Andrew Harnik/AP

Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson (l.) testifies to the House Intelligence Committee task force on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 21, 2017, as part of the Russia investigation.

Many members of Congress were furious. It was 1792, and a military campaign led by General Arthur St. Clair against Native Americans in what is today Ohio had ended in complete disaster. So lawmakers launched the first congressional investigation of US executive branch actions. President George Washington responded with wary cooperation, aware he was setting precedents for presidents to come.

Fast forward 225 years. In the cacophony of modern US politics, it sometimes seems investigations have grown from that beginning into a behemoth that has pushed aside legislating as a political measure of getting things done. Think of the well-known roll-call: Watergate. Iran-Contra. Benghazi. And now Russia.

But the pace of investigations hasn’t increased, say experts. The media that cover them are louder. The political combat involved is more intense. They have (surprise!) become more partisan, though sometimes bipartisanship grows out of partisan beginnings. The process works when the parties come together in the end, as they did in the long political struggle that was Watergate.

All that said, it’s possible the nation has reached a turning point in regards to Washington investigations. There’s something about the Russia probes – anywhere from three to nine, depending on how you count them – that seems different. The partisanship has been amped up to new levels, on both sides. The accusations – foreign government interference in US elections – are extreme, or extremely important. The president, unlike George Washington, does not appear to believe that quiet cooperation helps his cause.

“I don’t think we’ve had anything quite like this . . . not in terms of quantity of investigations, absolutely not. But in terms of the tremendous amount of anxiety I see in the country from Republicans and Democrats alike that the government is not functioning properly,” says Raymond Smock, director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education and co-editor of the book “Congress Investigates.”

Why ‘investigation’ shouldn’t be a dirty word

For much of American history, a Washington investigation has meant not a special prosecutor or media stampede but a focus on a particular subject by members of Congress.

Often that involves some action or responsibility or other aspect of life at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, at the White House. But not always: over the centuries lawmakers have convened special inquiries into everything from the sinking of the Titanic to the use of steroids in baseball.

Congressional investigations of the executive branch aren’t approved, or even mentioned, in the Constitution. But courts have ruled that they’re implied by the fact that under America’s founding document lawmakers have “all legislative powers.” Congress needs accurate information of all sorts to be able to properly draw up bills. Ergo, cross-branch investigations are OK, according to the Supreme Court. 

Congressional oversight, including investigations, “is how we open up our government and make it visible to the public, so it is an important element of our system,” says Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.

Thus “investigation” should not be a dirty word in Washington, Mr. Aftergood adds. Neither should investigations be weapons of political (or personal) warfare.

“They are a tool to uncover fact,” he says. “And invoking facts is ideally in everyone’s interest.”

Darrell Issa (R) of California, former chair of the House of Representatives Government Oversight Committee, argues that Congress should invest more in investigation – citing a drop-off in probes since he was chair.

“It takes a long time to build strong oversight teams and it takes very little time for them to lose sort of their mojo,” he says. “If it were up to me, I would invest in the neighborhood of a 20 percent increase in Congress’s budget, all going toward oversight.”

Key investigations

War has frequently been a topic of congressional interest. The St. Clair probe, generally considered by historians the first real US investigation, is a case in point. Lawmakers were interested in why Gen. St. Clair’s campaign in northwest Ohio had been such a disaster. Of the 1,400 US regulars and militia who set out in pursuit of Native Americans in what was then the nation’s frontier, some 650 were killed and 250 wounded when adversaries caught them unprepared for battle.

After hearing witnesses and examining government documents, the special congressional committee convened for the probe largely blamed the debacle on poor equipment and fraud by suppliers. The full Congress took no action following this conclusion, however. St. Clair expressed frustration that the report did not fully exonerate his own actions.

Beginning in the Gilded Age of the late 19^th  century, the economy – and the way it could be manipulated for the benefit of the unscrupulous – became a common theme. Congressional probes looked at everything from rampant corruption in railroad construction to the Teapot Dome oil reserves scandal during the administration of President Warren G. Harding.

This trend perhaps culminated in the Pecora Investigation of 1932-34, in which former New York deputy district attorney Ferdinand Pecora unearthed the records of many financial firms and ably demonstrated that Wall Street practices had contributed to the onset of the Great Depression.

The Pecora investigation reinforced two powerful lessons for Congress. One was that probes could create individual national stars – Pecora became famous for his thorough, patient interrogations. Another was that they could lead to important legislation. Pecora contributed to the reorganization of American banking under the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission the following year.

