7 years ago
Saturday, 19 May 2012
Wednesday, 15 February 2012
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Postcripts: good news and bad news.
We have had good news and bad news following on from our time in
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Friday, 3 February 2012
I
never finished the saga of the passports.
We were due to set off to London London 8.30 am the next day to get us to the airport in good
time. The DHL office finally informed us
that our passports had been sent to Alicante London 12 o’clock on Friday, with our flight leaving at 11.30! We were now desperate and it was 5 pm on Thursday with disaster looming. I toyed with driving to Alicante Alicante Cambridge 8.30 am the next morning when their vans arrived at the
Estepona office if their man in Alicante 8.20 am with the taxi waiting outside we were at the Nacex
office, biting our fingernails as if anticipating our exam results. The van arrived on the dot and they began the
long process of off-loading and identifying boxes and packages of all shapes
and sizes. Finally, (why did it have to
be the last one?), the boss gave us a small envelope and we shrieked with
relief and elation, thanked him profusely and leapt into the taxi. The moral of this tale: think globally, act locally.
There
was another drama in that last week which we had not wanted to talk about at
the time. On the Tuesday, Emilie went to
the doctor a little concerned by a lump on her collar bone. The doctor, saying that as a long-time friend
he wanted to be even more cautious than usual and knowing that we were going to
a place where getting skilled medical attention (or any) would be difficult,
recommended its immediate removal. He
personally phoned the surgeon in Marbella Spain
That
all seems a very long time ago now. It’s
typical of expats to moan about the lacks and hardships of their overseas lives
and to make fun of the places they have chosen to go and live in and I’ve
indulged in a bit of that, but let’s talk about the many positive features of
our life here. We went for a long walk
on our first sunny Sunday morning (it poured in the afternoon, but I wasn’t
going to be negative!) and ended up visiting an Ethiopian Orthodox church. This is a form of Christianity, older than
any in Europe , dating back to the 4th century. There was a wedding in progress and the
celebrants were just leaving the church, the bride and groom dressed in white
robes with crowns on their heads. Many
others were dressed in the traditional white robes, too, and there were drums
and singing as they milled around the couple who were then seated on thrones,
chairs covered with multicoloured cloths.
To their right sat four young women all dressed alike in white
embroidery-decorated robes and to their left sat four men similarly
attired. We were standing at a
respectful distance taking photos when a man approached us to say that the
couple had asked if we could participate in their wedding by sitting next to
them on the “best men’s” bench. Emilie
was given a white shawl to wrap around her.
Food was being served to be eaten plate in hand and we felt obliged to
participate in that, too. A crowd of
beggars gathered nearby were fed the same as the guests, obviously a tradition
at these events. Can you imagine
anything similar in your countries?
We
attended a service another Sunday at the Roman Catholic church in Nekemte. The region has a new bishop whom we had read
about in the Dutch press before coming.
You can imagine how the word ‘Nekemte’ jumped out of the paper at us. The new bishop is Dutch and originally comes
from a town near Leiden
Men
and women, boys and girls, mingle quite freely here, notwithstanding what I
said about segregation in the Catholic church, and the youngsters certainly
copy western styles in their dress, if not entirely in their behaviour. In general, people of all ages are curious,
courteous and ready to smile and speak to us.
Girls certainly care about their appearance and their straightened hair
or elaborate braided styles testify to many hours spent in front of a mirror. There are many very attractive people and I
haven’t seen a bad set of teeth yet, or hardly a fat person. Maybe there’s a health advantage to having
less than the West, up to a point. Both
teenage girls and boys favour jeans and T-shirts of worldwide provenance. The slogans they bear give the names of towns
and regions in the West (“Saffron Walden Bee Keepers’ Association”, “Sol’s Bar Mitzvah”) that make us think there
must be a market for clothes donated or sold from there. This is not at all to say that they are
scruffy; except for the obviously
extremely poor, everyone takes great care with his or her appearance. Older men often wear suits and ties while
women totter around the uneven stony streets in skirts and high-heels with the
agility of mountain goats, though women carrying huge bundles of firewood or
charcoal go barefooted. There must be
quite a lot of sex going on judging by the high birthrate and the condom
packets often to be found lying on the road sides. We’ve heard that some groups of university
students share the rental on a house in town where they can have their
assignations. The main brands of condoms, Sensation and Trust, are widely
advertised and available. At least
someone is listening to the anti-HIV/AIDS campaigns in a country that has
suffered considerably.
(I’m
very much aware of the danger of facile, hasty opinions about a strange
country. It is said that after a week
you can write a book, after a year an article and after that you don’t know
what to say as things have become too complicated!)
Another
lovely feature of Nekemte is the countryside and the views of it that we get
from our hilltop perch, up at 2,000 metres.
At this time of the year, after months of rain, there is greenery
everywhere and some effort is made to grow gardens and even to trim neat hedges
in the most unpromising of locations such as the forecourt of a petrol station.
Amid the mud bath or the dust bowl of the university campus, a little garden
has been created with a heart shape picked out in different coloured
flowers.
There
is wildlife, or not so wild, everywhere, a town obviously offering rich
pickings. Apart from the domesticated
cows and goats that wander around, there are packs of wild dogs that mostly
sleep during the day but take over the streets at night, howling and fighting
as well as presenting a threat to humans who dare to be out. We had a couple, perhaps in the marital sense
too, of black and white colobus monkeys jumping on the noisy tin roof of our
house recently. There is a variety of
multicoloured birds, including little red or blue ones which seem to be of the
same breed and which sip delicately from the puddles on the streets and don’t
seem to worry about being trodden on.
Others are humming bird like, with long beaks for getting the nectar out
of trumpet-like blooms on a tree in our yard.
Another one has an enormous long, heavy tail which you would think would
unbalance it. We saw what we took to be
its mating dance. What we assumed to be
the female, which lacks the tail, sat insouciantly on an electrical wire while
the male, with his heavy tail, had to use all his energy flapping like mad to
stay in front of her to try to make an impression and demonstrate his
virility. The things we males have to do
to win our females over. Vultures and hideous black birds with beaks curved like
Arab daggers hover threateningly over the university, though I don’t know what
that is telling us about the state of decay and potential for death. One thing it tells us is that we’re not far
from wild nature.
This
is not the area that produces the great Ethiopian runners, but along all the
flat road sides there are ping pong tables and boys, never girls, play fiercely
and enthusiastically, if not expertly.
These are rented out by adjoining bars or shops. On the same Sunday morning that we went to the
Catholic church we found the athletics track, an earthen one, with a
well-attended meeting in progress. As
one might expect, the standard of the long-distance running seemed quite high. There must be a martial arts club somewhere
in town, too, as we saw an exhibition in the town hall soon after we had
arrived. I’ve not seen anyone jogging
yet and I don’t think I would dare to be the first. Our attempts to introduce beach tennis, to a
country that hasn’t even got a beach, got off to a good start the other day as
another volunteer, Frits, and I started playing on a patch of grass and soon a
crowd gathered to see the weird foreigners and their bizarre sport. We offered to let some play and soon everyone
wanted a go. We’ll have to bring more
bats and balls next time. Maybe it
should be an Olympic sport.
It’s
heartening to see how education is valued.
There is a poster in town that reads: “If you think education is
expensive, try ignorance!” Mind you, it
is just outside a private, fee-paying college which has an interest in the
matter. There are several well-attended
private primary and secondary schools charging about 100 birr (5 UK pounds) a
month which offer better facilities than the state schools and private
so-called universities (what we would call further education or vocational
colleges) teaching courses such as Food Handling, Nursing, Hotel Management,
Accounting, IT and so on. Equipment is
terribly lacking (the university hasn’t even got one CD player we can use for
the Listening Comprehension CDs we brought with us from Spain, so almost all
teaching is highly theoretical. Even the
shops here still only sell tape recorders;
the CD revolution hasn’t arrived yet.
Only the university lecturers can be seen, occasionally, carrying books;
their students don’t possess any and just walk around clutching notebooks into
which to copy the teachers’ notes gleaned from the book he or she may get hold
of. Most of the books in the library
seem to be out of date rejects from the West.
In spite of these difficulties, education is truly seen as the route to
both individual as well as national progress and there is an investment in it,
again at both levels, that is wonderful to see.
My Ethiopian counterpart is the child of peasant farmers, as are most
people in the country, who had already lost one child at birth. He does not know his exact age because it
used not to be recorded, though now it is.
He has a Masters degree and lectures in Psychology. His big ambition is to get a scholarship to
do a PhD. He says that infant deaths
have been drastically reduced because of the network of rural clinics, though
this is causing the population boom until people realize that their newborns
will survive and they do not need to have so many to ensure that some will live
long enough to work and to look after them.
Curiously, Marie Stopes is a household name here, albeit spelt Marriee
Stooppes or some variant in the local Oromifa language, because of the
reproductive health clinics which are seen in all the towns.
Finally,
I really have to commend the postal service.
Three items of mail, one a package, arrived from Holland
Finally,
I have to admire the way decisions are spontaneously made and acted upon. The 3,200 new students haven’t even started
yet, at the end of October; they are waiting at home to be summoned. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education has
decided that their level of English is too low so the English Department here
at the university has been told to write and organize a course of 48 hours, 3
hours a week for all of them in order to raise their level. The 15 English teachers here have just been
told to get on with it. Such a lack of
foresight and imposition of extra work would be met with riots anywhere else,
but the teachers obediently go away and get started. Is such passivity a vice or a virtue? Am I guilty of the kind of mocking tone I
condemned earlier?
December 2009
Internet
has arrived on campus! There are few
pens, little paper, still no CD player for Emilie to do listening activities,
only out-of-date books in the library, no running water except for a couple of
standpipes, donkeys, goats and cows roam about, but we have forty new computers
with internet connection for staff to be able to look for scholarship
opportunities to further their careers.
It worked perfectly for the first three days, but is out of action
now.
It
doesn’t make much difference to our jobs one way or the other. Richard is teaching university lecturers a course designed by
volunteers and Ethiopians at the Ministry of Education what are known as ‘active learning methods’,
classroom management, lesson planning and so on leading to a diploma which
eventually all university and further education college teachers will be
obliged to hold. Besides teaching the
four two-hour sessions per week to two groups totaling 37 people, unfortunately
all men this year, Richard has to observe them teach and make comments, mark
their obligatory assignments and train an Ethiopian counterpart.
Emilie
has to run what is called the English Language Improvement Programme. She also has to train a counterpart, this
time a female, who, ostensibly, will take over when Emilie leaves. ‘Ostensibly’ because no staff stay here long
before trying to go off to do a Masters or Doctorate, which are the only ways
that promotion comes about. She runs
classes for 2nd and 3rd year English language major
students, for English department teachers as well as a class for teachers of
other subjects. All subjects are taught
through the medium of English, but there is recognition that the standards are
low. Emilie suffers from a complete lack
of resources so she has to use the ELT books we brought with us, the Guardian Weekly, to
which we subscribe, and her imagination and experience. There is no such thing as class sets of text
books. She has also organized a weekly
class just for female students as they are a shy minority and need
‘consciousness raising’ as well as English improvement to give them more
confidence to speak up in class. Her
latest idea is the setting up of an English Club where students can decide
their own activities, such as watching and discussing films, having debates and
so on.
Apart
from our official VSO-designated university commitments, we also help to run an
English language session on Saturday afternoons for orphans, of whom there are
a lot mostly due to AIDS and the fact that people do die young here, aged 50 or
so on average. The intention is to make
it fun, teaching through songs and games.
We are planning to set up a Saturday morning workshop once a month or so
for primary school English teachers, to improve both their knowledge of the
language as well as their methodology of teaching it.
Life
for students at the university is hard and boring. There are few activities for them to take
part in at weekend and the campus is forty or fifty minutes’ walk out of
town. Even the communal ‘line taxis’
don’t go that far and you have to walk for about fifteen minutes to where they
turn round to go back to town. There is
no running water in their dormitories and they have to collect water from the
couple of standpipes on the campus, even sometimes washing themselves and
shampooing their hair, in the case of boys, under these taps, when there is
water which is not always. Instead of
the four to a room there are supposed to be, there are six or eight. The food they are given is very poor with no
fruit or vegetables and meat only once a week.
The few richer students eat out in neighbouring shacks which serve food
with a little more nourishment and variety.
According to one of Richard’s students, who teaches Health and Disaster
Management, there are very serious health risks on the campus because of the
poor quality of the food and lack of sanitation. Students even go to the river fifteen minutes
away to wash their clothes. The fact
that it’s still a building site creates other dangers, though not from
machinery of which there is little as most work is done by hand, by both men
and women with no gloves or hard hats for protection. The dangers, besides to the workers are also
to the staff and students as there are cracks, crevices and holes in the ground
and wires dangling everywhere. You need the agility of a mountain goat to
successfully negotiate the campus. In
general it can be said that the patience and endurance of discomfort of people
here is amazing to us spoilt Westerners, though for them it’s normal. A seriously handicapped student who uses a
wheelchair finds it impossible to use on this campus with its undulations and
rocky terrain, so he crawls. A female
student who needed an urgent colonoscopy couldn’t afford it and a collection
was made among staff and students to raise the fifty pounds, or sixty euros
necessary. That’s a lot of money
here. There were to be other collections
taken up for sick staff or students as people realize that poor families
otherwise could not afford the cost of treatment.
The
students have no books and the books in the library, often donated by the West,
are often out of date or inappropriate.
So, the students totally depend on their teachers’ lecture notes,
creating a situation in which “the teachers’ notes become the students’ notes
without passing through the brains of either, according to one educationalist’s
view of the standard lecture method.
There is very little equipment in the laboratories so most work is
purely theoretical with very little opportunity to practice. Nursing students do, however, go to the local
hospital to watch or help out.
There
is an enormous programme of university building in Ethiopia
Religion
and political activities are banned from the campus, though Richard was talking
to two teachers about wealth not bringing happiness and giving as an example
the problem of youth in Saudi Arabia Britain America
Today is the Ethiopian
Christmas Day, so ‘Ayana killi gari’ to you all in the local Oromo language or
‘Mery Chiritmars’ as a local coffee bar has it.
Everything to do with dates and times is different here as Ethiopia
didn´t adopt the Gregorian calendar in 1582 when the rest of the Christian
world did, so it´s 7 years and 8 months behind and each year has 12 months of
30 days and one month of just 5 days or 6 in leap years!
The time is different, too, each day starting at 6 am, so when they say
7 o´clock, it´s our 1 o´clock and vice versa!
Today is a major meat-eating day for people for whom meat is a
luxury. The butchers’ shops are about
the only shops open this morning and they have long queues. Many people get together with neighbours,
family or friends to buy a whole sheep or cow and have it slaughtered to share
out. Western Christmas decorations are
making a timid appearance in a few shops and cafes, but, apart from that, there
is no atmosphere that we would regard as typical of Christmas: no shops packed
with special goodies or children´s toys, no shopping sprees, no wrapping paper
for presents. As far as we can see, no
presents are given at this time.
It seems an appropriate day
(7th January in our calendar) to write something about religion in Ethiopia Ethiopia India Africa ’s biggest problem.
Historically, the Amhara were the
dominant people and their language was imposed on the other regions as and when
they fell under Amhara control. This
causes resentment even now, particularly among the more numerous Oromo, who
feel they don’t get their share of the power and wealth of the country. These days children are taught in their local
language until English is used in secondary school as a common, neutral
language. Amharic is still, though, for
other purposes, the official national language.
The Amhara are usually Orthodox Christians, Christianity having arrived
here as early as the 4th Century, subsequently being strongly
influenced by Judaism. The Orthodox faith and the Amhara language were, under
Haile Selassie´s feudalistic regime, seen as the official church and the
national language, as the Catholic Church and Castilian Spanish language were
for Franco´s Spain, all other beliefs or languages being suppressed. I’ve heard an Oromo nationalist complain
about the noise emanating from an Orthodox church, saying that it´s the Amhara
flaunting their dominance!
I find it pleasing that
there may be a historical link between two of my VSO stints; there has long
been a mystery about how Jewish people, or at least their rituals, found their
way to Ethiopia Elephantine Island Aswan , Egypt Caribbean islands, thus making the slight link to my time in
the Turks and Caicos Islands in 1968-9!)
