drought and war, a woman is fighting to save her daughter.

Aziz Gul’s husband sold the 10-year-old girl into marriage without telling his wife, taking a down-payment so he could feed his family of five children. Without that money, he told her, they would all starve. He had to sacrifice one to save the rest.

Many of Afghanistan’s growing number of destitute people are making desperate decisions such as these as their nation spirals into a vortex of poverty.

The aid-dependent country’s economy was already teetering when the Taleban seized power in mid-August amid a chaotic withdrawal of United States (US) and NATO troops. The international community froze Afghanistan’s assets abroad and halted all funding, unwilling to work with a Taleban government given its reputation for brutality during its previous rule 20 years ago.

The consequences have been devastating for a country battered by four decades of war, a punishing drought and the coronavirus pandemic. Legions of state employees, including doctors, haven’t been paid in months. Malnutrition and poverty stalk the most vulnerable, and aid groups say more than half the population faces acute food shortages.

“Day by day, the situation is deteriorating in this country, and especially children are suffering,” said Asuntha Charles, national director of the World Vision aid organisation in Afghanistan, which runs a health clinic for displaced people just outside the western city of Herat.

“Today I have been heartbroken to see that the families are willing to sell their children to feed other family members,” Charles said. “So it’s the right time for the humanitarian community to stand up and stay with the people of Afghanistan.”

Arranging marriages for very young girls is a frequent practice throughout the region. The groom’s family – often distant relatives – pays money to seal the deal, and the child usually stays with her own parents until she is at least around 15 or 16. Yet with many unable to afford even basic food, some say they’d allow prospective grooms to take very young girls or are even trying to sell their sons.

But Gul, unusually in this deeply patriarchal, male-dominated society, is resisting. Married off herself at 15, she said she would kill herself if her daughter, Qandi Gul, is forcibly taken away.

Gul remembers well the moment she found out her husband had sold Qandi. For around two months, the family had been able to eat. Eventually, she asked her husband where the money came from, and he told her.

“My heart stopped beating. I wished I could have died at that time, but maybe God didn’t want me to die,” Gul said. Qandi sat close to her mother, her hazel eyes peering shyly from beneath her sky-blue headscarf. “Each time I remember that night … I die and come back to life. It was so difficult.”

She asked her husband why he did it.

“He said he wanted to sell one and save the others. ‘You all would have died this way’, (he said.) I told him, ‘Dying was much better than what you have done’.”

Gul rallied her community, telling her brother and village elders that her husband had sold her child behind her back. They supported her, and with their help she secured a “divorce” for her child, but only on condition she repays the AFN100,000 (about USD1,000) that her husband received.

It’s money she doesn’t have. Her husband fled, possibly fearing Gul might denounce him to the authorities. The Taleban government recently announced a ban on forcing women into marriage or using women and girls as exchange tokens to settle disputes.

The family of the prospective groom, a man of around 21 or 22, has already tried several times to claim the girl, she said. She is not sure how long she can fend them off.

“I am just so desperate. If I can’t provide money to pay these people and can’t keep my daughter by my side, I have said that I will kill myself,” Gul said. “But then I think about the other children. What will happen to them? Who will feed them?” Her eldest is 12, her youngest – her sixth – just two months.

Now alone, Gul leaves the children with her elderly mother while she goes to work in people’s homes. Her 12-year-old son works picking saffron after school. It’s barely enough to keep them fed, and the saffron season is short, only a few weeks in the fall.

“We don’t have anything,” Gul said.

In another part of the same camp, father-of-four Hamid Abdullah was also selling his young daughters into arranged marriages, desperate for money to treat his chronically ill wife, pregnant with their fifth child.

Abdullah borrowed money to pay for his wife’s treatments and can’t pay it back, he said. So three years ago, he received a down-payment for his eldest daughter Hoshran, now seven, in an arranged marriage to an 18-year-old in their native Badghis province. He’s now looking for someone to buy his second daughter, six-year-old Nazia.

“We don’t have food to eat,” Abdullah explained, adding he also had to buy medicine for his wife, who soon would need more treatment. “She needs another surgery, I don’t have one afghani to pay for the doctor.”

The family that bought Hoshran is waiting until she is older before the full amount is settled, he explained.

But he needs money now for food and treatments, so he is trying to arrange a marriage for Nazia for about AFN20,000-AFN30,000.

“What should we do? We have to do it, we have no other option,” said his wife, Bibi Jan. “When we made the decision, it was like someone had taken away a body part from me.”

In the neighbouring province of Badghis, another displaced family is considering selling their son, eight-year-old Salahuddin.

His mother, Guldasta, said that after days with nothing to eat, she told her husband to take the boy to the bazaar and sell him to bring food for the others.

“I don’t want to sell my son, but I have to,” the 35-year-old said. “No mother can do this to her child, but when you have no other choice, you have to make a decision against your will.”

Salahuddin blinked and looked on silently. Surrounded by some of his seven brothers and sisters, his lip quivered slightly.

His father, Shakir, who is blind in one eye and has kidney problems, said the children had been crying for days from hunger. Twice, he said, he decided to take the boy to the bazaar and twice he faltered, unable to go through with it. “But now I think I have no other choice than to sell him.”

Buying of boys is believed to be less common than girls, and when it does take place, it appears to be cases of infant boys bought by families who don’t have any sons. In her despair, Guldasta thought perhaps such a family would want an eight-year-old.

The desperation of millions is clear as more and more people face hunger. By the end of the year, some 3.2 million children under five years old are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the United Nations (UN).

Nazia is one of them. The four-year-old lay listlessly in her mother’s arms after visiting the World Vision health clinic.

Two years ago, Nazia was a plump toddler, her mother Fatima said. Now, her emaciated limbs are just skin covering bone. Her little heart beats visibly beneath her ribcage.

“The prices are high. Flour is expensive, cooking oil is expensive, everything is expensive,” Fatima said. “All day she is asking me to give her meat, yogurt and fruit. We don’t have anything, and we don’t have money to buy it for her.”

Charles, World Vision’s national director for Afghanistan, said humanitarian aid funds are desperately needed.

“I’m happy to see the pledges are made,” she said. But the pledges “shouldn’t stay as promises, they have to be seen as reality on the ground”.