Often politically motivated – but not always

Generally speaking, in the modern era most congressional investigations begin when a spark of political motive lands on the tinder of a real problem, says Dr. Smock of the Byrd Center.

That’s why they are more likely to occur when control of government is divided between Democrats and Republicans, with one party controlling the White House, and the other Congress. Think Iran-Contra, the lengthy probe into the Reagan administration’s funding of Nicaraguan rebels launched under a Democratic-led Congress in 1987, or the many GOP investigations into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, during the Obama years.

But that’s not always the case. Sometimes parties investigate themselves. In early 1941, a then little-known Democratic senator from Missouri named Harry Truman proposed the creation of a select Senate committee to investigate how defense contracts were being awarded, and how well those contractors were performing. This was prudent oversight given the ongoing war in Europe and possible conflict with Japan, Senator Truman argued.

The Senate quickly approved the proposal, with Truman as the committee’s head. He was given broad powers to look at the financial activities of then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s military buildup.

“It was a Democrat investigating a Democrat, and Roosevelt didn’t much like that at first,” says Smock.

Then Truman’s Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program ably pursued a broad agenda. It saved taxpayers billions and prodded the administration to centralize and improve purchasing for the massive war effort.

In the end, FDR liked the investigations so much he chose Truman as his running mate in 1944. Five months after the election Roosevelt passed away, and suddenly the obscure Missourian was the 33^rd  president of the United States.

Strength in bipartisanship

While many investigations may begin in partisanship, they’re usually more effective if they don’t end that way. At some point they need to transcend their origins and become bipartisan if they are to achieve their full objectives.

Take Watergate, for example. Democrats controlled both the House and Senate during the Nixon presidency. They drove congressional investigations and votes on Watergate throughout much of 1972 and 1973. Throughout much of this period congressional Republicans, even moderates, argued that the Watergate probes were too aggressive.

Even after Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre of October 1973, many in the GOP were leery of impeachment. A majority of Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee voted against impeachment articles in July 1974.

But the weight of the evidence, particularly the damning White House tapes, was weighing on key GOP Senators. On August 7, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R) of Arizona and other party leaders visited Nixon in the White House and told him his Republican support was crumbling. Accepting the inevitable, Nixon resigned the next day.

“For an investigation to be successful, it may start out as partisan, but at some point it has to cross the line to become bipartisan in nature,” says Smock.

How Congress' role has changed

While there’s always been some partisanship in the process, what is different today is that high-level investigations have been turned into partisan weapons.

The two big parties that govern America are ideologically more homogeneous and further apart than ever. The level of animosity is higher.

To a large extent, congressional investigations today are much less about informing lawmakers so they can write good legislation, and more about controlling or harming the executive branch.

Congress per se is no longer always the central player, as it would have been decades ago. Instead, Capitol Hill has become part of a larger investigative culture, which includes special prosecutors and an aggressive media.

“Congress ends up being a part of a much larger conversation, which is different from years past,” says Eric Schickler, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of “Investigating the President: Congressional Check on Presidential Power.”

Just starting such a “conversation” can have an effect. According to Professor Schickler’s research, investigations can systematically lower a chief executive’s approval rating and weaken their political leverage.

“There are a lot of examples historically when Congress has used these investigative tools to hold the president accountable,” says Schickler.

Perhaps that is how the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election will turn out. At this point in the process, we’re not really sure what their end point will be.

They are just much different than any past situation, according to experts. There isn’t really a good historical analogy, though some say it has some resonance with Iran-Contra, the winding, complicated, lengthy investigation of the Reagan administration’s use of arms sales to Iran to fund anti-communist Nicaraguan rebels.

But in this case, a Republican-led Congress is looking at a president of the same party. Congress itself is split, with the House inquiry roiled by fierce partisanship, and the Senate proceeding in a more cooperative manner, at least for now. Behind both, the FBI continues to work.

Meanwhile, the president is openly attempting to delegitimize the process, calling the whole thing a “witch hunt” while musing about firing Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller.

“It’s a carnival atmosphere that the country has never experienced before,” says Smock.

It’s not yet clear if the congressional Russia proceedings will morph into a more bipartisan effort.

It’s important to remember that in terms of President Trump himself, the outcome of the investigation will be as much political as legal. The Constitution’s description of the grounds for impeachment is sketchy, referring only to “high crimes and misdemeanors.”  Those are whatever members of the House deem them to be. (The House votes to impeach; the Senate then votes on whether or not to remove an impeached high official from office).

In general, the existence of congressional investigations doesn’t guarantee there’s a scandal waiting to be exposed. There may be or there may not be. Voters and lawmakers alike should be sober and realistic about that fact.