The Marxist military
movement that overthrew Haile Selassie in 1974 and ruled until 1991, tried to
suppress religious belief, particularly that of the more proselytising
Protestant denominations, and one of our university colleagues was imprisoned
then for that reason, but now there is a constitutional right of religious
freedom and what seems to be a live and let live tolerance prevails. Like any ideology that people feel deeply,
through childhood indoctrination or adult conviction, there is competition for
converts and fear of falling numbers of adherents. All believers think they know best and that
others are benighted for not seeing the truth so I am told that churches
certainly do preach a degree of hostility to other religions or denominations
but religiously-motivated violence has seemed rare in recent times. An Ethiopian Lutheran told us, however, that
he was worried about the influx of Muslims into this region. It has come about because of a government
policy of relocating people from the poor, desert eastern part of the country,
where survival is difficult or impossible, to here where the land is relatively
fertile and rich. He has the
Macchiavelian idea that it is a plot to deflect the politically-aware Omoros
from their opposition to the government and towards a minority group in their
midst, in an overwhelmingly Christian area of the country. A university lecturer told me he had been
brought up to believe that a good Christian would not eat food prepared by a
Muslim. So, there are all sorts of myths
and prejudices surrounding religion. An elderly man in the street told me once,
after asking where I was from, that Britain
Religion intrudes in our
lives on Saturday night – Sunday morning with the haunting moaning, chanting,
singing that is emitted by the Orthodox churches and continues all through the
night. Though founded so long ago, and
still using an ancient liturgical language, Ge’ez, that is no longer spoken except
in church services, this church has no qualms about using modern amplification
equipment to spread the word and, in our case, to prevent sleep. This noise is joined at about 6 am by the new,neighbouring Evangelical Church USA
It was a great surprise to
us to be in Holland in July, having accepted the placements in Nekemte, to read
in the Dutch press the name that a new Catholic bishop, a Dutchman whose town
of origin was right next to where we were sitting, had been appointed to
Nekemte. We now know that he has lived
in Ethiopia China Africa and mercifullly
non- amplified.
Career….
At the university, female
students whom we presume to be Muslims cover their hair with scarves and wear
long dresses but only a very few wear the kind of long robes which completely
disguise their female forms. We have
heard, though, that the wearing of this kind of garment is on the increase and
that there is Saudi and other Arab money going into the propagation of their
version of Islam, more rigid than that traditionally practised in Ethiopia.
Belief in a deity is
apparently universal and the only incomprehensible phenomenon is
non-belief. I’ve learnt over the years
never to get into debates about my own beliefs so when I´m asked what my
religion is I always answer that it´s a private matter which I don´t
discuss. One of my university
colleagues, who lectures in economic development and who loves serious
conversation told me that he believed that God had made all creatures exactly
as they are now, that Man did coexist with the dinosaurs and that Darwin’s
theory of evolution must be wrong because it defies the laws of
thermodynamics. I´m afraid I couldn’t
follow his argument, so maybe he´s got a point!
Emilie tells me I sound too
pedantic so here´s some more personal news.
On our December 25th we had to work, but got off a bit early
and met up with the other two VSO volunteers who are here, a Peace Corps
volunteer and another Brit and two Swedish girls who are doing voluntary work
for a few months at a school for deaf children.
Sebastian had arrived in Addis the previous week where I was attending a
conference and Emilie was looking for books for her department at the
university, which has none, as well as having a medical check-up. He came back to Nekemte with us and stayed
for Christmas. He was our gamesmaster
that evening and we created our own spirit of the season, though it didn´t feel
like the real thing at all. We did,
however, have mince pies, which Sebastian had brought with him! He was asked at short notice to give a talk
to a group of university students and 50 or so showed up and he did a good job,
telling them about his life so far and the work he´s doing. He also came along to our Saturday class for
orphans and led one of the games he knows.
It wasn´t very touristy for him but he certainly saw a side of Ethiopian
that the average tourist wouldn’t.
We’re getting along fine
with our work, though there are constant frustrations and, shall we say,
cultural misunderstandings. I’ve had a
bad knee which has been bothering me and the lack of any specialist attention
in this town is a bit of a concern, but I will have to see how it goes to see
if a trip to Addis is necessary.
We wish you all well for
the New Year and thank you very much for the Christmas cards some of you
sent; you can´t imagine how much they
are appreciated. Do please write if you
have the time either by post: PO Box 328 , Nekemte , Ethiopia
Late January-early
February, 2010
We’ve
been away travelling for a few days during an inter-semester break at the
university. We came to Addis on the
public bus which is always an interesting experience. You have to get to the bus station before 6 am when the gates are opened to allow the huge throng
of expectant travellers to burst through, with screams and shouts, in search of
tickets and seats. No mercy or quarter
are given; it’s every man and woman for himself. All the courtesies of which the Ethiopians
are justifiably proud (“It’s our culture”, they say) are foregone where
transport is concerned. There are ticket
salesmen who shout out destinations and write you a ticket. If you are a foreigner they ask “Where are
you go?” and point you in the direction of the buses concerned. This apparent chaos in the dark is disconcerting
to those not in the know. If you are the
last ones onto a bus you get the worst seats on the bench at the back which
goes the width of the bus. I actually
envy sardines in a tin, except that they’re dead. Six of you have to squeeze your bums together
so tightly that you all have to stand up together to get free. Only Emilie or I could lean back on the back
rest at a time while the other one leaned forward as there wasn’t room for us
both to do so. A departure time of 6
does not mean the bus leaves at 6 as it will wait to fill up and if it has to
leave before being full will pick up people who flag it down along the
way. While the bus is waiting, traders
take advantage of their captive market to sell nuts, chewing gum, biscuits,
pineapples, coffee beans and other items essential for a long trip, beggars get
on to seek monetary consolation for their woes and preachers may appear waving
bibles or charging to kiss a cross they carry to guarantee our safe
arrival. The bus exhibits a sign which
reads: “ Arrive alive-wear a seatbelt”, even though there is not a seatbelt to
be seen. Perhaps kissing the cross makes
them redundant.
When
the bus eventually goes, the joys of blaring Ethiopian pop music are provided
over the rattling speaker system to entertain the travellers. The buses hoot their powerful horns almost
constantly, usually not in time to the music, to scatter the donkeys, children,
cattle and any other road user in the way.
The poorer Ethiopian public’s capacity for discomfort and ability to
contort would astound Houdini. The bus
may only make a pee stop every three or more hours when mostly only men get off
and stand in a line at the side of the road peeing into a field; what the women
do, I have no idea but they don’t usually get off to disappear behind trees on
these occasions. There is also a phobia
about opening the windows of the bus. Is
it fear of catching cold or of ruffling their hair? If we ask to open a window there are murmurs
of complaint and, after a discreet period, someone will close it again. Meanwhile, the day gets hotter; the heat,
smell and squeeze of bodies is something I haven’t known since playing in a
rugby scrum at school. When the bus
stops for lunch in a town, there is the same rush of salesmen, usually pushy
children, and beggars, who await the arrival of every bus. We arrive at the bus station in Addis,
sweaty, cramped and exhausted after anything from eight to ten hours only to
have to start all over again, contorting ourselves into collective taxis to get
from one extreme of the town to the other.
After
a shower and a night in a hotel, we got the new luxury Sky Bus (“German
technology-Chinese price” it announced, referring to the bus not the tickets)
to Dire Dawa in the east of the country.
These buses are air-conditioned with reservable seats but unfortunately,
as yet, only serve a few cities. Even though it was a posh bus, its posh loo
was out of action and there were only two pee stops on the 9 hour journey so
crossed legs or Buddhist mind over matter control were required. Dire Dawa, now Ethiopia Djibouti Djibouti Ethiopia
Down
in the Rift Valley, Dire Dawa is fiercely hot and that, along with the herds of
camels, which we haven’t seen anywhere else, and the arid, sandy landscape,
made it seem more part of the Middle
East . The vast market, in the Muslim area described
in the guidebook as being more ‘organic’, with colourfully dressed Oromo and
Afar women doing all the work, had the flavour of an Arab ‘souq’, though in the
Arab world it’s usually the men manning the stalls.
After
one night there, we climbed the Rift Valley wall’s serpentine road in a
collective taxi driven by a lunatic who drove with one hand and who thought it
would entertain us to overtake lorries going into blind bends. His mate, the door operator and money collector,
an essential feature of collective taxis, chewed ‘chat’, a narcotic leaf,
ripping the leaves off from the branch like an animal in the zoo, as an
Ethiopian who talked to us put it, probably to deaden the panic that any
normal, undrugged, person would feel travelling with that driver. We were, after all, heading for the ‘chat’
capital of the world, Harar, from where it is exported all over the Middle East and, we were told even to Europe to comfort Horn of Africa émigrés.
I had really looked forward to visiting the ancient walled city of Harar Islam Mecca Medina Jerusalem
We
stayed in a dilapidated old government hotel which had a certain down-at-heel
charm where you could imagine famous writers and travellers staying in its
heyday, with waiters and waitresses who had been around to see them still
wearing the same fraying uniforms. They
were friendly and helpful enough. The
one concession to modernity was a big screen in the lounge showing satellite
sports TV enabling us to catch a bit of the men’s Australian Open tennis final
and the Arsenal-Man U premiership football match whilst drinking Harar’s own
excellent beer.
We
headed back to Addis and got another public bus to Awassa to the south, again
down in the Rift Valley. This town was
laid out 50 years ago, next to a huge lake of the same name, in grid fashion
and is so spread out that walking is truly hard work and the threewheeler
‘bajaj’ taxis, based on motorbikes made in India, are driven by lads who see
dollar signs when a foreigner flags them down and ask what, for us, are absurd
fares. Though lacking any character or old town centre, we found a crumbling
oldish hotel next to the lake with an abundance of bird and monkey life in the
trees and at the water’s edge. A monkey
jumped onto our table, grabbed a bag of old bread that Emilie was going to use
to feed the birds and joyfully scampered up a tree to enjoy his loot. Was it the same monkey who approached our
table the next day, was shooed away by Emilie and who ran up the tree over our
heads and peeed and pooped on her?
Now
we’re back in Addis for Emilie to attend a workshop relating to her work and
I’m using the VSO office to plan a workshop for when we get back to Nekemte, a
trip which will enable us once again to savour the joys of public bus travel.
February,
2010
What does it mean for a
country to be poor in modern times? The
title of a novel by the Nigerian writer Achebe captures it: ¨Things Fall
Apart¨. Systems and supplies do not reliably meet people´s needs or
expectations. The grip on basic
modernity is tenuous. To give you an idea, here we may have electricity for a
while, and/or water, sometimes internet, the scheduled university bus for teachers
sometimes doesn’t show up with no explanation or warning, we go for our
macchiato coffee but they can´t give it to us because there is no water, or no
electricity, or no milk. A really bad
day is when none of these is available. I came home from work today wanting a
shower and was delighted that we had electricity, but there was no water. Last Monday we invited the other two VSOs for
dinner and to play cards. There was no
electricity so we couldn’t cook on our one electric ring. Luckily, we have a little backup kerosene
stove and were able to put some food on the table and eat and play by
candlelight. Internet may fail because
there is a fault somewhere in the internet provision chain or simply because
there is no electricity.
There is an obvious lack of
technicians, and the botched, careless way most jobs are done, be it painting,
installing sockets, putting up a blackboard, even the non-technological hanging
out of washing on a line, makes you either laugh or cry, but the motor
mechanics must be superb, judging by the age of many of the vehicles still
apparently reliably plying the roads.
Harar, where we were recently, must be the Peugeot 404 capital of the
world and they were 30 or 40-year-old models.
I must also add that the capital is a different story, in some respects;
I was given a thoroughly efficient MRI scan on my
knee, even though it cost our medical insurance the equivalent of my month’s
salary. We asked the President of the
university what his priority would be if he were Prime Minister of the country
and he had no hesitation in replying that it would be ‘infrastructure’. More things may be available these days,
particularly in towns, but their supply is provisional and they will often run
out before being replaced, processed foodstuffs, beer (which is serious) and
soft drinks being examples. Of course, in their present form these are all
modern phenomena and depend on technology, but other types of systems fail for
different, more human, reasons.
There is a fear of
corruption. Indeed, it is assumed that
everyone who can be, is corrupt. They
tell us frankly: ¨We Ethiopians will
always cheat or use deceit if we can, it´s the way we think¨. This is a gross exaggeration, of course, as
there is a high degree of honesty in personal dealings, as there is almost
everywhere. What they are referring to
is where institutions, which are seen as fair game, are involved. So, systems have been put in place to
discourage this type of corruption, but the effect is to stymie action and
impede the achievement of the goals of the organisation. To give a couple of examples, we have
computers with internet in the library, only for use by the staff. They are not attached to printers and to
prevent viruses (i.e. corruption) no flash drives or CDs may be used to copy
documents. Thus, nothing from internet
can be downloaded and copied for use in the class, surely one of the objects of
giving teachers access to internet. To prevent corruption a system is
established which prevents useful action.
A second case is that of money.
There is a budget with detailed descriptions of what the money can be
spent on. Anyone wishing to spend money
for their department from the budget for their department must obtain three
estimates from three different establishments for the item, but it must be
exactly the same item, same make, same model.
Many products are unique and are not sold in more than one shop so,
either you go without, or the shop has three different stamps to feign being
different shops to stamp your official forms.
So, again, the system either invites the corruption it is designed to
prevent, or prevents the action it is designed to foster.
The result of all this is a
fatalism about what can be achieved and how.
Talent is wasted and good people
become disenchanted time-servers who lose the ambition to make things
happen. When plans are made for meetings
or classes, everyone knows it might not happen because of some system
breakdown, so meetings are held spontaneously without prior arrangement to ensure
that it does happen, thus spoiling the plans of many of those who attend who
may have been expected to teach a class or fulfil some other commitment. This is a bugbear of my work as teachers are
forever missing my methodology classes because they had a spontaneous
meeting. Often their students aren´t
informed, either, and are standing waiting to be taught, not knowing why their
teacher hasn´t shown up.
We read a report on Ethiopia Ethiopia Addis Ababa
We take the reliability of
systems for granted and are greatly put out when there is a failure (¨leaves on
the line¨), but here the reverse is true and that attitude is a deterrent to
entrepreneurship or ambition. How can
you run a modern business, manufacturing for export, say, if you can´t count on
a reliable electricity supply or internet for contact with suppliers or customers,
or water, an ingredient in your production process? This is what underdevelopment means.
This has affected us
considerable recently as we have been writing materials for various workshops
we are putting together. One is for
English teachers in the ten local primary schools which we are running on
Saturday mornings, team teaching the sessions with our two VSO colleagues who
work at the Teacher Training College 195 in ‘Key Issues in Development’ Damien Kingsbury
et.al.)
At least the supply of
traditional products is not affected by anything I have said. Women still struggle into town with firewood
or sacks of charcoal on their backs and the same few fruits, vegetables and
coffee beans find their way into the markets.
There doesn’t seem to be any danger of plastic shoes from China
One of our greatest joys
here is to sit on the little terrace in front of our house drinking tea or
coffee and reading. We live in a
bungalow built in more modern style, of concrete, on what they call a compound
as we share the enclosed land, which has a corrugated fence and gate on the
street side to give it great privacy, with another building. The other building is built in a more
traditional way of ‘adobe’ (mud and straw) and is just a single-storey row of
five rooms with the corrugated metal roof that all buildings have. The building runs along the side of our
house, around which we have a drainage channel as we are low, with steps and a
sloping grassy, garden area leading down to our front door. In the first room lives Emebet who acts in
some respects as our landlady as she speaks English reasonably well, having
studied Law at a private “university”.
Her boyfriend, Fikadu, is a lecturer at that university and usually
stays over on Saturday nights. Next
along comes a tallish erect young woman who dresses smartly in a skirt and
jacket to go to work during the week.
She works as a secretary or something similar. The next room is occupied by Selamawit a
plumpish, jolly-faced young woman who is from Baku 6 am and to stop the bus nearer our house for us to jump
aboard. It sounds colonial, but is
commonly done here and we pay him extra for his troubles.
We´ve been really lazy
about learning any local languages, by the way, as English is the language of
the university and, although Oromifa is the local language in these parts,
there are many who live and work here who don´t speak it and only speak the
more national language, Amharic. So,
this presents a dilemma about which to learn.
We do know a few greetings and expressions in Oromifa, but little
more. English is so widely understood that,
though we could not engage in a discussion about the finer points of quantum
mechanics with them, we can manage to buy vegetables perfectly well from the
ladies in the market.
We sit watching the cock
strut about imperiously and the hen clucks after her two remaining chicks, the
other eight having survived only a few days and died one way or another. It´s not surprising their life was brief as
Lombi would grossly mishandle them and anyone could step on them as they
twittered around. One got its head trapped under a wire fence and Emebet´s
mother shook it about and blew on it to revive it which, unsurprisingly, did
not work. The remaining members of the
family wander in and out of the rooms proprietorially if the doors are
open. Occasional ‘wild’ dogs wander in
and out of our compound. They seem to
know how to open the gate, provided it´s not locked with a key, which is a bit
more tricky for them. The main one
recently has been a mother who must have had pups not too long ago, judging by
the size of her teats, but has been attacked and has a flesh wound on one of
her hind legs. It´s healing well,
though. I say wild dogs, but they’re not
wild in the sense of attacking people only in the sense that no one owns them
and they live in the street where they feed themselves quite well to judge by
their reasonable appearance and the plentiful bones of various other animals
strewn around the streets. They don´t
pay much attention to people being far too engrossed in their own battles and
amorous escapades. They’re quiet in the
day and whole families can be seen sleeping in a huddle, but are cacophonous at
night when they rule the roost, so to speak.