But history shows the process itself is valuable.

“There is going to be abuse in any administration, deliberate abuse. And incompetence, and people have to watch that,” says Louis Fisher, a scholar in residence at the Constitution Project and former separation of powers expert for the Library of Congress. “If there is not much oversight, we are going to pay a price.”

Staff writer Francine Kiefer contributed reporting.

Once again, a cycle of deadly violence between Israelis and Palestinians – this time sparked by recent events at Jerusalem’s holiest of religious sites – poisoned already strained relations between the two populations and threatened to drag neighbors into the storm.

And once again the United States intervened.

As tensions spiraled and deaths related to the flare-up mounted, President Trump on Sunday – some say belatedly – dispatched his Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt to Israel.

After meetings Monday with Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and into Tuesday, with a side trip to consult Jordan’s King Abdullah, Mr. Greenblatt was able to claim at least a role in an initial success, as Israel announced it was reversing new security measures on the Temple Mount/Haram Sharif site that had caused increasing outrage and protests around the Middle East.

Yet despite hopeful signs that steps addressing the current crisis may ease tensions, larger questions have bubbled up around the American mediation mission. Those include just how much leverage the US retains to stanch bloodletting and coax the parties back from the brink.

Moreover, Mr. Trump’s dispatching of his crisis envoy instead of bigger diplomatic guns – traditionally secretaries of State have been sent to broker crisis resolution deals, but in this case Rex Tillerson was nowhere in sight – has some region-honed diplomats and experts questioning the prospects of the president’s goal of an “ultimate deal” on Israeli-Palestinian peace.

“The president has talked a lot about achieving the ‘ultimate deal’ – but he’s delegated the work and details to people who simply don’t have the skills, experience, and credibility to put forward the kinds of new ideas that could speak to all the parties involved and help make progress,” says Haim Malka, deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.

“This current crisis demonstrates the urgency of not letting things spiral out of control,” he adds, “but it’s hard to see real movement beyond immediate crisis management without higher-level [US] engagement.”

Outrage over metal detectors

The wave of violence that claimed at least 10 lives and froze relations between the Israeli and Palestinian governments began early this month when Israel installed metal detectors at the entrance to the compound containing Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque – Islam’s third-holiest shrine – after three Arab Israelis shot and killed two Israeli guards at the site. The mosque is located on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, venerated as the location of the two biblical temples.

Deadly demonstrations against Israel’s security measures ensued. On Friday a Palestinian who later said he was acting in protest against the measures at al-Aqsa invaded a home in a West Bank settlement and killed three family members eating the Sabbath meal.

Then on Sunday an Israeli guard at Israel’s diplomatic compound in Amman shot and killed two Jordanians after being attacked with a screwdriver by one of the Jordanians, who was delivering furniture to the diplomatic mission.

It was at this point, with the violence spreading to Jordan and threatening a wider crisis, that Trump dispatched Greenblatt to the region. Israeli officials also spoke by phone with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and his designated Middle East dealmaker, but Mr. Kushner was obligated to remain in Washington to testify in Congress on his dealings with Russia during the presidential campaign.

Tensions began to ease early Tuesday after Jordan – in the hours following Greenblatt’s visit – allowed the Israeli Embassy guard to return to Israel with the rest of the embassy staff. Then in the early morning hours Israel dismantled the metal detectors at the gate leading to the mosque compound, pledging to replace them with high-tech cameras.

Officials claimed no quid-pro-quo deal was struck. But whatever led to the steps easing the crisis, some analysts say the resolution may say more about regional dynamics and politics than about enduring US clout in the Middle East.

“Even if you call this a non-deal deal, I think it was more likely driven by events on the ground than anything else,” says David Makovsky, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Project on the Middle East Peace Process.

Israel's ties to Sunni states

Another key factor, he postulates, was Mr. Netanyahu’s consideration of this crisis in the context of Israel’s position in the region vis-à-vis increasingly friendly Sunni Arab regimes.

“Israel is very proud of its growing outreach with the Sunni states, and I just wonder if Netanyahu stepped back and decided, ‘Look, if this is not isolated, if I don’t solve this thing, this could really obstruct the inroads we’ve made with the Sunni Arabs and the Gulf states,’” says Mr. Makovsky, who from 2013-14 was a senior adviser on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to Secretary of State John Kerry.

Along those same lines, others say Netanyahu may have had one eye on Turkey’s increasingly belligerent talk about the events at al-Aqsa Mosque, and may have been prompted by it to act quickly to head off Israel’s isolation.

“The Turks have been fanning the flames of this crisis, declaring that al-Aqsa is under siege, and it has looked to some like they are competing in a way with the Jordanians for influence in Jerusalem,” says CSIS’s Mr. Malka. “That trend is really worrying to the Israelis.”

Some Israeli analysts agree that Israel’s improving relations with Sunni states are critical to any progress towards peace – be it in resolving sudden crises or in pursuing an end to the decades-old Middle East conflict.

But some say the US, and the Trump administration’s emphasis on improving regional relations as key to an eventual comprehensive deal, are essential factors in any steps forward by the two principal parties.

“The US is very well-positioned right now to explore, with the involvement of Mr. Greenblatt, the commonalities between the moderate Sunni regimes and Israel, and to see where that can lead, not just in resolving crises but in achieving regional peace,” says Gilead Sher, director of the Center for Applied Negotiations at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

The argument that Trump should have sent in bigger guns to address the Temple Mount crisis holds little sway with Mr. Sher, who says that Greenblatt “has enough credibility and respect at this point to help restore order and get the parties back to talking.”

Others say the US retains incomparable clout in the region and for nudging along the peace process both because of and despite Trump’s unorthodox approach to diplomacy in the region.

“The good news is that the US has leverage because nobody wants to say ‘no’ to Trump, particularly because he is so unpredictable in what he’s going to do in response,” says the Washington Institute’s Makovsky. “The not-good news is that if the parties don’t have the requisite political will to square the circle – and neither side does right now – they will just say, ‘I didn’t say ‘no’ to Trump, the other side did,” he adds.

Cost of failure

Where many analysts find common ground is in the assessment that Trump, if he really wants to achieve Mideast peace, will have to forgo the idea of the all-at-once ultimate deal in favor of a long path of small steps to get there.

“The old approach on the basis of the formula that ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’ has to give way to a continuous hands-on approach, with America leading a gradual process of interim agreements,” says Sher, who is co-chair of Blue White Future, a nonpartisan group that favors a two-state solution allowing survival of a “Jewish and democratic” Israel. “The new formula should be that whatever is agreed should be implemented.”

Makovsky says he is worried that “America’s standing in the region will be very seriously eroded if we try and fail for a fourth time to get the big deal all at once,” as Trump seems to want.

“Whenever it’s all or nothing in the Middle East, it’s always nothing, so I would say, ‘Don’t try to do the grand deal,’” Makovsky says. Instead, the baseball fan says the US should “stop trying to do the home run and instead go for a series of singles.”

The current crisis underscores the deep sensitivities on both sides concerning Jerusalem and its place in both peoples’ identity, so Makovsky says the US should not expect its “opening base hits” on that emotional issue.

But he says the “singles” should begin in areas that figure at the top of each side’s list: security for Israel and land issues for the Palestinians.

“People on both sides need to see that steps forward are possible, that there is a process,” Makovsky says. “But it’s really up to the leaders, more than any outside influence including the US, to show they can move the ball.”

Battered by drought and civil wars, more than 20 million people from Yemen to Tanzania are at risk of starvation in what aid workers call the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. But over the past two decades, nations that once produced searing images of famine's toll have moved to thwart it by strengthening community resilience. Our reporters traveled to Madagascar, Ethiopia, and Somaliland to investigate the daunting challenges as well as the long-term efforts that are saving lives.

First, they sold their goats. Goats are precious, but not as sacred as hump-back zebu cattle. Then they sold their cattle, too. And finally they sold their kitchen pots. There was nothing to cook, anyway, besides leaves and bitter cactus fruit.

For farmers in Madagascar’s drought-stricken south, this menacing months-long countdown to impending famine last year was measured week-to-week at village markets, where they desperately tried to raise enough money to stay alive and buy seed for one more harvest.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A shepherd leads his livestock away from the Mandrare River after watering them in Amboasary. This area in the country's south has been experiencing a severe drought. The river's water level is very low.

And then the rains would not come, their cassava and sweet potato plants would wither, and the hunger in their bellies forced them back to the markets to sell whatever they had left.

“That’s the true indicator that the south is in real difficulty: when people sell their livestock and their kitchen utensils at rock-bottom prices,” says Dr. Audin Rabemiandriso, who for the past six years has run the health clinic in this dusty, ramshackle town, whose dirt streets are lined with women squatting by small piles of root vegetables for sale. “And last year was the worst that I’ve experienced.”