Humans have their interest,
too, and we can sit and watch, as well as smell, the cooking procedures that
are conducted in the various doorways over charcoal. Sometimes the smoke is overpowering and
drives us away, though the worst smoke of all comes from the neighbours on a
separate compound next door. We don´t
know what on earth they cook, or burn, but when they do we have to close the
shutters on that side of the house. When
they roast coffee beans, the smell is delicious and gets our mouths
watering. Lombi and Bontu play around,
though they´ve been well-trained not to bother us or come to close unless invited. They have no manufactured toys and have to be
very creative with bottle tops, scraps of paper, cast off bits of chalk which
they use to play at teacher and student, flowers which they break off and make
a mini flower shop on a cloth on the ground.
In the absence of television, they are at play all day and never seem
bored. Lombi is a singer and never stops
singing scraps of the songs we have taught them at the orphans´ classes: ‘This is the Way’ and ‘Old MacDonald had a
Farm’. ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ and ‘He´s got the Whole World’
obviously didn´t make the same impact.
We speak to them in English and Bontu understands a lot, though Lombi
just says ‘Yes’ to whatever we ask, except ‘How are you?’ to which he perfectly
replies I’m fine, thanks. ‘Goodbye, see
you later’ comes very easily to both of
them when we leave. Hair is a constant
source of activity and we see the various tasks associated with it, the
washing, the brushing, the combing into elaborate styles, and that´s just
Lombi. We don´t even know for sure
where our neighbours go to the toilet, though there are a couple of out-houses,
one of which we do know is used for cooking ‘injera’, the round, flat
bread-like substance that accompanies all meals. It´s a rubbery, light-brown-greyish substance
which has been likened to carpet liner.
There’s also a well which they throw half a tyre inner tube on the end
of a long rope into, though usually they just use the tap on the side wall of
our house. The garden at the back is
quite extensive, with coffee plants among other trees from which they get the
odd foodstuff. Emebet has talked of
getting a cow, which the neighbouring house has, to supply various needs. That would give us another animal to watch,
though we already see plenty roaming the streets. Though valuable creatures, they very often
seem to be unattended as well as being intelligent enough to know where to
go. Lombi and I are the only permanent males
here in a very female-orientated little world.
The public, outdoor world, is very much more dominated by males who
gather in groups at the shoe-shining posts or just hang around, apparently
idly.
Both male and female
circumcision are common in Ethiopia Ethiopia
Changing the subject
completely, at work, we have run two workshops on methodology for young
teachers who have had no previous pedagogical training. One was Friday-Saturday, the other
Monday-Tuesday for a day and a half each.
The idea was to show them how to be practical in their teaching, using
‘active learning methods’ to encourage their students to think and not just
copy the teacher’s lectured notes. The
turnout was poor as each was supposed to have 40 participants when, in fact,
only 22 showed up to the first one and 16 to the second. It must be said that it was all organised in
great haste with very little notice and the teachers had to hurriedly rearrange
classes in order to attend. They are
surprised by this new approach to teaching and tend to make excuses for why it
will not work with the large classes that they have to teach and with the lack
of resources at their disposal. We tried
to show them how many of the methods could work, explaining that we have
visited many classes in progress and are fully aware of the difficulties. We got further insight into some of the
problems faced by anyone trying to achieve anything here with people who are
supposed to be professionals showing up late, up to half an hour sometimes, or
missing odd sessions with lame excuses.
Many, though, were seriously interested and resolved to try out our
suggestions as well as being pleasant people to chat to. Each workshop ended with a one-course lunch
at a local restaurant paid for by the university. This kind of thing, as well as the
certificate of attendance, are major incentives to get people to go to such
events.
Over lunch the first time,
I had a friendly argument with a lecturer from the Journalism department about
the problems of Africa , which he instantly blamed
on colonialism and outside interference.
When I cited Mugabe of Zimbabwe as a prime example of bad government, he
denied that he was a dictator and that he had run his country into the ground,
saying that I was getting biased information and that Mugabe was doing his best
in the face of a hostile world otherwise why would other African leaders
support him? He also found it most
offensive, and it surprised me that he would know this detail, that Gordon
Brown had refused to attend a Europe-Africa summit meeting in Lisbon USA BBC cannot be
trusted to tell the truth after a recent report has been greeted with denials
by many involved. It concerns the famine
in the 1980s which took place when the Marxist dictatorship governing Ethiopia BBC investigation
found that aid money that was brought in by the major aid agencies to buy as
many supplies as possible locally had been diverted by the rebels to buying
armaments. This would clearly discredit
the government ahead of the national elections in May this year. This made us suspicious when we first heard
about the report, which smacked of opposition groups trying to besmirch the
government. Bob Geldof and other aid
workers were paraded on Ethiopian state-controlled TV to deny the truth of the BBC report and this
has now blackened the name of Britain´s most successful and trusted export,
even though, as I pointed out to the fellow, the fact that famous people deny
an event is no guarantee that they are right.
The BBC is very widely followed
among the educated in Ethiopia BBC ; ‘Hardtalk’ seems to be a particular favourite
Book-buying spree -
April 13th, 2010
We´ve just had a successful
week, though for you it might seem strange that we should feel that way because
all we did was buy 400 books. Emilie is
tasked with creating an entity called the English Language Improvement Centre
to raise the standard of English in the university. There was a budget for this from a World Bank
grant which also pays our allowances and supports my work in teacher
training. The problem has been spending
that money. The lack of books, even in
Addis’s bookshops, and the bureaucratic procedures designed to prevent
misappropriation of funds had so far prevented Emilie from buying any but a
handful on two previous trips to Addis, when she had gone with a university
‘purchaser’, who seems to be tasked with blocking any possible use of the
money, which the university seems to prefer to hand back to the World Bank
unspent. The legal requirement is that
the purchaser obtains three estimates from three different establishments for
each item in order to buy whichever is the cheaper. The problem with books is that they are
unique and sold at fixed prices so that, even if the same book is available in
three bookshops, it will be in branches of the same shop and have the same
price. Also, all the universities are
setting up their ELICs at the same time and whoever gets to the bookshop first
will clear it out of the required books which are imported and take ages to
replace. Finally, the books to be bought
have to be listed by title, author and publisher here in Nekemte, a list which
is stamped and signed by all concerned, before the trip is made to Addis where
only those listed may be bought, even if they are not available but equivalents
are.
Emilie had protested to the
President of the university about the inflexibility of the purchasing process
and asked that she be allowed to make yet another trip with authority to buy
any suitable books. We had not expected that
this request would meet with any success but last Monday we were told to go to
Addis on Tuesday in a university pick-up truck with driver and a cheque for
26,000 birr, over a thousand pounds. I
went too because I needed to get a few books for my programme. It was all very fortunate timing because we
had to get Hepatitis B booster jabs, which would have required a trip to Addis
in any case. Everyone comments that such
power would never have been granted to an Ethiopian teacher because we
foreigners are trusted and accorded knowledge and skills that they lack. Our age may also be a factor as we are almost
regarded as senior statesmen, being by far the oldest people on the
campus. We certainly didn´t waste the
opportunity and spent every single penny.
(When I first heard we were going to be paid in birr I misheard and
thought it was beer and looked forward to the 2,000 a month I would receive.)
The bookselling business
here gives an insight into the state of the country. By far the biggest chain of bookshops, called
Mega Books, which even has a tiny shop here in Nekemte, is owned by Azeb
Mesfin, the wife of the Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi. There is a Mega business empire with
printing, publishing, real estate and various other money-making activities. We are told, though it sounds impossible to
believe, that it is not taxed and can always, therefore, undercut
competitors. We visited five different
branches of Mega Books in Addis. This
was worth the effort because one branch had books which were out of stock in
others, though in general, they all carry the same stock. The main rival is called Bookworld.
What is interesting is that the Mega bookshops are scruffy, poorly-lit
and badly laid-out, but are the only ones selling an enormous number of books
written by Western authors, printed in cheap editions, under the Western
publishers’ banners (Cambridge
This is almost certainly
the best government Ethiopia has ever had, which is not saying much, and most
people have never had it so good, but to call it a democracy would be to strain
the meaning of the word to the limit.
There are elections next month but the victory of the ruling party is a
foregone conclusion. Membership of the
ruling party is a requirement for advancement in public employment and, in many cases, for getting business
permits or loans. Though freedom of the
press is guaranteed in the constitution, the independent press is regarded as a
mouthpiece for the political opposition, its journalists are frequently
imprisoned and they are not invited to government press conferences. The government is protected from
accountability and criticism because the press is not only prevented from
obtaining information from the government but is punished if it publishes
whatever it can find out. The Prime
Minister has been in office for more than 20 years and, typical of Africa , seems unlikely
to relinquish his hold on office voluntarily.
After the last elections in 2005, in which an opposition party won all the Addis
Abeba seats, opposition leaders were imprisoned, including a man we know who
spent 20 months in jail accused of treason and who was sentenced to 18 years of
hard labour although he is in his 60s.
International pressure got him released but it didn´t help the woman who
leads the opposition coalition, who was released and then immediately re-arrested
and who is still in prison. It seems
that the opposition has been cowed and will not pose a serious threat this time
around. We have been warned by VSO to
stay away from polling stations and not, under any circumstances to take photos
anywhere near them. This is probably in
case we are thought to be foreign election observers, who have been denied
entry into the country this time after they condemned the last elections for
their irregularities.
Despite all the many
failings, there is a great deal of optimism in the country and the government
is spending money on education, health, roads, water and energy supplies,
industry, agriculture and telecommunications, including internet, which are
bringing improvements in the quality of life for the great majority of
people. We get a distorted perspective
as we live in a town, in which posh new buildings are going up, and only see
the parts of the country alongside the main roads. The worst poverty and where improvements are
hardest to bring about are in the deep countryside and the arid areas of the
peripheries where 10 million people are still dependent on food aid. Though there is still a long way to go, even
there schools, which both boys and girls are attending in ever greater numbers,
and clinics are being built. Civil
unrest could jeopardise this and it is most people’s worst fear; real democracy can wait.
People – 16th May, 2010
Asfaw
Keno, with his receding hair, round, smiley face and easy laugh is always ready
to see humour and cracks up at the slightest provocation. He told me he had
been brought up by a family of small farmers, as are 80% or more of Ethiopia’s
people, and that he had gone to a Catholic school and been given financial
assistance by a nun running the school as he was a promising child. He explained how farm productivity declined
catastrophically at the time of the Marxist-oriented military regime, the Derg,
which had overthrown the Emperor Haile Selassie. Communist ideals were applied
to the land, meaning that no one had the incentive to work any harder than
anyone else as the benefits were all going to be shared anyway. They went
bankrupt. He tells how, as he has advanced in his career, he has helped his
parents, and neighbours as well (which seems to be an obligation here), by
buying them cows so that they have been able to recover the standard of living
they previously had. He was imprisoned
for a month during the Derg regime for his outspoken religiosity. He has a voracious appetite for knowledge
and, besides the courses in Pedagogy and Development he teaches at the
university, also gives classes at a private college in return for studying
there to be a Medical Officer. With
others he also supports some poor orphaned youngsters and when he tried to get
a micro-loan to enable them to start a small business, it was denied because
they were not members of the ruling party, which was the first item on the
checklist of qualifications. This sounds
outrageous, though he did point out that there was a certain logic to it from the
point of view of the lending agency; since these boys had no collateral,
membership of the party would enable the agency to have a certain hold over
them in the event of non-payment. Asfaw
is scathing about the way the country is currently run with membership of the
party, not talent, being the determinant for promotions, as the university
itself epitomizes with its promotion to Vice Presidents of two young men with
no administrative experience at all who are only recently-arrived lecturers. He prides himself on his outspokenness and
says that it rubs some colleagues and superiors up the wrong way and makes him
unpopular. When Sebastian came to visit,
Asfaw was most anxious to meet him for a chat and immediately set up a
gathering of students for Sebastian to talk to, showing his desire for
knowledge of and contact with the outside world. He’s a person who probably really would
benefit from a period of study in the West.
He’s religiously fundamentalist by Western standards, though, firmly
believing in Creationism and that Man roamed the Earth at the same time as the
dinosaurs. Typically, he uses
intellectual arguments to support his beliefs, saying that the Second Law of
Thermodynamics categorically refutes the theory of evolution. An interesting man, he is always a pleasure
to chat to. He is separated from his
wife but has one of his three children living with him.
Lelisa
Chalo is Dean of the Faculty of Education and could be mistaken for an Idi
Amin-style African dictator, being unusually bulky by local standards, with his
milky right eye lending him a scary appearance.
He is much given to bluster and temper, which add to the scariness, as
you never know in what sort of mood you´re going to find him. He´s our Line
Manager, so we have to have daily dealings with him but they are usually
harmonious, particularly as he´s got to know us better. In the early days, I was ill and I had asked
him what I should be doing and he had said to just go away and prepare. So, feeling ill anyway, I stayed at home to
do some preparation. He phoned because
he had needed me for something but hadn't been able to find me at work, and he
gave me a lecture about 'this is against our work culture, you must be here
every day etc.' The next day when I went in I told him that I was 60, had
worked all my life and that there had been a misunderstanding. He showed me a folder on the table in front
of his desk in which there was an attendance sheet signed by members of his
department. He told me he could make me
sign it too as a kind of threat. He
never has, though, and I have seen enough examples of local ‘work culture’
especially my counterpart, Melkamu’s
habitual absence, as well as that of most other university teachers, to
know that Lelisa must have been kidding himself or me. Another example occurred when the Dean of
Students, Ketema, asked me if a group of students could use my HDP room for an
HIV/AIDS workshop. I was not using it
and agreed. He promised that the room
would be returned to me as it had been found.
The next morning, I discovered that most of the tables had been put
outside into the corridor as they weren’t needed for the workshop which was in
progress. When Lelisa saw it he blew a
fit, saying that the tables were my responsibility and that if any were lost I
would have to pay for them. I pointed
out that Ketema had asked me and that it seemed a reasonable request. He said it was good to share and maximise the
use of facilities but that things could easily disappear. He should know because when I was setting up
the room and starting my classes I told him that I did not have enough tables
and he went off and brought three tables himself one by one, joking that he was
a ‘thief’! If things are not in always
locked rooms or nailed to the floor, they walk away here. We always have to lock our rooms when we
leave them. People always warn you not to lend books, for example, as you won’t
get them back. Twelve books seem to have vanished from the tiny library of my
little department between the last volunteer leaving in June and my arriving in
September. Ketema, when I told him what
Lelisa had said, told me not to worry as that was just the way Lelisa was; his
bark was worse than his bite. Another
example was when Emilie was trying to discuss the budget and how to spend it
with him and he said ‘you are annoying me’.
Emilie was upset about that and of a mind to walk out, not only of the
room but of Nekemte and Ethiopia Darfur ’ restaurant, which is a shack mainly used by
building workers and is, to our eyes, a squalid slum! His main goal for the year has been to see
internet installed on campus and his joy was boundless when it was and he could
show us ‘our’ computer, password protected.
Ketema, by the way, has a great sense of humour and once told us that
the problem on the campus was not sexually-transmitted diseases STDs), but
STGs, sexually-transmitted grades, in allusion to the number of affairs he
imagines or knows there to be between staff and students. Lelisa did invite us to his home for a meal
one afternoon, out of the blue, however, though, in typical fashion, there was
no forewarning and we´d only just had an early lunch at the university!
The
President of the University, Fekadu, known as the Professor, is a lively,
bright-eyed man who oozes intelligence. We bumped into him by chance in Addis
where we were attending a workshop once and he immediately asked how we were
getting back to Nekemete. When we said
by public bus he made a face to express the disagreeableness of such an
experience and offered us a lift in his car, giving us the opportunity to chat
for 6 hours or so. When he was a young
lecturer at Awasa University Oslo China Africa to give themselves food security and here it was in practice. I have
read that China Ethiopia Ethiopia Awasa University
Dawit,
a man of very youthful appearance who speaks excellent English, was the
director of the Lutheran Theological
College Sweden Ethiopia Norway
Kifle
is the husband of an Anglo-American woman, Carmela, and they are the parents of
Gideon, who was at Atlantic College London
Carmela’s
family background is not very usual, either.
She is of Jewish parents, one from Germany Israel Russia US
Kifle
was telling us that the standard of education used to be very high, obviously
only for those few who could receive it, and he went to a state school which
had a British English teacher as well as Indian, Canadian and teachers of other
nationalities. He went to university in
Addis to study public administration but was kicked out because he was the
editor of the students´ newspaper and it had been critical of the Emperor´s
government, a tradition of not tolerating criticism that continues to this day
when journalists are still imprisoned and newspapers closed down for
criticising the government, even though the constitution now clearly allows
freedom of speech. He got a scholarship
to attend a Catholic university in California
I
don´t know yet how he made a living on his return, but his family now has a
construction business and he is obviously well off. He and Carmela said they had thought of
flying to Doha Spain Africa ; most of
the wealth is concentrated in the capital.
I've read in the Marcus 'History of Ethiopia' book how Haile Selassie
wanted to modernise the city and that all the first schools, hospitals,
university and other institutions catering to the elite were built in Addis and
only in Addis. The 'fat cats' all want
to be in the capital to live out the Western life style, a phenomenon common to
most of Africa where the gulf between what the capital city
offers and the rest of the country, including regional capitals, is
enormous. Even we, after so little time
here, can recognise the Addis types at the university in Nekemte. Students don´t choose where or what to study; they are sent by the Ministry of
Education. In part, it is a policy of
mixing up the different nationalities and religions that comprise Ethiopia
Kifle
told us that he had always been active in politics and was one of the leaders
of the biggest opposition party at the time of the 2005 elections and had
played a part in forging the coalition of parties to take on the ruling
party. The coalition won all the seats
in Addis but the governing party did not recognise or accept the result and
opposition leaders were arrested, Kifle with them, tried on charges of
attempting to overthrow the legitimate order, and, in Kifle´s case, sentenced
to 17 years with hard labour. How this
could happen to such a quiet, thoughtful, intelligent man in his 60s is beyond
belief, of a Westerner anyway. He said
there is no independent judiciary and that the judges just have to do as they
are told if they value their jobs. There
was an international outcry and pressure from abroad meant that he spent 'only'
20 months in jail. He was lucky, as he
admitted, to have family and staff to bring food and items to make him
comfortable. Carmela said that they used
to take him fruit juice laced with vodka in the evening to make the comfort
even greater. I asked Kifle what the
policy of his party had been and he said that it stood for the free market,
freedom of speech, in reality not just on paper, and to change the basis of the
federal organisation of the country from one of ethnicity, which he sees as
highly divisive, to one of a blend of geography, ethno-linguistic and other criteria. He said that 60% of Ethiopian doctors live
and practice abroad. It’s one of the
great curses of Africa that its talented, qualified people either flee to
the West, whether for money, freedom or both, or, if they stay, have to keep
their heads down and never participate as fully in civil society as they should
to create the pluralism normal in the West.
Family. Emebet, who lives on our compound is a
Catholic but has a Protestant boyfriend so, in the towns at least, that may not
be a problem. She is even able to spend
the night with him, with her mother´s knowledge, here on the compound. There seem to be three types of
marriage: religious, civil or common law
with the signing of some sort of agreement.
In the countryside girls get abducted, raped and virtually forced into
marriage, often very young. Town life is
very different with people marrying later and having fewer children as they get
touched by modernity. University
students, mostly of rural origins, speak of having 8, 9 or 10 brothers and
sisters. Just as we have Bontu on our
compound, whose family origins we are not sure of but who is an orphan, other
families take in orphans. A man of means
we know, Tesfaye, who owns two private schools, has seven orphaned children
living with him. Their parents have died of AIDS, or in civil strife that took
place some time ago in the west of the country.
They are always immaculately turned out and well-behaved. Middle-class people don´t seem to marry
young. One of my colleagues, Dereje, is
in his early thirties, had a fiancee, but fell out with her because, he says,
she was too materialistic for his taste, always demanding he give her things,
and has no one else on the horizon. To
me, he looks like a real catch, but meeting educated women of the same religion
and, preferably, the same ethno-linguistic background, is difficult. People like him these days have moved away
from their families and home areas and are not subject to the same pressures to
marry, have children, nor to have these matters arranged for them. Also living with Emebet’s elderly mother is
Lombi, one of Emebet´s sister´s children.
The sister has farmed her out to her mother because she feels she can´t look
after him as she has five other children and ‘to give her mother company’. Couples are also very used to spending long
periods of time apart. The President of
the university has his wife and children living in Awasa, two days´journey
away. Emilie´s counterpart, Bedani, is
newly-married and her husband is doing a Theology post graduate degree in Holland
Elections – May 25th, 2010
As I sit at home writing
this, on a public holiday when we are ostensibly celebrating the downfall of
the vile Mengistu dictatorship in 1991 and its replacement by a supposed
democracy, the rain is thundering down on our tin roof making it impossible to
speak and difficult even to think. We
are in the period of the ‘short rains’, which means that there are short breaks
between the torrential outbursts.
There´s a leak in our roof and we have to put a bucket under it, but,
although we run the risk of getting soaked indoors, we´ve been lucky not to be
caught in it outdoors, so far. Someone
emailed the other day to say that she was watching a BBC programme about
the source of the Nile and I replied to say that
the source of the Nile was falling on our
heads. Emilie, meanwhile, is sitting
with me at the table sewing curtains for the university so that she can darken
her room there to show films.
It has been an interesting
week. Last Sunday were the national
elections, the fourth since the event we are commemorating today occurred. We had been told to stay at home all day by
VSO in case there were disturbances, as there had been at the time of the last
elections in 2005 when 200 people were killed.
We had the other two VSOs around for a 9-hour lunch, beer and cards
marathon. The bosses phoned us from VSO
HQ to ask if we were alright and whether we had heard of or seen any
trouble. Fortunately, it was a peaceful
day all over the country; which is not to say that these were wonderfully
democratic elections. We have befriended
the European Union election observers who are based here in Nekemte and we
found them an interpreter, our ´landlady´ Emebet, at a rate of pay beyond the
dreams of the average Ethiopian. Though
they are not allowed to discuss with anyone their findings here, they have
passed on to us copies of the news reports from around the world, including
from the Ethiopian English language press, as well as the preliminary report of
the observers’ team, published last Tuesday. Prior to the elections, we had
also been able to read the Human Rights Watch report on the electoral process
on internet, so we have kept ourselves quite well informed. What is clear is that there has been a
completely ‘uneven playing field’ (to quote the EU report) which has not allowed
the opposition parties to mount a serious campaign. So, the problem has not so much been what
happened on election day as what happened or was allowed to happen in the build
up to it. People who support the
opposition were not allowed to register to vote in some cases, or opposition
leaders were harassed or arrested.
People were threatened with the loss of their government jobs, or
houses, or subsidies, or access to education or seeds or fertilizers or micro-credits
or business licences ….. if they did not vote for the ruling party. Government resources, such as buildings and
vehicles as well as employees’ time, were used to campaign for the EPRDF, the
governing coalition. Of course,
government ministers said that these were just isolated incidences of
over-zealous local party officials, but it is difficult not to see a pattern to
it, that of a centralized authoritarian desire to obliterate the
opposition. Added to these abuses were
the insults heaped on opposition leaders, who were to be regarded as traitorous
or desirous of undermining the steady progress of the country. The leader of
the main opposition party, a 35-year-old single mother, is still in prison
where she was put for ‘treason’ after the last elections. National and
international campaigns to have her released, including requests from Western
leaders in meetings with the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, have
failed. Finally, there were the
bribes. The EPRDF must have spent a
fortune, garnered from where one wonders, on plastering every town with their
posters, handing out T-shirts, baseball caps, flags and even glittery watches
with the yellow colour and bee motif of the ruling party on the face. The bee isn´t a stylised cuddly affair but an
aggressive beast that looks as if it will sting you to death if you try to get
a share of its political honey. People
who have never had a watch in their lives are all happily sporting this trophy
which will remind them every time they take an admiring glance at it to whom
they owe their good fortune.
Among educated people we
talk to at the university there is awareness and even embarrassment towards us
about the lack of freedom and fairness in their elections, though these views
are always expressed privately after a good look around to see who´s
listening. When the EU observers´ report
came out, the government immediately reacted by condemning it and whipped up
rent-a-mob rallies all over the country with the slogans: ‘Respect our votes!’, ‘Stop intimidation!’,
‘Leave the politics to us!’, ‘We chose our leaders, accept the results!’, ‘The
people´s vote will not be overturned by foreign forces!’ ‘Patriotism is the last resort of the
scoundrel.’ said a worthy gentleman some time ago and we were witnessing the
actions of scoundrels who have found a convenient foreign scapegoat to detract
their peoples’ attention from their own multitude of failings. Classes, even exams, at the university were
called off and staff and students alike, even some who have privately told us
they are not party members, a risky business when you are in government employ,
went off to parade through the town to condemn the EU and HRW documents they
hadn´t read, just like those who burned Rushdie´s Satanic Verses, which had
been conveniently and of course unbiasedly summarised for them on the radio and
TV. We were worried that things might
get out of hand and that some hotheads would turn on us, but everything was
peaceful. We kept out of the way and
chatted to some staff members who hadn´t gone including one who had read the
HRW report online and said he agreed with it and that the state-controlled news
media had completely distorted its findings.
Despite the corrupt nature
of the electoral process, the ruling party would certainly have won in any
case. The country has had several years
of double-digit economic growth, everyone we talk to says that things are
getting better for them: health, education, roads, water, electricity and
telephone provision and all other forms of infrastructure are visibly improving,
albeit from dreadfully low levels from which it´s easy to improve, and there is
a stability and willingness to collaborate in Western policies of, for example,
intervention in Somalia to root out islamist militias, and thus continue to
attract succulent quantities of foreign aid (30% of the national budget). Also, the opposition did not, in any case,
offer a credible alternative, partly because it wasn´t allowed to and hasn´t
been able to acquire the experience to, but also because its policies were not
much different from those of the EPRDF, it is a coalition of small parties that
could easily start squabbling among themselves even if they had the chance to
form a government and because so many of its best leaders either retired from
politics or fled the country after the last elections. Several journalists have
also fled the country and the government has been jamming the Voice of America
Amharic service for allegedly broadcasting misinformation, making it hard for
people to hear alternative voices. Many
here take the ‘better the devil you know’ point of view in relation to the
ruling party continuing in power, though they may not be aware that they are on
a slippery slope of ever-increasing authoritarianism and suppression of human
rights, according to HRW, and that the devil they know may be more devilish
than they thought.
Postponed from Tuesday
because of the political rally, Wednesday saw the grand inauguration of
Emilie´s English Language Improvement Programme´s resources centre, where all
those books we bought are now housed and available for use by staff and
students. It also has a giant TV and DVD player for
showing films and is due to receive some computers which the keen can use to do
computer-based English courses. The
President of the university, two Vice Presidents, Deans of Faculties and
various other leading lights were there. The Dean of Education´s secretary, who
looked gorgeous in a traditional costume, had made a ribbon, which the
President cut with difficulty with my lousy scissors. Emilie and he made
speeches and, after a quick look of admiration at the books, we all went to see
the newly-established HIV/AIDS resource centre. The most important resources it
offers are undoubtedly the free condoms, but we were filled with envy to see
the array of new flatscreen computers and luxury office furniture. “I feel as if I was in America 11 am in the new teachers’
canteen, a tent in a field. Emilie had
been dying of nerves about the event, particularly having to make a speech, but
it all went off without a wrinkle, except the one in her brow when she saw that
the HIV/AIDS centre is better-resourced than hers; probably because HIV/AIDS is
life-threatening in a way that bad English isn´t!
The next day was
nerve-wracking, too, because Emilie had invited the EU observers, Gary from
Canada, a 68-year old retired investment adviser (he obviously got out of that
just in time before being lynched) and veteran of 35 observation missions, and
Liesbeth from Holland, a 60-year-old retired teacher and politician who has
also observed elections in Eastern Europe, to come and be guest speakers as
part of her ELIC programme, on the clear understanding that they could not talk
about this election or Ethiopian politics.
The President had given his permission, but the Dean of Education, our
immediate boss, didn´t like the idea at all after all the controversy
surrounding their mission. He gave
Emilie an earful about why she shouldn´t have invited them, accusing her of
going behind his back, and saying that he would be the one to get in trouble if
riots of anti-ferenji frenzy broke out.
Emilie was on the point of ringing them to cancel the visit when the
Dean enigmatically said that the damage had already been done and she might as
well go ahead with it. It turned out to
be a pleasant event of courteous questions and answers, mostly about trivia
such as what the capital of the Netherlands was, indeed where it was, what the
weather was like in Canada but also turning to what the trick of development
was that the West had learnt but Ethiopian hadn´t, all attended by 55 students
and 2 members of staff. Not a stone was
thrown, nor a brickbat hurled and everyone went away happy with Canadian flag
stickers displayed on their chests.
In the evening we met up
with Gary and Liesbeth, and four EU observers from other regions who had
gathered here before returning to Addis: a Romanian, a Dane, a Frenchwoman, and
a Spaniard who gave us our first opportunity in 9 months to speak his
language. The best restaurant in town
had, as usual, only one or two of the dishes listed on the menu, but the sense
of relief we all felt after a hectic, challenging week made the good beer and the
less-good wine taste all the better.
The election result was a
foregone conclusion and no surprise to anyone:
EPRDF 499 seats out of 536. When
you consider that 20 seats are reserved for ethnic minorities, it´s about as
overwhelming as you can get. It´s sad,
though, that there are so many thoughtful, open-minded people in this country
who feel they have to keep their opinions to themselves. Several have said to us, with a fatalistic
shrug, ‘This is Africa ; what can you expect?’
Neighbourly Anectodes, October,
19th 2010
Not all she seemed
Emebet
asked us if she could borrow our camera to take photos of her brother’s
wedding. After the event, the story came
out. We saw the new bride on our
compound and felt sorry for her as she seemed too young and innocent to be
living in a strange town, among strange people, far from her family. Then, Emebet told us the full story. Her brother was a lorry driver and hadn’t had
chance, with his constant travelling, to meet a girl and form a
relationship. The family probably also
feared, though Emebet didn’t say this, that he might be more intimate with bar
girls along the way than was wise and might contract AIDS. So, a matchmaker was employed and a girl was
found. One of the conditions was that
she was of the same ethnicity as the brother and thus spoke Oromifa, as well as
being a virgin.
Emebet
came back from the wedding furious. We
know she had had to fund the event with the money she had earned as the
interpreter for the EU election observers who had been in Nekemte, a job which
we had helped her to get and which had paid very generously. It turned out that the girl, who was 15, not
only hardly spoke the required language, but, far worse, was no virgin. Her mother had a bar selling local beer. It seems that it not only sold the beer, however,
but also the favours of the daughter.
Despite that extra income, the mother wanted to get her off her hands
and safely married, threatening her with “Either you get married or I’ll kill
you.” Well, with a choice like that the
outcome was not surprising. So Emebet’s
rather simple-minded brother has not only been deceived, but will also have to
worry whether his new wife will get up to her old tricks (sic) while he’s
away. The girl made it completely clear
at the wedding, as we could see from the photos, and while on our compound,
that she was utterly miserable about the whole situation as never a glimmer of
a smile crossed her otherwise quite pretty face. It seems she was now demanding of the brother
that she be given her own house in her home town as she hated being stuck on
our compound. After a few days, she did
indeed vanish. They are still together,
however, as the girl did come with him to our compound to celebrate Meskel, a
national festival. We were not here, so
we did not see them to form any opinion about the state of their
relationship. Not the best start to a
marriage, one would think.
Jobs for the boys?
A
couple of weeks ago, we had coffee in Addis with a student of Emilie’s who had
graduated from Wollega University
He
exemplifies a problem which we identified and put to the President of the
university when we first met him; isn´t there a danger that the thousands of
graduates pouring out of the new universities every year will not find work and
will be angry and frustrated at not being able to repay the investment that
their families have made in them and to start building themselves a better life
than their families had? He, perhaps not
surprisingly, reacted rather defensively, saying that it was better to have
these thousands of moderately educated people than none at all, though, to me,
that is only a valid argument if they can find work commensurate with their
higher educated status, or at least, useful, reasonably paid employment. If not, there could one day be an
explosion.
We
were very disappointed and surprised when we saw the President again after our
chat with Kefale. He said that thousands
of this year’s graduates had been employed by the banks, by government, as
teachers, and by other bodies and that there was, indeed, a shortage of
qualified people for the jobs available. He further said that of course not all
young people could just expect jobs to be given to them by the government and
that they would have to create their own, we suppose by setting up businesses
or whatever. When Emilie told him that Kefale had studied Political Science and
International Relations his attitude was that he shouldn’t have bothered
studying such a useless subject unless he was allied to the right party,
presumable meaning his own, the governing one.