In international aid jargon, that meant that more than half a million people were enduring crisis-level “Phase 3” food insecurity. Another 330,000 were in even worse shape, suffering emergency-level “Phase 4” food shortages. “Phase 5” is famine.

“People were on the edge,” recalls Elke Wisch, head of the UNICEF office in the Madagascan capital of Antananarivo.

But they did not tip over. Catastrophe was averted. And now, with help from international aid donors and a little rain from the heavens, local farmers and their families are beginning to pick themselves up, rebuild their lives, and prepare to cope better with the next drought.

For a next drought there will surely be. The land in southern Madagascar is fertile: just three or four rains ensure a harvest. But farmers cannot count even on that. Droughts, once cyclical, are now semi-permanent. And last year the situation was worsened by El Niño, the weather pattern that made the rains even more irregular and insufficient.

That threw the farmers’ plight into sharper focus, reminding the world of the longer-term effects of climate change: Year by year, the lean season – from the day that villagers run out of food until the day they reap their next harvest – stretches a few weeks longer.

That is a challenge for peasant farmers across eastern Africa. But Madagascar’s success avoiding famine last year, and the lessons that it learned from its brush with disaster, point to ways in which crises might be averted elsewhere if villagers can strengthen their resilience in the face of danger.

If persistent drought is the new normal, local people are going to have to adapt to it, so as not to risk starvation again. Already, they are making changes to ward off the threat of famine, from more frequent clinic visits to keep an eye on kids’ health; to new sources of water and crops; to finding ways to earn a little extra cash, or raise a little extra protein – an egg-laying chicken, perhaps, that could mean the difference between life and death when the next climatic disaster strikes.

Spotting the crisis

If famine was averted this time round, it was partly because scattered rain has fallen on the parched fields in recent months – just enough for some farmers to gather small harvests of corn or cassava. But it was also largely because international aid agencies had long been present in Madagascar, one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. They were in a position to spot the food crisis as it crept up, slowly and silently, and well-placed to quickly provide survival rations and other emergency aid.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A woman walks past a home in the small village of Ankilimanara, Madagascar. Poor infrastructure makes food aid delivery easier said than done, making cash aid more practical in some areas.

But even so, Madagascar’s pitiful infrastructure makes food aid delivery easier said than done. Roads in the south are in catastrophically bad shape, suited better to travelers on foot or on bicycles than to the rare motor vehicles that brave them. Any tarmac that was once laid through the open farm and scrubland has long since crumbled and washed away, leaving red clay highways cloven by mini-canyons that deepen with any rainfall. They are almost impossible for tractor-trailers carrying grain to navigate.

The World Food Programme has been working in the area for 30 years, meaning it could scale up quickly to feed a million people when the situation went critical. But new tactics gave added impact to its aid, circumventing Madagascar’s geographical challenges. Last year, in regions where there was still food to be had, the WFP gave an emergency $20 per month to families to buy what they could find.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Mothers In Ankilimanara, Madagascar line up to sign an attendance sheet after a meeting with a nonprofit that gives them aid for malnourished children. Nearly half of the country's young children are chronically malnourished.

“You don’t need trucks to distribute cash, just mobile phone networks,” Theodore Mbainaissem, the WFP emergency coordinator in Ambovombe, says of the mobile money transfers. “It’s a lot more practical.”

WFP also handed out high-nutrition food supplements to moderately malnourished children, so fewer of them fell into the severe acute malnutrition that could kill them.

UNICEF, the United Nation’s children’s agency, saw that food was growing alarmingly scarce as early as 2015, when government doctors and nutritionists, carrying out routine health checks with UNICEF support, began reporting skyrocketing levels of child malnutrition.

Quickly, the agency expanded its nutrition programs to all 193 town and village health centers in the south, screening every child under 5 and making sure the worst-malnourished were given high-nutrition, peanut-based food supplements. “Our first priority was to prevent loss of life,” says José Más Campos, UNICEF’s emergency coordinator for Madagascar. By and large, they succeeded; few children died. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A malnourished baby cries after being weighed and measured by visiting doctors during a mobile clinic visit in Amboro, Madagascar. When the project began in this village in February, there were 22 children participating. Now 13 are still involved, the others have improved.

Generally, aid officials say, international donors reacted quickly and generously when they realized how grave the threat of famine had grown. But often they insisted their money be spent only on emergency cases – a familiar conundrum for NGOs.

That meant, for example, that UNICEF could not use some donors’ cash to treat moderately malnourished children, says UNICEF's Ms. Wisch. “We had to wait until the situation got absolutely critical,” she recalls, when children were suffering from severe acute malnutrition and their lives were at risk.

“We got a good response from emergency aid donors,” says Wisch. “But even if we got people over the hump this time we’ll have another drought in a year or two. What we need is a sustained resilience program … to stop people drifting into the next humanitarian emergency-threshold situation.”

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Behind hunger, thirst

That’s the thinking behind a package of complementary measures that aid workers are now taking in southern Madagascar to build “resilience.” That is the new buzzword in humanitarian circles: It is seen as a key to ensuring that farmers have something to hold on to when drought strikes again, rather than finding themselves caught in an endless cycle in and out of disaster.

“This crisis is about food, of course, but it is mainly about water,” says Mr. Más Campos. “We are not getting enough either from the sky or from the ground.” Clean water, he argues, offers the path from emergency survival to long-term development.

UNICEF has been paying for trucks to deliver water to out-of-the-way villages, which spares residents from having to drink unsanitary surface water. But it is not a lasting solution.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Etienne Ramandimbisoa, UNICEF's water specialist, stands on part of an old pumping station by the Mandrare River near Amboasary that he is helping rehabilitate to bring water to drought-affected areas in the country's south.

Much more promising is the kind of system the government has set up with UN assistance in the village of Sihanamaro, a collection of simple wooden huts scattered among savannah shade trees, whose farmers scratch a living from land they have cleared of thorn trees.

Here, a solar pump carries clean water from a sealed well up to a water tower, from which it flows to seven community taps around the village, each set in a cement trough and protected by a picket fence.

“This has changed our lives,” says Vaha Saajinuru, a mother of eight who until recently had to walk four or five times a day to get water: down the dirt road out of town, and then across thorny grassland to a muddy pit more than a mile from her home.

The children who drank that water easily fell prey to disease that only made their malnutrition worse. “We knew it wasn’t good for our health but we had no choice,” says Ms. Saajinuru. “Now my kids have no more stomach problems, and there are three taps near my home where they can go to get water.”

A $10 difference

Water is still a problem in Ankilimanara, the tiny village where Patricia Soavenira lives in a low-roofed, cramped thatch hut with her husband and four children, sleeping on a mat on the bare earth. But at least she has something to give her family to eat.

Ms. Soavenira is one of 55,000 mothers whose malnourished children make them eligible for a $10 monthly cash handout from a local nongovernmental organization. She spends the money on weekly trips to a market an hour’s walk away, where she buys rice, corn, beans, and anything else she can afford.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Mother of four Patricia Soavenira, who receives cash aid, sits inside her small wooden hut in Ankilimanara. She was able to buy one cooking pot and five spoons with her first money transfer.

“Without the cash, we’d just be eating cassava leaves and wild cactus like last year,” she says, watching a pot on a smoldering fire as she nurses her baby. “I was very, very thin then; very, very weak. And I was very frightened for my children.”

Soavenira had sold all her kitchen utensils except one pot and a spoon. Now she has bought five more spoons and another saucepan. They are only the bare essentials, but she would rather spend her money on food, she says. “We are still hungry.”

The monthly cash handouts are keeping people in Anklimanara alive, but the NGO running the program, the Foundation for Development Intervention, has an innovative, broader vision. Over the next few months it will hand out $60 grants (a small fortune in a country where few earn more than $2 per day) in “getting back on your feet” money.

Recipients will be expected to invest it in some sort of productive project – buying a goat, or planting pigeon peas that need little watering and yield crops repeatedly over three years, for example. Soavenira plans to buy some chickens, she says.

“They could save my life,” she says flatly. “We can eat their eggs, or if one of my kids falls sick I could sell them to get the money for medicine. It means security.”

Resilience made real

Security is all that sweet potato farmer Prinu Rakutunirina wants, too, as he surveys his field of spindly green shoots under a beating sun. But that doesn’t come easy in these parts.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A farmer kneels in a field of drought-resistant sweet potatoes with members of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and a local nonprofit in Andahive. The NGO's distributed seeds and tubers to the farmers so they could grow this variety of sweet potato, which is more nutritious and longer lasting – It can keep for a year.

Maybe it was faith or maybe it was desperation, but he stuck with his experimental variety through two crop failures last year, and now he is glad he did. The new strain of tuber, introduced by agronomists with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is more drought-resistant than most. But it was no match for last year’s drought: Starved of water, the plants withered in the dust in July, and then again in September.