He didn´t exactly say that but something like “maybe he was following
the wrong line.” We found this very
dismissive of a young man who had shown himself to us to be responsible and
hard-working, as well as of those who might choose to study that subject
without being aware of the consequences of doing so. He also said, which might have more merit,
that he shouldn´t be looking for work in Addis, which is obviously the magnet
for the best-qualified in the country and where competition for jobs is
fiercest. It seems he thought Kefale was
telling us a sob story to get our sympathy and perhaps our help.
You’re never too old.
We
were surprised and heartened to see ‘emma’, which means mother and is used to
refer the grandma of Lombi, one of the children who live on our compound,
coming in the gate clutching a notebook and pen. Bontu, our resident orphan, proudly took the
book from her and came to show it to us, saying ‘Emma goes to school.’ We tried to ask what sort of school it was
and imagined it may be literacy classes or for a primary school diploma, such
as uneducated adults can do in Spain
Nekemte
is known as an educational powerhouse, in national terms, with several private
‘universities’, which we would call colleges of further, vocational, education,
as well as private primary and secondary schools. We are planning this year to give classes on
Saturdays, along with the other two VSO volunteers in Nekemte, at a charitable
school for children orphaned by HIV-AIDS.
Known as ‘Sunshine School
November, 2010
What
a difference a year makes! In our case,
mostly for the better. Of course, the
main difference is that last year everything was strange. We knew no one and knew nothing of the
language or culture. This year, it’s all
hugs and kisses and “How are you? How
was the holiday?” and, from those who knew that Emilie had had an operation,
“What is your condition? Are you fine?”
in Ethiopian English. This time we’re
not shocked by the state of our house, though there were surprises and not the
theft we had feared (several volunteers in other parts of the country have been
robbed), but a welcome series of repairs.
Emebet had seemingly employed some of her earnings as an interpreter for
the EU election observers (a job we had got for her) to fix up the house for
us. The ceilings, which had had panels
of canvas (for of such are ceilings usually made here) hanging down, had all
been repaired and repainted. The light
sockets, which had life-threateningly hung loose from the walls, were now all
fixed back in. The bathroom walls had
been repainted in bright green and, most miraculously of all, the toilet now
flushed, making us the proud owners of one of the few flush toilets in Nekemte,
a luxury indeed; not that it didn’t function perfectly well by having buckets
of water tipped down it. Toilets are a
bit of an obsession for Westerners here as we need them more often than we
might elsewhere, due to the effects of the food and the water quality, and they
are universally vile in any public place, being of the long-drop variety and
used by people who are extremely challenged in the knack of aiming. Subsequent cleaning is not a priority,
either. As in so much, we remind
ourselves that many parts of Europe were not so scrupulous not so long ago, either,
and only recent years have seen dramatic improvements.
The
lack of food in the market is all very familiar to us now and we have built up
a camel’s hump of reserves while we’ve been away. So far, too, we’re not suffering the
transport nightmare. In recognition of
Emilie’s debilitated post-operational condition, the university has sent one of
its pick-up trucks to come by our house every morning to collect us (I’m just
freeloading) so that she doesn’t have to participate in the scrum to get onto
the university bus. The vehicle picks up
the Dean of Students, one of the perks of her job, and is always available on
campus in case a student, or member of staff, I suppose, needs to be rushed to
hospital.
Also,
the weather has been kind to us. Last
year were put through a baptism of fire, or rather of rain. The rainy season, which is supposed to last
from June to September, decided to test our fortitude by going on into
November. And when I say rainy season,
don’t think of your English “scattered showers”, think of non-stop Amazonian
downpours that turn cats and dogs into hippos and elephants that hammer
deafeningly onto the tin roofs. Some of
my colleagues emailed over the summer to tell me that the campus was a sea of
mud and that they were having a rough time of it; I felt awful for them as I
lounged on the beach in Estepona. This
year it’s been mostly glorious Spanish spring weather with the bright yellow ‘meskel’ flowers, a national icon, in
bloom everywhere. Though we are slightly
north of the equator, the seasons are somewhat reversed here with the summer
being wet and cool, making the period we are in now into spring, when the world
leaps back into life after the rainy assaults.
We had a surprise downpour yesterday which turned the campus into a mud
bath within minutes, but, in general, there is no comparison with this time
last year.
There
have been minor improvements to the campus, too. In particular, the teachers’ ‘lounge’ has
developed into a pleasant place to sit and chat to colleagues, even though it
is an ankle-turning, knee-jarring downhill hike to the bottom of our hilly
campus and is still no more than a lumpy field with a couple of tin
shacks. The range of Ethiopian food on
offer has improved and, of greatest interest to us, it now has a ‘macchiato’ coffee machine and a
seemingly reliable supply of milk with which to make it. Macchiato
is one of the few positive things the would-be colonizing Italians left behind
in the ‘30s. Surprisingly perhaps,
people still say ‘Ciao’ when they
leave one another. Again, the weather we
are enjoying this year makes this a worthwhile trip, one you’d be mad to
undertake in the rain when the downhill paths turn into rivers and waterfalls.
The
electricity has been vastly better, too.
The year before we arrived, it was literally one day on, one day off,
but last year was already an improvement on that, though it was erratic, which
in some ways is more frustrating. We
would be in the middle of some work on the computer and ‘click’, off it went,
leaving us with a few lines lost and unable to work until it came back on. Whether it’s because a new dam has come on
line or because the economy is on the ropes and industries are not using as
much or whatever, we don’t know, but are grateful for the almost constant
supply, which means that I don’t have to click on ‘save’ quite so often as I
write this. You may wish that I hadn’t
and that I’d lost it all.
Human
joy must never be unalloyed, however, for fear that the inevitable subsequent
disappointment will prove insuperable and Ethiopia BBC website for a few minutes before classes start or
in the lunch hour will have to await the outcome of the dispute over who cut
the cable and who has to pay for the repair, which, we gather, is very
expensive. The same happened to us last
year when a tree was cut down and fell on the overhead cable supplying our
house and we were several days without electricity while the dispute about
responsibility raged.
To
make a more general point, for which this internet disruption may stand as a
metaphor, life in poorer countries is extremely precarious. Life is lived near the edge, with little
needed for people to fall over it. What
to us in the West is easily dealt with by social safety nets here may be
life-threatening and disastrous.
Illnesses, such as typhoid against which we had been inoculated before coming,
though that is not 100% protection, and for which we took antibiotics when it
did affect us, kill many people here, particularly children. I asked a teacher colleague whether teachers
as a collective have any medical insurance.
He said they were supposed to have, but that he had never seen or heard
any evidence of it. Thus, people have to
be able to afford to be treated, even in the government hospitals, and pay for
their own medicine; those who can’t,
suffer the consequences, which often include death. There may not even be any local medical
attention available in the remoter areas.
A few statistics for Ethiopia
·
Average life
expectancy: 53 years (World Development Indicator, 2007). UK
·
Average per
capita income: US$780 (Purchasing power
parity rate; real, unweighted
amount: US$141). UK PPP - WDI, 2007)
·
Population
living below the poverty line of US$1 per day:
39% (World Bank, Oct. 2008)
·
Women dying in
childbirth: 673 per 100,000 (Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey report,
2005). UK
·
Children dying
before the age of 5: 123 per 1,000 live
births (EDHS, 2005). UK
·
Percentage of
people with access to safe, clean water: 52% (Ministry of Water Resources 2006/7)
Despite serious government and NGO campaigns to
inform people of the risks, HIV/AIDS still exacts its toll. Nekemte is a truck stop for traffic from Sudan Djibouti Middle
East with Maersk,
Nedlloyd and P&O containers are parked for the night along the main
street. Cheap hotels and bars cater to
the needs of the drivers, as do the bar girls who frequent these places. Not everyone is aware or careful and AIDS
hits town leaving orphans in its wake.
There is also a toll of lorries which drive off the appalling roads and
down ditches and embankments because the drivers were asleep at the wheel,
possibly from the excitement of the night before. Ethiopia Africa ’s second
highest road death toll. The ‘Guardian
Weekly’ newspaper reported recently that the incidence of new cases of HIV/AIDS
was falling in many parts of Africa , including Ethiopia
We have started teaching classes on Saturday
mornings at a charity primary school that has been set up by a wealthy builder
based in Addis. The children are all
AIDS orphans, 270 of them. With the
other two volunteers in our town, we work with the teachers to improve their
English and teaching methodology, and with the children just English. It’s a delight to work there as it is such a
clean, well-organised place which even has its own vegetable garden where the
children do a certain amount of work during the week. Last year we ran a course on Saturday
mornings for state primary school teachers and a separate class for a random
group of orphans on Saturday afternoons, but this year we’ve been able to
combine the two activities, albeit with different people, into one three-hour
stint, another improvement in our circumstances. Most of those living near the edge I
mentioned are in rural areas, where 85% of the population live, not in towns
like this where you can already see major improvements in life expectations: better health, more years of education,
smaller families, more choice of employment and so on. Apart from the beggars who line the streets
in the centre of town, with their deformed legs or withered bodies, we don’t
see the worst extremes of hardship, but, as the orphans can testify, life is
not easy here.
I
spoke too soon; I provoked the jinx that delights in confounding our arrogant
human pretensions. I said a while ago
that things were much better this year and then we got home to find that there
is no water supply and there hardly has been since then. I was correct in observing however, when I
last wrote, how Ethiopia
The
electricity started misbehaving, too, so I must take back everything I said
about the supply of services having improved this year! Even worse than that, though, was the shock
of going to the teacher’s ´lounge´ (as they call it here though there is not
the faintest resemblance to a lounge as we know it) to be told there was no
coffee. This is the home of coffee, the
stuff was first consumed by humans near here, there are millions of coffee
bushes around this town which produces the most expensive and prestigious
coffee in the country! How could they
not have coffee? The answer again may
come back to infrastructure and the frailty of human systems. Coffee is not roasted and ground here in
bulk, but in Addis, so the finished product for coffee machines has to be
packaged and sent back here and that depends on the roads, supply chains and
other human economic factors. Thus,
despite the ready availability of the raw product (we have a bush in our
backyard), the supply of the finished product can fail. The other reason, and the more likely
explanation, is that someone in the kitchen didn’t notice that they were running
low on ground coffee to tell someone else to go and buy it, or, if they did, no
one could make the money available quickly.
These kinds of human breakdowns are all too common as there is a
reluctance to take responsibility on the part of the employed or to foresee
problems that may arise. Probably,
farming and other rural-life systems are highly evolved (people have lived and
survived here for thousands of years, after all), but modern systems have yet
to develop deep roots so failure and breakdown are frequent.
On
the other hand, there are heart-warming experiences which speak of the
universal goodness of most of humankind. Yesterday, we took a communal taxi
from the university back to town, as we do every day after work. When we got home, I realized that I didn’t
have the cardigan I had been wearing in the early morning chill. I couldn’t remember if I had had it on the
way home or if I had left it in the juice bar where we had had a drink in the
town centre, but I was sorry if I had lost it as it was a useful, though not
very beautiful, garment. On the
50-minute walk to the university this morning, we have to follow the main road
for a short way, the rest of the time taking country lanes, which are far more
pleasant. As we were still by the main
road and just before we turned off onto a lane, a car horn tooted right next to
us. I prepared to jump out of the way of
a taxi dodging a pot hole or animal, but when I looked round, the driver was
holding up my cardigan jubilantly. I
gave him the big hug he deserved, to the amusement of the passengers, for his
honesty in keeping the cardigan and perspicacity in looking out for me. Of course, we do stand out here and probably
everyone knows who we are and where we work, but I was still impressed that the
garment didn’t just disappear. We were
not so lucky at a conference for all volunteers at a lakeside hotel (not as
posh as it sounds) where we had each put out a shirt to dry over a chair just
outside our room and within an hour both were stolen!
The
weekend before last was probably the most important event in Nekemte’s history
since an Italian plane was shot down nearby in 1940. Its remains can still be
seen outside the town museum.
A
new municipal stadium is being built and we hope it lasts longer than the
Italian plane. We saw the poster announcing
it in the town centre last year, but the poster was faded almost to
invisibility and we had assumed it was one of the many projects optimistically
announced by artists’ impressions that fade as quickly as the ambition that led
to them. But no, this was to be a
reality and once we found out where it was being built we walked out of town to
see the site on which men and machines were, even though it was a Sunday, hard
at work.
Then
news filtered through the grapevine, and even banners began appearing,
announcing that a town race was to be held in the presence of major
dignitaries, including, we heard, the great Ethiopian runner Haile
Gabreselassie. Would such a figure be
willing to subject himself to the potholed road whose bone-jarring jolts would
guarantee an end to his illustrious career more surely than any rival on the
track? Or would he be helicoptered
in?
We
and the other volunteers in town signed up to participate, the younger ones to
run, we to walk. The profits from the
specially-produced T-shirt which we would get were to contribute towards the
costs of finishing the stadium, which, like all such major projects, in the
West too, seems to have run into financial difficulty. My Ethiopian counterpart at work says there
have been accusations of corruption related to the project, but what’s
new? We usually live on the Costa del Sol in Spain
A
certain buzz was being generated and the special yellow T-shirts started
appearing all over town in the days leading to the event. Then, it was delayed for a week, ostensibly
because Haile had another commitment.
The
race was going to be held on a Sunday and only a few days before we heard that
there was going to be a concert in the stadium at which well-known Ethiopian
singers would perform. The entrance fee
was to be 20 birr (about 1 euro). We
decided we would go along later than the 3 pm starting time, reasoning that nothing ever started on time and that
the cost of entry would be a deterrent.
What a surprise, then, to arrive at 4 pm and find the place packed with mostly yellow-shirted humanity and to
find that there was no charge at all, the two facts being probably
related. It was so crowded and such is
my dislike of being hemmed in on all sides, that I suggested giving up and
going, but I hadn’t counted on the power of the white skin in these parts as
people started ushering us through the mass towards the front and then along to
where the dignitaries were seated on plush red armchairs. I thought it was rather embarrassing to be
treated as so special, but it was the only way we were going to be able to see
anything so we accepted with good grace.
It seems that everyone in town saw us on TV as we were seated right
behind the big shots, albeit on a concrete step, not the seats. After various musical acts by people we were
assured were famous, there were speeches from the President of the Oromiya
Region, the Mayor of Nekemte and the architect of the stadium, a refreshingly
modest man dressed in the yellow T-shirt, rather than the suit and tie worn by
the other figures. Everyone was waiting,
though, for the appearance of Haile and a couple of times it was announced that
he was on the way and there were false starts as people near the main entrance
leapt to their feet and cheered as a Toyota Landcruiser entered the
stadium. All dignitaries are driven in
Toyota Landcruisers in this country.
Eventually, it was after dark when he did arrive, humbly walking around
the unfinished track. The lighting was
so bad that it was hard to see whether it was him or an impostor.
It
poured with rain all night and we dreaded that the long-awaited event, so
important to the town, would be cancelled.
It was still spitting when we set off into the centre of town for the
start of the race. Everyone was kept
waiting for over an hour, with the serious runners running up and down to keep
warm. Sensibly, they were allowed to set
off first to avoid being trampled by the uncouth, untrained masses. We joined in walking fast and were last, at
first, (sic) though after half an hour or so started overhauling those who had
set off running too enthusiastically and who had seriously overestimated their
abilities. The masses never even had to
complete the whole course, though, as, after we’d been going for 45 minutes or
so, control had broken down and everyone just headed directly to the stadium so
as not to keep the dignitaries waiting for the prize-giving or because they
just felt they’d done enough. We were
disappointed not to have completed the course as we were being given rousing
support by the people who lined the route and were enjoying our moments of fame
if not the hardship of walking flat out.
We probably would have been flat out, on the ground, if we had had to
keep up that pace. Also, by the time we
got to the stadium, it was impossible to distinguish the yellow-shirted
participants from the many more who had just bought the shirt to lend support
and had no sweat to show for their troubles.
Once
again, we were ushered to the VIP area
in the stadium for the speeches and ceremonies.
One prominent figure, besides Haile, was a man who ran at the time of
Bikile Abebe, who was the first African to win an Olympic gold medal, in the
marathon in 1960, and who is still running at the age of 97! They breed them tough out here. I was interviewed for an English-language
national paper and we chatted to some of the important folk, including Haile
himself, giving us our moment in the sun, even though the sky itself was
black. The announcer broke into English
to welcome us specifically for having come so far for this event; he didn’t
know that we live here.
Altogether
it was a great occasion and one which we hope inspires the town to finish its
stadium and participate more in communal activities, especially sport. For us,
personally, it showed how, in this part of Africa at least, the white person is treated as an honoured guest whom the
Ethiopians are pleased to have working and living alongside them and enjoy making
a fuss of during a major public event.
Last
Sunday, Emilie walked the Great Ethiopian Run in Addis along with 35,000 others
(some also ran). I ate something dodgy
the night before and the only running I did was to the toilet. Still, I also paid my share and got the
T-shirt.
Travels with Rebecca and Inge; December, 2010 - New Year, 2011
Thanks
to those of you who wrote emails or sent cards for Christmas. We really do appreciate the contact and will
try to reply to each individually. We
hope you had as good a Christmas as we did, even though it may not have been in
as exotic a location or with as dull and limited food and drink!
We
celebrated Christmas with our daughter, Rebecca, and Inge, a Dutch friend from Spain Ethiopia Kenya
We
picked Rebecca and Inge up in Addis and they had a couple of days in the
capital to acclimatize (it’s at 2,400 metres), visiting our ancestor, Lucy (3.5
million years old) in the National Museum Fistula Hospital Lake Tana , where the Blue Nile begins its journey to the Mediterranean . In
addition to the discomfort this involved to all of us, bouncing and banging
along a dirt track, it had a more serious consequence for Inge as the car hit a
pothole at speed and gave her a badly bruised back because of the inadequate,
worn-out upholstery of the seat. This
was to trouble her throughout the trip, as were the showers. We crossed the Blue Nile, known here as Abay
(father) and left our region of Oromiya where the Oromo language is spoken, to
enter the Amhara Federal Region, historically the dominant one which colonized
or subjugated the rest and gave the country its main common language,
Amharic. This is also the home of the
pre-eminent religion, Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, as well as of the
ethnically identical people, the Beit Israel or Falasha, who practice an
archaic form of Judaism which probably separated from the Jewish mainstream
before 650 BC and which influenced the rituals of Orthodox Christianity, which
dates from the 4th century AD.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a
process of colonization by Amhara kings of other ethnicities and kingdoms to
form the current area of Ethiopia Ethiopia
On
crossing the Nile , we immediately noticed differences in the
people: all married women in the
countryside have short, cropped hair and wear brightly-coloured cummerbunds,
while the rural men wear shorts, green or purple shawls and carry a walking
stick across their shoulders. Oromo men
wouldn’t be seen dead in shorts in public, unless doing sport. I imagine that the carrying of the walking
stick is a way of saying that they have sufficient wealth and status to have
wives or donkeys to do the carrying of produce for them.
A
VSO colleague who works in Bahir Dar had booked us into a cheap hotel, which
was great value except that the showers only provided cold water, the discovery of which was both literally and
metaphorically a shock, particularly to Inge who had been looking forward to a
hot shower to give her back some relief.
On more than one occasion we were to be nastily sarcastic to our guests
by saying “Welcome to Ethiopia
Sixty.-five
kilometers in diameter, Lake
Tana is Ethiopia Blue Nile Falls Nile tributary to get close to the bottom of the falls and Emilie dropped
her shoes into the water, so it was a memorable experience one way or another.
Our
Christmas dinner was not especially memorable.
We met up with the local VSO volunteer and went to a reasonable
Western-style hotel but, despite the Christmas crackers that Rebecca had
brought, which provided amusement for the staff and the few other tourists
eating there as we cracked them open and wore paper hats, the food was nothing
to write home about (so why am I doing so?) and there was none of the
atmosphere we normally associate with Christmas in our countries. It was not even Christmas in Ethiopia
Next,
our driver Mamoush took us to Gondar , Ethiopia church of Debre Birhan Selassie
Besides
the defects of the showers, our bed fell apart in the night and not due to any
frisky activities we engaged in, a “welcome to Ethiopia
We
had to set off at 5.30 am for the
long drive to Lalibela which, though today only a village and set in an
economically poor region, was the capital of a dynasty which ruled over Ethiopia Ethiopia Stonehenge , that
seem to defy the technology of the period in which they were built and make you
think of divine intervention, which is what the faithful do claim.
We
continued to have shower difficulties, even though we were paying what for us
on a VSO budget was the astronomical price of $42 a night for a double
room. We arrived back at our rooms hot
and sweaty from tramping around the churches, to find that in Inge’s room the
water had not heated up and in our room that the hot water tap came off in
Rebecca’s hand and obviously couldn’t be repaired in a hurry; “Welcome…..”
Rebecca proved brilliant at demanding, politely, to see the manager and
negotiating the use of the manager’s personal shower that evening, a change of
rooms for the next day and free drinks with our dinner, using her experience
with Emirates Airlines to give examples of how a major company compensates its
customers for deficiencies in its service.
In
a small remote town like Lalibela (what a pretty name, by the way), the ugly
faces and dilemmas of tourism can so quickly become evident. We find it tasteless to snap away without
permission at poor people with a camera that could keep them fed for years, yet
tourists do it without apparent concern or thought. We went to a place offering traditional
Ethiopian food and music one evening. We
ordered a “bayaynet” (meaning ‘variety’, this is a vegetarian dish with several
types of vegetables, such as beetroot, lentils, split peas, cabbage, spinach,
some very spiced up, served on a base of ‘injera’, the pancake-like basic food
of all Ethiopia; we had this for lunch
every day during our travels) between us and drinks. There was a group of Asian tourists already
there who had not ordered anything, though they were given coffee from the
“coffee ceremony” that was in progress.
A foreign man came in, again ordering nothing, and didn’t pause for a
moment from taking photos of the dancers.
A tourist couple then came in and ordered one beer between them and
likewise spent half an hour taking photos.
When the Asians decided to leave, the waitress said that it would be a
few birr for the coffee and 30 birr (€1.50) each for the music. The couple and the man immediately made a
dash for the door, the woman saying “We may be tourists but we’re not stupid!”
and adding that one never had to pay for the music. In our experience, that is only true in posh
restaurants where there is expensive food and drink and where you would not
dare not to consume anything. The
stinginess was astounding; the musicians
and dancers had entertained them with great gusto and skill and the tourists
had their photos to show everyone back home how interesting they were for going
to such ‘authentic’ places, yet they begrudged paying a pittance for the
privilege. We found the experience
excruciatingly embarrassing and apologized for the behaviour of our fellow
tourists when we paid what they asked and left, after suggesting that they put
up a big sign so it’s clear that people have to pay for the music. Part of the problem is that the locals are
naïve about these business matters and about what foreigners expect. Not so naïve was the doctor who tried to
charge a volunteer’s mother 400 birr (€20) for the five minutes it took to take
her blood pressure. The volunteer
protested (this was a fifth of a month’s salary for her) and he admitted that
he charged the locals 20 birr. Fair
enough, you might say; perhaps there
wouldn’t be a doctor at all in this remote town if it weren’t for the money he
can extract from tourists. The same
volunteer and her mother then went to buy medicine from a pharmacy; 250 birr was the asking price. They asked a local employee at their hotel to
go and buy it for them; it cost him 40
birr. These forms of mutual
exploitation can give a place a bad name and end up killing the goose that, with
care, can lay the golden egg, but are common where cultures and levels of wealth
clash so grossly, and raise the question of the real cost of the tourism which
seems to offer relatively easy, short term wealth to a country. A trip to the same pharmacy was the cause of
amusement to our group; Inge had a sore
throat and wanted to buy some throat lozenges.
The shop assistant asked her to open her mouth and shone the torch of
her mobile phone in to ascertain the extent of the problem. This careful analysis led her to the
inevitable recommendation of the antibiotics much beloved as a cure-all in
poorer countries, with disastrous long-term consequences for the efficacy of
these drugs.
Rebecca
had to fly from Lalibela’s tiny new airport via Addis to Dubai for work, while
Inge, Emilie and I were driven back over two days and more varied landscapes,
some of which were positively Alpine and extremely dramatic, especially when we
had to drive for half an hour throught an impenetrable mist, fearing that a bus
or lorry would appear at any moment to tip us over the precipitous drop on our side
of the road. We plunged down, on the
road fortunately, into the Rift Valley where there were bubbling volcanic pools
and where the Middle East made its appearance with camels and many Muslim
women with their faces covered. There is
a region here which is well-known for its intermarriages between Christians and
Muslims; our Programme Manager, Tesfaw
Mohammed, as his name suggests, is the product of such a union.
After
a meal with a few other VSO volunteers, we toasted in the New Year with coffee,
Ethiopia’s champagne, while saying our farewells to Inge at Addis’s airport,
before heading back to Nekemte, a couple of days later, to complete our 3,000
km circuit.
We
wish you all a great 2011 and hope to hear some of your news.
Transport February, 2011
While
we were driving around a large chunk of Northern Ethiopia a couple of weeks ago, one of the most heartening
aspects of human behaviour we saw was the trek of children to and from
school. Often we would pass a gaggle of
kids in their tattered but still recognizable school uniforms, of varied
colours, even a dashing check in one area, anxiously or carelessly clutching
their priceless school books, and we would drive on for another half an hour
before passing the school they were heading to, which always displayed the
national and regional flags and was usually adorned with hand-painted signs
depicting worthy quotations and lessons for life. Though undoubtedly picturesque and often
tempting us to shout ‘stop’ to the driver so we could take a photo, the
literally timeless scenes of ploughing, threshing or winnowing filled us with
more mixed sentiments as, though probably ecologically sound, they were both
cause and symptom of Ethiopia’s economic poverty, there being not a machine or
tractor in sight whilst humans and animals performed all the back-breaking
work, condemning both to short, unhealthy lives.
The
long hard walk to and from school on flat plains or in alpine mountains is now
an Ethiopian universal and a tribute to the enormous effort being made by the
government, with major economic and intellectual assistance from a group of
wealthier countries who fund a major project called GEQIP (General Education
Quality Improvement Programme) to do as the name says. This is to run from December, 2008 until
July, 2013 and $417 million has been allocated to it. So far, the results quantity-wise are
stunning: 2000: 5 million children in
school; 2010: 14 million. Now work needs
to focus on quality which, in theory at least, is why many of us VSO volunteers
are here; to raise teaching standards.
There is some good news; the university lecturers whom I teach have to
do a two-week secondary school placement as part of their course and even since
last year’s batch did the same we are getting reports of progress in terms of a
negligible drop-out rate, an even number of male and female students and
greatly improved textbooks which are being delivered as I write. I can only speak for a town and don’t pretend
to assert that the same would apply in the countryside, (between 20 and 70% in
some areas still do not attend) but, still, progress has to start somewhere and
it probably always does affect towns first.
There
being no other walkable routes in most areas, all pedestrian traffic follows
the main highways, which is why the ant-like columns of school children are so
visible. This has its hazards, as you
can imagine. Last week in Nekemte, three
girls on their way home from school were knocked down by a line taxi; one was
killed and the other two were seriously injured. As I’ve commented before about our own walk
to work, line taxis, four-wheel drive vehicles, buses and huge lorries, which
are the main users of the roads, there being very few private saloon cars,
swerve violently to avoid the potholes, which give our road from town to the
university the appearance of having been the mistaken target of a NATO bombing
raid on an enemy airfield, and the animals which wander around aimlessly. Humans are the least priority and are the
ones who have to do the dodging.
Transport
is one of our biggest headaches here, even though we haven’t actually been hit
by anything yet. We have the luxury of
university buses to take us to work in the morning, if we choose to use one. Their timing is erratic but, on the whole, there
is a system. The same is not true of
getting home. Last year the ‘line’ taxi
fleet of battered, ancient Toyota minibuses, supposedly for 12 or so
passengers, ended its route some 20 minutes’ walk from the university, so, rain
or shine, we walked to that point to get one.
This year, for double the price, they started going the extra mile, so
to speak. Or at least, sometimes they
do, so you wait not knowing if one is going to show up or not. If one does, we and a hundred other anxious
would-be passengers have to rush to it and fight, literally, to get on, there
being no holds barred or deference to those who have been waiting longest, are
lame, female, elderly or in any other way deserving of a little
consideration. This makes my blood boil
and I do sometimes use my height and weight to ensure we get on. They do not seem like the same people who
urge us to the front in the bank or post office, or lead us to the VIP section in the new stadium. An even greater likely cause of me meeting an
early demise one day is the arrival of the minibus at its final destination
when a mob of people, who want to go back the other way, rush the bus before it
can even turn around to face that direction, trap the passengers who want to
get off the bus and trample them underfoot.
The last time, I really lost my normally calm disposition and fought
back against the tide, which could have had me arrested for assault.
Fortunately, we usually get off before that point.
Yesterday
we had a very unfortunate transport experience.
Last year an Englishman in his late 20s showed up to work at the charity
school for deaf children near our house.
He had been a builder in the UK 7 am , we decided to try the hitching option somewhat
later. We were four ‘farenjis’ with a
deaf couple and their children. Nothing
came by on the main road near our houses, so we got ‘bajajes’, Indian-made
three-wheeled mini-taxes, to the centre of town where contract taxes could be
found. They were asking silly money, and
a passing local whom we knew suggested going to the bus station. So we hiked up there and stood around
hopefully but nothing was going anywhere.
We did provide entertainment, though, for some 20 local young men who
stood staring at us as if we were specimens in a zoo; white people are rare
here and might do something never seen before and so are worth watching
closely.
After
an hour of useless hanging around we were approached with an offer of a
contract taxi there and back at a pre-arranged time for 500 birr round
trip. This is a lot of money as a line
taxi on the same route would only charge 10 birr per person each way, maximum
12 people, total 240 birr. So, after
three hours of looking for transport we accepted and were finally off. We phoned the would-be bridegroom who said
there would be a lad holding a sign saying ‘VSO’ at the side of the road at the
point where we had to get off. Just as
we were leaving town, the driver’s sidekick (conductor, ticket collector, whatever
you call such a figure) demanded 500 birr each
way, even though the agreement had been as clear as daylight; 250 going,
250 on return, despite the garbled Afaan Oromo on our part and English on
theirs. We were furious and immediately
piled out of the vehicle, along with five other local folk who had pleaded to
go with us at the bus station and who would now also lose their ride, and were
sorely tempted to kick the car, the creepy hustler or both. Of course there is a ´farenji´surcharge in
any price negotiation, but to our simple minds, an agreement is an agreement
once the journey has started. We gave
up, invited the deaf couple and kids to lunch in the Classic Cafe and went
home, gifts undelivered, to lick our wounds and look forward to our next trip.
Workshops March 10th, 2011
This
is the land of workshops. If workshops
could be wrapped up and exported, Ethiopia
There
are workshops (once called conferences or seminars, I suppose) on every
imaginable topic: gender issues, female assertiveness, anti-corruption,
government policy as applied to education, how to administer the budget,
HIV/AIDS, which is a great favourite, being more glamorous and better-funded
than all the other major killers in Africa put together, and a long etcetera. When Emilie and I go to ‘deliver’ (as if you
just hand it over like a letter) teacher training to university lecturers at
our two outlying campuses this is also called a workshop. It was our Dutch VSO colleague, Frits, who is
based at the teacher training college in Nekemte, who commented that workshops
are more ‘shop’ than ‘work’ when they are held somewhere with an opportunity to
buy any product more cheaply than in our town.
Thus, workshops can be seen in many respects as an economic opportunity.
The
main attraction of attending or presenting a workshop is the opportunity to get
free food and drinks, and a ‘per diem’.
The former is not trivial; eating
meat is not a daily event here, but is the food of choice for breakfast, lunch
and dinner when it is paid for by the institution sponsoring a workshop. For us, Emilie a dedicated 100% non-meat
eater, me usually one, this makes life difficult as there is often no other
choice. The latter attraction, the ‘per
diem’, is also an important motivator as it offers a boost to the coffers of
our lowly-paid colleagues, especially when they can stay with family members or
friends and save on the hotel costs. As
many people as possible will be involved in organising a workshop so that the
benefits are spread around. When I went
to our campus in Shambu, two of us were the presenters, but our Dean went as
‘facilitator’ (another of those NGO words), which meant he could visit his
family in that town, a young woman went as ‘purchaser’, which required her to
carry money and pay for the soft drinks (another important component of a
workshop, giving the participants the special experience of drinking Coke or
Pepsi, albeit always luke-warm) and settle up with the restaurant after the
meals, as well as a driver. All got
their ‘per diems’ and, in this case, a paid hotel room; 5 people for 2 to do
the training. I’m not implying that
there is much corruption; all these expenses have to be approved and be taken
from the relevant budgetary category. If
there is no money left for workshops this year, there will be no workshop. Getting your ‘per diem’ is a bureaucratic
rigmarole of papers and signatures, and receipts are required for all meals and
drinks. Also, it should be said, many of
the workshops are extremely worthy and perhaps even valuable as a medium for
‘capacity building’, as well as for ‘experience sharing’ another popular
expression and synonym for socializing.