But Mr. Rakutunirina finally brought in a harvest last February. And what a harvest. Yields were double what they used to be, he says, and what’s more, the new sweet potatoes last for nearly a year, whereas the old kind rotted after a few weeks. That means he can decide if and when he wants to sell them. It also means he will be able to carry his family through the dreaded kere, the lean season between harvests when there is normally nothing to eat. This is “resilience” made real.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A malnourished baby's arm is measured during a mobile clinic visit aimed at severely malnourished children in Amboro, Madagascar. The program is run by the national nutrition office and supported by UNICEF.

Rakutunirina was part of a pilot group using the new variety. “We all saw our crops increase and now everyone wants to plant this type,” he says, though it will be a year until the 100,000 farmers now using the improved seeds will have harvested enough to spread the variety throughout the drought-stricken south.

“If there is no rain for three months, it does not matter how many high yield seeds you plant,” points out Jean-Etienne Blanc, an FAO field worker. “You’ll get a poor harvest. But farmers are learning about good-quality seeds and how to use them, and next year they will be seeking them out.”

Rakutunirina is a convert. “Everything depends on the rain, of course,” he says. “But this plant can protect us from the return of hunger.”

Samantha Bronkar/The Christian Science Monitor

Rosalie Kelleher stands in front of a hutch containing teacups and tea sets from around the world – a few of the treasures that made the cut in their six-year downsizing process from their home in New Bedford, Mass., on July 12, 2017.

Two hundred stuffed animals, two violins, and a 7-1/2 foot-tall Christmas tree: That was just a corner of the possessions Rosalie and Bill Kelleher accumulated over their 47-year marriage. And, they realized, it was about 199 stuffed animals more than their two grown children wanted.

Going from a four-bedroom house in New Bedford, Mass. – with an attic stuffed full of paper stacked four-feet tall – to a 1,300-square-foot apartment took six years of winnowing, sorting, shredding, and shlepping stuff to donation centers.

Among the possessions the Kellehers are keeping are three hutches – one that belonged to his mother, one that belonged to her mother, and one that they purchased together 35 years ago. One shelf is carefully lined with teacups Rosalie collected during her world travels. Another houses a delicate tea set from Japan, a gift her mother received on her wedding day.

“We really don’t need them,” she admits.

That refrain is becoming a common one as baby boomers begin to downsize and discover (as many generations before them have) that their children do not want their stuff. In fact, they recoil in something close to horror at the thought of trying to find room for the collections of Hummels; the Thomas Kinkade paintings; the complete sets of fine china and crystal, carefully preserved and brought out at holiday meals.

For their parents, to have a lifetime of carefully chosen treasures dismissed as garage-sale fodder can be downright painful.

“When [people] try to throw something away, they feel like they are losing ... personal history, losing a bit of themselves, losing a little of their identity, and they fear if they get rid of it they’ll never have that same experience again,” says Randy Frost, a psychology professor at Smith College and co-author of “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.”

While every generation has its turn with an attachment for antiques or nostalgia for outdated technology, today’s tech-heavy culture shows few signs of trading in its sleek, modern designs for dark furniture or knick-knacks from bygone eras. And many younger families see trips, vacations, and photos as the repository of family memories – not shelves full of mementoes.

“Their kids ... oftentimes have homes already, they have families already, they have furnishings already,” says Kate Grondin, owner of Home Transition Resource in Andover, Mass. Ms. Grondin is part of a senior move-management industry that will pack, move, unpack, sell, and donate clients’ things as they move to smaller homes.

There are other signs that the next stop for those attic treasures may be the town dump. “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” by Marie Kondo with a specific process for getting rid of things, has sold 1.5 million copies since 2014 in the United States. Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, otherwise known as The Minimalists, have published several bestselling memoirs, produced “Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things” in 2016, and are currently traveling across the US in their “Less is Now Tour 2017.”

When a pile of possessions has come to embody a sense of identity – or even what someone could yet become – it’s not always easy to figure out what should stay and what should go.

Dr. Frost recounts the story of a woman who “saved all of these cookbooks and all these recipes,” even though she didn’t really know how to cook. “If she were to try to throw some of that stuff away,” he explains, “that [removes] the opportunity for her to become the cook she thinks she’d like to be. In a sense, it’s removing a potential identity for her.”

‘You know you don’t have space for it’

Judy Maguire of Andover, Mass., and her siblings helped their mother move to an assisted living facility after their father died. They carefully selected some furniture and photographs that would make her feel at home.

But then they faced the difficult task of figuring out which heirlooms to keep for themselves.

“We were all pretty sentimental,” Ms. Maguire admits.

She recalls the siblings arguing over one particular piece – not over who would get it, but how to stop one sister from keeping what Maguire describes as a “big, hideous piece of furniture.”