The
point Frits was joking about was that the college or university usually
provides transport to these events; nothing very luxurious, just a pick-up
truck. This provides a great opportunity
for shopping as ‘teff’, the indigenous grain which is the raw material for
‘injera’ the staple eaten with every meal, is a little cheaper in Shambu than
in Nekemte. So we finish the workshop on
Saturday, but spend Sunday buying sacks of ‘teff’. Charcoal is sold by the roadside so sacks of
it can be chucked in the back. Likewise,
bundles of firewood, sacks of barley, live chickens, eggs, sugar cane, honey,
tomatoes and carrots will be bought wherever they save a few birr, even though
it makes the journey twice as long as it should be and, for the non-buyers like
us, an exercise in boredom and annoyance when we would rather get home less
slowly. Butter, too, is sold loose, and
as the temperature rises in the car creates a sour smell, intolerable to our
delicate noses. Coffee is one product, though, that has protected markets and
is illegal to transport without a licence to do so. There are police road blocks that check up on
suspicious-looking, possibly coffee-carrying vehicles, though they don’t check
the contents of the occupants’ stomachs .
If
we attended all the workshops that are relevant to us, we would hardly be in
our placements. Emilie’s job is the
English Language Improvement Programme, funded by GEQIP, the General Education
Quality Improvement Programme, the money for which is provided by a consortium
of Western agencies including the World Bank, Britain
A Country Wedding April, 2011
Those
of you who read my newsletters and have a good memory (that narrows it down to
two) may remember my story about the ill-fated trip to a village for the
engagement ceremony of an English lad and his Ethiopian girl friend. Here’s a
quick reminder of what I wrote. “Last
year an Englishman in his late 20s showed up to work at the charity school for
deaf children near our house. He had
been a builder in the UK
Phil,
for that is his name, had laid on minibuses to make sure we couldn´t escape
this time and we climbed in to find we were sharing the vehicle with the
bridegroom’s father, mother and a friend of the family as well as another lady,
who speaks of God as her personal pal, who has been coming to the deaf school
behind our house to help out for 40 odd years.
It is so rare here to see foreigners of any kind, though Chinese road
builders and telephone technicians are becoming increasingly common, that to
see English ladies from the home counties with their floral hats and accents to
match is truly astounding. ´Out of
place’ hardly begins to describe the scene, particularly of the lady friend of
the family, a woman in her 60s, who had a bare shoulder and décolleté look that
would be normally associated with a ball gown.
That will go down a bomb in the village, we thought. She, and the others, male and female, showed
true British grit, though, and stiff upper lips, apart from décolleté, were
much in evidence throughout the ordeal.
When
we arrived at the point on the main road where we had to abandon the vehicles,
we were met by horses, caparisoned in brightly-coloured ropes and tassels,
traditionally used for conveying the important guests at a wedding. At this stage, the bride was still in her
home village anxiously awaiting the arrival of her husband-to-be, so Phil and
his dad and brothers, whom we now saw to be typical English lads with their
beads and piercings and funny hair-dos (and that was just the dad), clambered
awkwardly up, though his mum for some reason, perhaps the fact that she was
wearing a dress that would reveal too much leg, didn’t join them. She and her low-cut friend with her walking
stick hiked gamely across the fields leading uphill to the village. ‘Village’ is too generous a word for the
hamlet we came to, panting with the heat and altitude, after 20 minutes or
so. Then the singing and ululating of
the females of the village began, with an energy and gusto that explains
Ethiopia´s successes in the marathon and other endurance events. The bride appeared wearing a dress that
belonged in Phil’s family and had been brought over and adjusted for the
occasion. It seems to be the custom
here, which no one has been able to explain adequately to me, for the bride to
look as miserable as sin until the ceremony is over. Perhaps it’s not just an act. Perhaps there
has been sin. It could also go back to
the idea that the female has to be taken against her will. Of course, in the West it’s traditionally
thought to be the reverse.
Being
honoured guests, the whites, including an Indian nun who works in these parts,
were given the best seats, though best is relative as we crowded onto benches
on either side of long tables in sweltering, cramped heat in a mud-walled room
with no ventilation. I know it was
mud-walled because we could see from the outside, though it had been covered,
walls and ceiling, with plastic sheeting.
Part of the fun was imagining what the newly-arrived English folk were
making of all of this. Emilie and I had
at least experienced similar meal times when invited by colleagues in
Nekemte. After an Ethiopian buffet
lunch, eaten as always with the fingers, we had another hike, this time with
the bride, too, mounted on a horse, uphill and down dale, even crossing a
stream, to the local church, another earth and sticks structure which was just
as hot as the house had been. The youth of the village totally filled in the
window holes that might have provided ventilation in their eagerness to see the
spectacle which was probably the most historic event the population had ever
witnessed. A nasty fight had broken out
on the way between two local men, apparently about whose turn it was to ride on
one of the few horses. This was the
second fight we had seen at a wedding.
Once, on our way back from Addis, we had had to slow for a wedding
procession, complete with the ornate horses.
Another traditional part of the procession is a group of twenty or so
men in two ranks jumping along in time to their singing, stamping long sticks
up and down. On this occasion, two of
them had started whacking each other with the sticks and the other celebrants
were busy dragging them apart. What is
it, we wonder, about Ethiopian country weddings that brings out this aggression
in some of the men?
In
the church, the female choir sang to the accompaniment of a drum and harp-like
instrument, with the usual verve and hypnotic rhythm and swaying, and then the
minister preached. To make matters far
more interesting, his preaching was translated into sign language by a male
teacher from the deaf school, for the benefit of the bride herself and some of
her deaf school friends who had come, and then into English by the lady
mentioned earlier who can communicate to some degree in both Amharic as well as
in the sign language used here. There
were some amusing mistranslations, picked up by the local interpreter who
speaks English himself, especially concerning the interpretation of quotations
from the Bible about women being subservient to their husbands. Sincerely
enthusiastic clapping and cheering broke out when the couple were finally
pronounced and gestured to be man and wife and given their official
certificate, suggesting that such a wedding of a local girl to a foreigner was
not badly viewed. By some cynics, no
doubt, it will be seen as her having won the lottery with undreamed of
opportunities for material advancement.
We didn´t dare ask, but we wonder what his parents make of it all. They did tell us it all seemed unreal, as if
they were participating in a TV documentary and they certainly put a brave face
on things, the father even getting up in the church to make a short speech,
translated into sign language and Afaan Oromo, thanking the village people for
their welcome and their generosity.
Even
the return trip was not without drama.
Our four vehicles had stopped at a spring; trips outside the town are
always interrupted by buying opportunities or, as in this case, some local
delicacy that can´t be missed, even though it´s only fresh water. Our minibus had just set off when we noticed
people running agitatedly in the opposite direction. Our car swung round to go back. The handbrake of one of the minibuses, the
one with the bridegroom’s mother still in it, had failed and the vehicle had
run into a ditch and was leaning at an unfortunate angle. It was proving to be a more memorable day for
the poor lady than even she would have wished for. Passersby stopped and stones were piled under
one of the wheels so it got itself out and back onto the road.
This
was the signal for the big, fat drops of rain that had been threatening to
start falling. We went back to town to
Phil and Birale’s rented quarters for a bit of foreign food, but the excitement
was over for the day, except for the tummy troubles which were inevitably going
to afflict some of the party, as they did Emilie.
Dam! May, 2011
The
Ethiopian Prime Minister recently laid the foundation stone of what is to be Africa ’s biggest dam, on the Blue Nile . Dams are always controversial, mainly among
environmentalists and those concerned for the displacement of poor, powerless
residents of the area to be flooded by the lake behind the dam, but another
reason for controversy is the effects that result, or are feared may result, on
downstream communities which may include those in other countries. The new Gibe 3 dam in southern Ethiopia Kenya Lake
Turkana (formerly
Rudolph) in their territory. They say
the water level of the lake will be reduced and that it will become more
saline.
The
newest dam, however, seems to be controversial in Egypt, as far downstream as
you can get, because of a 100-year-old treaty concerning the use of the Nile
cooked up by the British in the bad old colonial days when Britain effectively
ran Egypt and the Sudan. Britain Manchester Ethiopia Nile and risk impeding the flow of the precious liquid.
More
interestingly, for the first time, as far as I know, bonds are being sold to
finance the dam; the name’s Bond, Dam
Bond. Offering 6% per annum over 5
years, it’s not a good deal with inflation raging at the moment. The inflation rate is not public knowledge,
by the way, but a bus fare has gone up 100%, our coffee 50%, and teachers’ pay
30%, which they said was not enough. The
fact that the public is involved in financing a project like this is, however,
highly significant. The need for rulers
to raise funds from their people has been the main route by which democracy has
been created. Kings needed money from
their Lords to pursue their wars and the quid
pro quo was a say in running the country. Eventually, this was extended to
the rest of the public. If governments
raise taxes from the public, they are answerable to it. This has always been held to be one of the
defects of both aid and the income from energy resources; that they are capital
which flows directly to government and
which does not require the government to be responsive to their voters. On the contrary, politicians use part of the
wealth that flows in to bribe the voters to vote for them again so that they
can keep their greedy, grasping paws on that wealth. Then the voters aren’t needed any more and
can be safely ignored. Or, in the case
of dictatorships and absolute monarchies, think Saudi Arabia, the rulers can
easily keep themselves in power, by force if need be.
So,
these bonds will create a link of trust between government and people as well
as demonstrate to the world a self-help ethic.
At least people who buy bonds get a certificate which says that it
guarantees to pay the interest and capital on the due dates. No such guarantee accompanies the donations
which are ‘voluntarily’ being made towards the dam. Collectives, such as teachers, are called to
meetings at which they are asked to give a month’s salary towards the dam and
most are doing so. The month’s salary
is paid into the fund over a year, not all at once, which no one could afford
to do, but voluntary it isn’t as no one dares to defy the will of the
group. We are old cynics and ask how
they can be sure the money will be spent on the dam, or what will happen to the
money if the dam is never built, or who will really benefit from the
electricity generated by the dam? On the
other hand, it is heartening to see a country trying to pull itself up by its
bootstraps and willing to put its money where its mouth is, if you can excuse
these mixed metaphors.
‘Development isn´t rocket science’ May, 2011
Emilie´s
gynaecologist in Estepona had it all figured out: ‘There’s no hope for those people in Africa ’ he told her when she said she was going to Ethiopia
He
wasn´t saying anything that is uncommon among many Westerners who so easily
forget the two world wars we inflicted upon humanity, and even recently the
corruption of Enron, Bernie Madoff, successive mayors of Marbella, the credit
crunch and a very long etc., and who think there is something unique in the
African psyche that keeps them backward.
Backward,
in economic terms, Africa , by which I refer to sub-Saharan (i.e. non-Arab) Africa , certainly is. The statistics,
even applying the caveats that statistics always require (‘lies, damned lies
and statistics’, ‘rows of figures looking for an argument’), make shocking
reading; already the world´s poorest area it is falling further and further
behind. According to the latest data I
can find, which may well be some years out of date, its per capita income is
one third lower than that of the next poorest region, South East Asia . Most African countries have lower per capita
income now than they did in 1980 or in some cases 1960. Half of Africa´s 880
million people live on less than $1 a day.
Its entire economic output is only $420 billion, just 1.2% of world GDP ; less than Mexico East Asia ). It is the
only region where life expectancy is falling.
All 25 lowest Human Development Index countries are African. More than half rely on Western aid for as
much as 50% of government budget and 70% of public investment. Africa has
received more foreign aid than anywhere else: $500 billion since 1960. There is 1 doctor per 78,000 people in Ethiopia Africa . Population
grows by 3-4% per annum, food by 0.5.
And
yet, Africa is rich in mineral resources: it has 75% of world´s gold, 70% cobalt, 40%
vanadium and platinum. Rich countries
import up to 50% of their bauxite, phosphate, cobalt, uranium from Africa . Coltan, vital for mobiles, is
only found in the Congo Bolivia Africa has more than 40% of the world's potential hydro-electric power and
is a major source of oil. But these possibilities of prosperity all too often
become the cause of corruption, war and a worse life for the majority.
So,
what has gone wrong? Africa suffered slavery for 400 years from 1400 to 1800
and colonisation for 150 (1800-1950).
The colonial powers distrupted indigenous political and socio-economic
development. Pre-capitalist Africa had hiring of labour, exchange in kind and money-like payments (Axum 350 AD had coins), trade, empires, city states. Of all the colonised areas of the world, Africa suffered the longest and most severely. At least 22 million of men and women of working
age were taken as slaves. The slave
trade took away the most productive Africans who then provided cheap labour for
the west. It helped the West create a
vital economic surplus and led to improvements in marine technology, credit and
insurance systems. Slavery helped America Britain Sierra Leone Gambia Senegal Somaliland (Britain Somalia Italy Djibouti France Ethiopia Ethiopia Ethiopia
Once
Europe had started industrializing, it was able to
establish the rules by which the economic and political game would be
played. Take trade policies: the total value of agricultural subsidies in
the West amounts to $1 billion a day, higher than the gross domestic product of
all sub-Saharan Africa . The European Union subsidises each cow to the
extent of $900 pa, more than the average African income. The Japanese subsidy is $2,700 per cow. Western surpluses, sold at a fraction of
their real cost of production, are then dumped on African markets, undermining
domestic producers. At the same time,
African exporters face tariff barriers. Africa is the world´s third largest producer of cotton and gives a
livelihood in West Africa to 1 million farmers, representing 5-10% of GDP , more than a third of export income. Production in West Africa costs 38 cents per pound. Production costs in the West are twice as
high, but the US GDP and 12% of its exports. The trade losses suffered
by West Africa as a consequence are more than all the aid they
receive. The EU supports cotton producers to the tune of $1 billion p.a. It would be three times cheaper for Europe to import cotton from Africa than grow
it in Spain Greece Africa is more often than not in the hands of international marketing boards
which can play producers off against each other to keep the price low. This is the case with coffee, Ethiopia´s main
export (up to 60% of exports by value) and the world´s second most traded product,
after oil.
When
I said to some Spanish friends that Africa was
subsidizing the West, they thought I had taken leave of my senses, until I
explained about capital outflows (it is estimated that African political elites
hold $700-800 billion in Western banks. Recent estimates suggest that capital
flight from Africa totaled more than $600 billion between ’70 and
2004. Total aid to Africa since 1960 is $500 billion so there has been a net loss. Much aid is spent in donor countries, too, so
the loss is even greater) and the number of skilled Africans who work in the
West; as many as 40% of university graduates emigrate from some countries and
only a few return. Up to 75% of Malawi´s
doctors leave the country which now has only 266 doctors for 13 million
people. The tens of thousands of dollars
spent training each doctor is effectively subsidizing the Western health
service. Ethiopia Chicago Ethiopia
Aid
hasn´t always helped. In many ways it
has, such as in the drastic reduction or even eradication of diseases such as
smallpox, river blindness, diphtheria, tetanus, AIDS, TB measles and malaria.
Infrastructure has also improved: 40% of Ethiopia Kenya
I
asked a colleague at the university today how he thought Ethiopia Europe , which had been able to recover from devastation in a few years
because its people knew how to put the aid to work productively. I often say to the university lecturers I
teach that it’s relatively easy to build hospitals, schools and universities
but it’s much harder to create the humans with the skills, knowledge and
attitudes necessary to run those systems.
We also discussed the failure of the institutional infrastructure
necessary to facilitate progress. Money
in the banks is not put to work effectively because, in Ethiopia Ethiopia Ethiopia
In
all respects, except political openness, which has declined since 2005, Ethiopia GDP of the USA Bangladesh Luxembourg
What’s
the answer? At our in-country training course in Addis when we arrived, the
head of Save the Children NGO spoke to us and said that “Development isn´t
rocket science; it´s much more difficult than that!”
* *
* * *
If
you are interested in reading more about this topic, may I recommend the
following:
Jared
Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” is a
Pulitzer Prize-winning historical and geographical explanation of why some
countries are rich and others poor.
Jeffrey
Sachs, Bono’s guru, is a developmental economist and author of the UN Millenium
Goals who argues the case for an increase in aid to end once and for all the
extreme poverty that blights the world in “The End of Poverty”.
“The
Bottom Billion”, by former World Bank economist and now Oxford University
William
Easterly is also a former World Bank economist, but he takes Jeffrey Sachs to
task on his proposals and argues, more in line with Dembisa Moyo, that aid is
not the answer.
Alex
Perry, TIME’s Africa bureau chief, wrote a book called “Falling off the
Edge” which details the growing inequalities in the world and the conflicts
that arise as a result.
Except
for the last named, I don´t have these books with me here to refer to so my
information comes from random notes that I have jotted from a variety of
sources over the past year or so here; information is not easy to come by,
especially without a fast internet connection.
I would like to have dealt with the topic exclusively with reference to Ethiopia
Summing Up June, 2011
With the rainy season in full flood now, keeping
us indoors, and only two and a half weeks until we leave Nekemte for good, it
seems a good time to look back and take stock of our time here.
What have we achieved? VSO asks for measurable, provable impacts,
but so much is not like that. We are asked to quantify the numbers of direct
and indirect beneficiaries of our work, though they don´t define the terms for
us. The development world is full of ‘MBA-speak’, as I call it, with its
‘outputs’ and ‘inputs’, ‘objectives’, ‘impacts’ and ‘indicators’. How can we
know the effect we’ve had on Bontu and Lombi?
How do you measure the time spent chatting to colleagues about life in
the West (the good and the bad) and here.
Certainly, we have derived great satisfaction from doing the workshops,
which people were not obliged to attend and which were not part of our official
work here but merely something that we saw and need for and wanted to do, on
Saturday mornings with the primary school English teachers and at the Sunshine
school, with both kids and teachers. We
haven’t in any way measured the effect (impact, in development-speak), but
assume that there has been some educational benefit and, perhaps more
importantly, a human one. The Director
of the school wrote a letter of thanks to the four of us volunteers who work
here, saying that “The overall service you have been giving is great and
praiseworthy, and if it were measured in terms of money it would cost a lot.
Above all, your kindness and friendly relations you have had with our students
and teachers deserve great appreciations (sic).” Notice that the ‘above all’
does not focus on the measurable effects of our work. It probably sounds ‘wet’
and ‘feely-touchy’, but we should not be too cynical and, though I doubt
whether anyone here (or elsewhere, come to that) can really understand our
motives, certainly there is some appreciation of our efforts by those who know
us and know why we are here. How, too,
do I measure the impact that teaching English children’s songs to both primary
teachers and students has had? At the
workshops I taught ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ and ‘This is the Way’,
among other songs, to the teachers and got them to sing and act out the words,
too. Last Friday was a national holiday
celebrating the downfall of the previous military dictatorship, the Derg, and
not incidentally, celebrating the coming to power of the present ruling
party. Oromiya regional TV was in town
with its cameras and one of the things they broadcast was a group of
schoolchildren singing the songs I had taught their teacher!
Then there have been the benefits to ourselves;
we’re not kidding ourselves we are just here for the good of others – humans
don’t work that way. We have been
enriched in ways we don’t yet even begin to appreciate. Besides anything else, we have endless
stories to tell and photos to show to bore you all to tears with for years to
come. The word ‘Ethiopia Egypt
We have learnt a lot, too. Cooking a variety of healthy, balanced meals
on one electric hotplate, if there is electricity, or on a kerosene cooker, if
there isn´t, using only carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, rice and cabbage
is a challenge and something we had to learn rather quickly. At work, we have learnt to use the computer
in ways we had never, or rarely, done before to make graphics, charts, tables
and to write more reports than we ever thought possible could be required in
any job. We´ve certainly had to work on
our patience, tolerance and fortitude skills as well as acquiring a fluency in
Afaan Oromo and Amharic that will enable us to say ‘hello, how are you?’ and
‘thank you’ in those languages whenever we encounter an Ethiopian.
However, it´s been physically and psychologically
draining. We feel shell-shocked,
particularly after the recent onslaught of illnesses which affected us both. VSO had told us that volunteers don´t usually
suffer any more illness while abroad than they would at home. We have been exceptions then, especially
Emilie, who has suffered urinary tract infections at least 6 or 7 times, acute
gastroenteritis, dysentery and typhoid. I’ve had malaria and typhoid in just
the past three weeks. When you’re ill in
places like this you just wish there were a magic carpet to whisk you instantly
back to where you know you can be comfortable and get the best treatment. The doctors in this town really don´t inspire
much confidence and the child´s-chemistry-set ´laboratories´ where the tests
are conducted, even less so. How would
we ever get to the capital, Addis, the only place where there is sophisticated
equipment and, one supposes, the best medical care, in an emergency? That has been a worry. We live on the edge, always worried that some
disaster may befall us and that we are trapped. The lack of water, of
electricity, of easy to make food, of internet, even of mobile phone access are
much harder to bear when you don’t feel well and there have been times when we
have just wanted to pack up and go, concerned that we were building up problems
in our bodies from which we would never recover. How is it possible that in one
of the wettest parts of the country, where we are now in the rainy season,
there are so many day-long periods without domestic water? Despite the optimism
with which we started the year, in a vivid illustration of the topic of a blog
from last year (which I’m sure you all remember), entitled Things Fall Apart
after a Chinua Achebe novel, these last few weeks have saved the worst for
last; daily power and water cuts and, worst of all, no internet or mobile phone
connections for two weeks or more, just when we so desperately need the
internet for making our leaving arrangements, flight bookings and so on. Even the land line in our house crackles so
badly that we can’t hear what the other person says. We feel totally cut off
from the world. Nothing is ever explained to the public here, either, except
when the government wants the public´s money to build a new dam, so no one
knows why mobiles and internet are down for so long.
Work, too, can be challenging with misunderstandings
and what seem to us unnecessary complications to achieving anything. Our line manager has at least been a more
approachable, sympathetic person than last year’s, who went off to India
Emilie´s work has been more difficult to feel
satisfied and rewarded with than mine. I
inherited an ongoing, nationally-designed course of lecturer training that has
some prestige and possible career benefits with a handbook for the participants
and a leader’s guide for the person running the classes, all produced by VSO
volunteers working at the Ministry of Education alongside local counterparts. I
taught lecturers, 25 last year, 58 this, and trained three counterparts, who
will take over the running next year, and can say my job´s done. I also, with Emilie´s help, wrote material for
and ran several two-day, lecturer training workshops, both on our main campus
in Nekemte and at the outlying ones at Ghimbi and Shambu, an hour and a half’s
and four and a half hour’s drive away, respectively. These are necessary because most university
lecturers are incredibly young, only recently graduated themselves, and have
had no pedagogical training at all.
In Emilie’s case, however, although the English
Language Improvement Programme was also established by volunteers and Ethiopian
colleagues at the Ministry, there is no centrally-produced material to use,
little guidance about what to do and no obligation on the part of lecturers or
students, the supposed beneficiaries, to participate. It all depends on the volunteer in each
university or college deciding who needs classes, setting them up, writing the
material to be taught and hoping that someone will, voluntarily, attend. Also, Emilie is supposed to be an adviser,
not just the teacher, but cannot find anyone else willing or designated to do
the teaching. What happens when classes are set up is that everyone starts with
great enthusiasm, keen for the opportunity to improve their English, which, let
us not forget, is the medium of instruction, but then, all too often, quickly
finds excuses to disappear. Sometimes,
the excuses are real and created by the general disorganization of the
university where spontaneous meetings are called, timetables changed arbitrarily,
and any number of other disruptions arise unexpectedly leaving the poor old ELIP bottom of the priority
chain. For example, last year Emilie
started a class for female students, who are supposed to need the ‘empowerment’
which improving their English skills would help to bring about. It was felt
that being free from dominating male company would rid them of the excuse not
to participate and embarrassment at doing so, but after a few weeks they
totally disappeared as if they´d all voted with their feet from one day to the
next. If there is any interruption for
whatever reason, such as the Christmas break, the class just never restarts as
though everyone has forgotten about it. The most successful course, perhaps,
was a short-term one for secretaries which was 12 sessions over 5 weeks and had
90% attendance, even though it ate into their lunch breaks. They were a lovely
fun group of women of various ages and organized a traditional ‘coffee
ceremony’, filling the room with smoke from the charcoal, to celebrate the end
of the course and the certificate-giving ceremony. There were some good groups of third-year
English major students that also reached successful conclusions. One surprisingly serendipitous achievement
came about when Emilie’s sister, who works in the Psychology Department at Leiden University Leiden Holland Holland
One thing that disappoints us is the widespread
‘can´t do’ attitude. So often, when we suggest something that we think should
or could be done to improve life (such as when I asked the librarian to
photocopy two books of mine on development which I feel should be in the
university library - where many books are only illegal photocopies - or I
encourage lecturers to use a variety of active learning methods, or Emilie
needs her small library of books to be registered in the main library but not
moved there) the answer is that it can´t be done or ways are found to make it
immensely complicated. I have mentioned
this attitude in teaching training sessions by asking what Obama’s election
slogan was; they all know and say “Yes, we can!” (it appears here on T-shirts,
emblazoned in English and Amharic). Then
I say “Correct. It’s not ‘No, we
can’t’!” They see the point. People are very hierarchical and deferential,
always avoiding rocking the boat, preferring to act in line with tradition and
political obligation. This makes the
attitude changes that we are trying to bring about, which follow the policies
of their own Ministry of Education, extremely difficult to achieve. There is no habit of reading, not even among
most university lecturers, who rely on one standard textbook or their own
university notes for their lectures and we never see them sitting and having a
coffee reading, even though they are completely alone, and only rarely using
Emilie´s library, which is well-stocked with up-to-date reference as well as
reading books. The President of the
university decries this, too, but even he is powerless to change it. The doctor in the clinic where I was treated
for malaria sat staring into space or watching the TV screen in the waiting
room between patients yet, when I asked about dietary restrictions relating to
the medicine he was prescribing me, he said none, though when I read the
prospectus, there were; why hadn´t he spent his time reading up about his
medicines?
There’s
also an attitude of ‘It´s good enough’ in relation to all work that we see,
intellectual and physical, with no imperative to strive to do it better, to do
jobs as well as they could be done given the limitations here: trivially, in almost every hotel we have
stayed in, which are never the classy ones, the soap dish in the shower slopes
downwards so that the soap always slides off onto the shower floor, all taps in
the country swivel when you turn them though they are not the swiveling kind,
the scooter-taxis line up at their starting point in random order so that you
have to walk along the whole line asking to find which is the first one to go
(why not line up in order of departure?), washing is thrown over the line to dry
all bundled up so that it dries more slowly and comes out totally wrinkled,
paint dribbles down over sections of a different colour on walls because the
painters can’t be bothered or don’t think to use masking tape, even though it’s
easily available. Is it because there is
no example of high standards to copy or learn from? It’s not only lack of skills, certainly; it’s
the lack of an attitude. We, in the
West, have internalized the urge to improve, to innovate, whether for
competitive reasons, because we are obliged at our workplaces or because we
find satisfaction by doing so; that approach is far less common here where rows
of shops, for example, will all sell the same items with none trying to
distinguish itself. We’re not here to
inculcate the ethos of capitalism, nor are we always convinced of its merits in
all its manifestations, but striving to do better is a human characteristic
with positive connotations which we would be happy to see more of here. The government itself aspires to raise Ethiopia
Doing better than others, in this tradition-bound
society, is frowned upon as a threat and a challenge to others and can lead to
teasing and virtual ostracism. An
Ethiopian lecturer who does my job at another university and who I love
chatting to at conferences when we meet told me how he greatly admired the work
ethic of the volunteers who worked with him but how, when he imitated them, was
made to feel a pariah by his fellows.
This happens to a degree everywhere, perhaps, but seems to be
particularly strong here where the prevailing ethos is not that of work hard to
get ahead or show your commitment to your job and organization, but keep your
head down to conform. This is encouraged
by the one-party dictatorship political system in which party yes-men get the
plum jobs over hard-working talented people.
The line taxi drivers were on strike in Addis the other day to get the
government to increase the controlled fares to match increased petrol prices;
there was not a word in the government-controlled media This hardly conduces to
spirited debate, nor to the desire to aspire to better things. If they are not careful, the rulers here are
heading down the same path as Egypt
I know I sound like an old-fashioned Western
imperialist looking down on the ignorant natives, but when I discuss these
matters with the lecturers I teach, they always say I´m right, that these
things must change and recognize that it must come from themselves. “Improvement begins with I”, as the cute
punning saying has it. I know I sound
dreadfully negative, too, but, as a slogan at our induction training in Addis
reminded us “If there wasn´t a problem, you wouldn´t be here!” Doubtless, there are lessons we can learn
from Ethiopians and maybe they should send some ‘aid workers’ in the opposite
direction, but the demand comes from the opposite direction and their problems
really are matters of life and death.
There is change, though, and a powerful
commitment by the government to transform for the better rural life, the role
of women, aid dependency, food stability, the quantity and quality of education
(13 new universities in 5 years, with 10 more to come) and, in general, to
achieve the UN’s Millenium Development Goals, of which it is a star performer,
on schedule. We notice new buildings
springing up here in Nekemte, nothing compared to the boom in Addis, which are
evidence and symbols of optimism and determination. Even those who oppose its dictatorial
methods, praise much that the government has achieved, perhaps made even more
possible by the single-mindedness that the lack of opposition permits, the
‘Chinese model’.
A friend of ours in Spain said to us before we
came, as a result of a trip she had made to the tourist sites of Ethiopia,
“They (Ethiopians/Africans?) have something which we in the West have
lost.” She couldn’t have been more
wrong. All human life is here, the good
and the bad, with extremes of cruelty and ignorance, as well as resilience,
generosity and solidarity. Many
Westerners only see the former, alternative types only the latter, and the
complexity gets lost. They love their
children, yet children work from the earliest of ages and are left alone all
day. The two on our compound of 4 and 8
are loved and cared-for, yet are left for hours on their own and the younger
one wields a razor-sharp knife to peel the potatoes while the elder girl lights a charcoal fire
and cooks for them both. Unthinkable to us.
People here look after their elderly, yet when you see the fights to get
on the line taxis, it’s the elderly (or a heavily pregnant woman we saw once)
who get left behind with no one concerned to give them a place. They love their families and look after each
other, yet a colleague at work complained to me about his sister virtually
demanding that he give her money. Many
brothers and sisters, probably more the former, abuse the family support
network and the others do realize and resent it. Our colleague Frits encountered a boy in the
street with badly damaged arms and, on asking him, was told that his father had
strung him up with rope to a beam for several days as a punishment. Frits tried to get the neighbours, police and
local government to do something about it, but no one wanted to get
involved. Yet it is routine for elder
brothers or sisters, or the more successful, to support others in the family to
pay for their education or medical care. When I was in hospital for malaria
recently visitors flocked in, twenty-two one day, including the President of
the university twice, and a neighbour brought us tea and cooked food, which
hospitals don´t provide here, for breakfast at 7 o´clock in the morning both
days.
Why should it be otherwise? Humans the world over, rich or poor, are far
more similar than they are different;
paradises and utopias only exist in the minds of those with highly selective
eyesight or cast-iron ideologies. Looking after the young and elderly, caring
for the sick, these are human universals. That is the greatest challenge of an
experience like ours, how you can share your common humanity with people whose
external circumstances are so vastly and, often shockingly, different?. The VSO
motto is “Sharing Skills, Changing Lives”, but it should just read “Sharing
Lives” which is, perhaps, the most we can claim for our time here.
I’ve jotted a random list of some of the good and
bad things about our life here, apart from what has been mentioned above:
The
good: Bontu and Lombi; our house and terrace, where
we sit watching the birds and enjoying the colourful plants, sometimes even
colobus monkeys; many people who were kind, warm and welcoming; the pleasant
weather during the dry season conducing to country walks with lovely views;
teaching/training when we have non-bureaucratic personal interaction with
people who enjoy and appreciate our work; drinking a machiatto while chatting with colleagues; kids who say hello on the
street, or smile and wave; fruit juices at the juice bars; sociable evenings
with our VSO colleagues when we cook a meal, have a few drinks and chat or play
cards; acting as a focus for the generosity of friends back home (we’ve been
sent money, books, even spectacles, to donate here; egotistically, feeling
different and rather special with everyone knowing who we are; writing letters
and feeling we have something to say(?)
The bad: Kafkaesque administrative hassles; paperwork,
with interminable and repetitive reports to write for our two bosses, VSO and
the university; transport, with its extreme discomfort, uncertainty about its
very availability and squabbles to get a place; lack of variety and quality of food; missing chocolate, cheese and brown bread;
local food in general(except ‘beyeynet’) is not something we will miss; erratic
services of every kind: water, electricity, internet, phone network, machines,
transport; people who ask for money facetiously; blaring churches and music
shops, especially our hitlerian Protestant preacher next-door but one, but also
including the wailing Orthodox church which goes on all night on occasion; the wild street dogs which howl and bicker
every night; the mercenary attitude of ”I´m not going to lift a finger unless
I’m paid for it” which we often encounter;
the denial of democratic rights with the lies and deceits practiced by
the virtual one-party dictatorship government, which insults the intelligence
of a lot of bright people who daren´t speak out.
You´ll be very happy to know, if you´ve read this
far, that I will no longer be making such great demands on your attention span
as we return to Europe in a few days and my emails will become much shorter
again. I hope that you will have gained
at least some insights into the life of the Ethiopian people and that, because
of our presence here, the country will have become more interesting to you,
too, though we’ve only scratched the surface; as I wrote in an earlier
newsletter, the longer you live in a country the more you realize you don´t
know much about it at all.
We look forward to seeing you all again very
soon.
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