“I said, ‘You know you don’t have the space for it. You don’t really need that.’ And she said, ‘I know, ... I just can’t let go of it,’ ” Maguire says.

They ended up donating the table.

Dr. Frost suggests posing a simple question for those going through this process: “How does this object … fit into your life?”

The Kellehers created staging sections in their house for specific items, using their kids’ vacant rooms, the living room, and the sunroom. Eventually, all of the leftover items to be taken away fit into the downstairs rec room, half of which had been filled with empty cardboard boxes being saved for some potential use.

Others have found that parting ways with familiar possessions actually brings a sense of freedom.

‘It’s like he’s still in college’

Carolyn Ledewitz of Cambridge, Mass., discovered that her son didn’t want anything when she downsized. “My son drove all the way up from New York City to go through his childhood things. I was appalled [when] he just grabbed them out of the boxes and dumped them into the trash,” she says.

Ms. Ledewitz describes her 40something son’s apartment as “so sparse – it’s like he’s still in college. He doesn’t have a single picture on the wall” of his Manhattan apartment, she says.

But Ledewitz ended up adopting some of her son’s attitude to achieve her goal of living in a sleek city condo in Boston’s Seaport district. She and her husband made the transition in two steps. First, they downsized from their ranch home in Springfield, Mass., where they had lived for 33 years into a three-story town home nearby.

“I had a china cabinet in my dining room with all my wedding presents ... my mother’s sugar bowl, the silver. I just loved it. I would look at it every day,” she says.

Ultimately, she says, the lifestyle she wanted outweighed the things she thought she cherished.

“Over the years, when you can’t hand it down, you have to let it go,” she says. She and her husband are now living out their urban dream.

That said, even professionals are not immune to temptation: Of all their late father's possessions, Nan Hayes and her siblings found themselves squabbling about a large statue of a conquistador. (Ultimately, the brother whose vehicle could transport it lugged home the booty.)

Ms. Hayes, the business development director of Caring Transitions, spent 10 years as a transition specialist helping individuals downsize their possessions and homes.

“The part of the job I miss the most,” she says, is seeing her clients “so much happier to be where they are because they know it’s where they need to be.”

“[Downsizing] was challenging, but it was good for [my husband and me],” Ledewitz admits. “It’s been so nice not worrying about all that stuff…. Life is much simpler without all that maintenance.”

AP Photo

The Dome of the Rock Mosque in the Al Aqsa Mosque compound is seen in Jerusalem's Old City. On July 14, three Israeli Arabs opened fire from a sacred site known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount, inside the walled Old City, killing two Israeli police officers before being shot dead.

In most religions, sacred shrines are meant to remind the faithful of the promise of peace. But for Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem’s Old City, that promise seemed illusive this month. A series of killings, which began at the Temple Mount on July 14, set off the worst violence between Israelis and Palestinians in years. The potential of a major conflict forced emergency intervention by the United Nations Security Council and the United States.

The relative calm that was restored by July 25 speaks to the wisdom of a few Israeli and Arab leaders who put peace above any contest over religious identity, which has long been the issue in determining access to Jerusalem’s holy sites.

The string of violence began when three Arab residents of Israel used concealed guns to fatally shoot two Israeli police officers guarding the Al-Aqsa mosque in the Haram al-Sharif compound (or Temple Mount). Israel then set up metal detectors to check Muslims seeking to pray at the mosque. But it did so without consulting the Jordanian-controlled Islamic trust that administers the site. This was seen as a new assertion of sovereignty by Israel over what Muslims consider to be their third-holiest shrine.

Israel backed down after further violence and dismantled the detectors. It now seeks to install “smart” cameras that can detect guns. That action may not ultimately satisfy Jordan and the trust overseeing the mosque. But Israel’s concession at least shows its sensitivities to Muslim feeling and its own interest in peace above demanding total sovereignty.

Control over the Temple Mount has required a delicate balance of interests between Jordan and Israel since the 1967 war that saw Israel take over East Jerusalem. That balance rests on a mutual recognition of freedom of worship – at least in separate areas – and a desire to keep the peace. The fact that Muslims and Jews have generally accepted this balance shows that they can agree on something. More important, they rise above their respective identities as either Muslim or Jew to embrace a common identity in maintaining peace.

The peace that allows Muslims and Jews to pray at their respective sites is a transcendent significance far beyond that attached to their physical shrines. When violence erupts over control of the sites, it often takes only a reminder of that common bond to restore the calm – and allow worship to go on.