Snow to Sand

My first trip to Africa left me pretty speechless.  Instead of choosing a more typical safari location, I found a flight to Ethiopia, where the the per capita income is 7th lowest in the world when adjusted for PPP, and the  AIDS rate approaches that of Washington DC.

In this country of 80+ million farmers constantly at risk of starvation, I was met with fantastic food, beautiful scenery, and warm smiles covering sad eyes.

I made some friends at Entoto Market and shared coffee with them

Ethiopia was one of the few African countries that was not colonized, and except for the Italians in WWII, never had European rulers. The country suffered a similar fate as Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and was controlled by a communist government with Soviet support, where life was filled with constant rebelion against the socialists, which was countered with Stalinist style retribution by the government against academics, reformists, and the wealthy. The country became independent in 1991, and despite massive double digit economic growth, remains one of the poorest in the world.

I still don’t fully understand the failures of the Ethiopian economy.  Despite being comprised of over 80 unique tribes and surrounded by Sudan and Somalia, it has not experienced ethnic conflict, and the different groups somehow manage to live in harmony.  The country now is roughly 45% Christian, 35% Islamic, and the remaining 20% is a mix of many pagan tribes, yet there is no religious conflict.  Despite the faults of colonialism, it provided basic infrastructure, especially in British economies.  Ethiopia, on the other hand, entered the second half of the 20th century with minimal infractructure and a communist government not willing to spend money to improve it.  The country therefore emerged in the early 90s hopeful, but greatly crippled.

Eucalyptus was introduced to Ethiopia because it is a very fast growing tree, and almost all Ethiopians still rely on firewood. It is the woman's job to fetch the firewood each day, and many end up having terrible hunches on their back in old age because of this. This girl managed to smile at me and say hello, despite the burden on her back.

I was greeted at the airport by my guide, a taxi driver name Girma who spoke fluent English.  His services where priceless in showing me around Addis Ababa, the capital.  My first impressions on the road from the airport were what I had mentally prepared myself for: the first major intersection we stopped at, our car was approached by a number of beggars, mostly children, who were in very bad shape.  Hesitant to give out cash, I realized that I had to first visit the Hope Food Kitchen, which sells food vouchers that can be given out to the poor.  When we arrived, I found out that 8 food vouchers, worth 8 meals at the soup kitchen, cost roughly $.41.  I quickly bought 10 packets of vouchers, and over the next two days, managed to feed 80 people  for $4.10.  I handed them out through our car window, and most people were incredibly grateful.  However, there were a few who only wanted money, and actually didn’t accept them… this is exactly why I purchased the vouchers to begin with, because out of everyone who needed help, I wanted to make sure that I was helping those in need the most.

I soon arrived at my hotel, the Sheraton at Addis, which was one of the best hotels I’ve ever stayed at.  I guess because a job at the hotel is one of the highest paying jobs in the city, people work extremely hard to make sure that they keep it.  Despite the comfort of the hotel, I felt pretty terrible looking out of my posh balcony at the roofs of the shantytowns just beyond the walls of the hotel.

We continued my day by going to Tomoco cafe, which is one of the best coffee shops in Addis.  Coffee originated from Ethiopia, and remains the country’s top export and is fantastic quality.  After cofe, Girma took me to Entoto market, where Ethiopians shop for clothes.  It was walking around here that I first experienced the warmth of the people.  Most of the people in the market were Ethiopian middle class – far poorer than any American or European, but they had stable jobs as shopkeepers and were not starving.  I was invited to join some shopkeepers for coffee, where I hung out with them for a while and snapped photos of them joking around.

Next I checked out some of the museums, most interesting being the National Museum which holds the famous Lucy, and many of the other anthropological finds.  Next, Girma took me to Merkato market, which is known as the biggest open air market in Africa.  The market was truly chaotic, and everything from donkeys to AK-47s could be purchased there (Girma denied the Ak-47 part, but I had heard otherwise from others).  After walking around a bit and buying a few things, I chatted with some Ethiopian girls (I don’t know if it’s my Saudi goggles, but Ethiopian girls were some of the best looking in the world).

Girl doing traditional dance

Finally, we ended the night with some fantastic Ethiopian food and traditional dancing.  The traditional dancing was actually really cool, with the dancers performing dances from different tribes in the country.  Ethiopians love to eat raw beef mixed with chili, and although I’m a huge fan of stake tartare, I avoided the raw meat because I didn’t want to bring any worms home with me…

A couple clips from the dancing, click through on the video clips to watch in HD.

(woops!  anyone know how to rotate videos?)

The following morning, Girma introduced me to his friend, Alazar (Lazurus in English), who works as a driver for American families and took them to rural orphanages to adopt children.  He became my driver for the day because he had a 4×4, and it was time for me to see a bit of the Ethiopian countryside.

I read in a book that Lake Wenchi, which was supposed to be a 2 hour, 150km drive away from Addis, was worth seeing.  The views driving through the countryside were much different than in Addis.  Whereas Addis had a clear middle class, the countryside was filled entirely with poor subsistence farmers who are all one drought away from starving to death.  Luckily, this year there was ample rainfal and the crops where successful, so people where generally happy, and despite having no income, well fed.  After driving for 2 hours on a paved road, we turned onto the road which led to Lake Wenchi, which was supposed to take 20 minutes and only be 20km.  It turns out that those 20km took us almost 2 hours to travel, because it was down a windy, and bumpy dirt road.  However, the dirt road opened up even more interesting people to me.  Because even fewer foreigners traveled down the road, in every village that we passed, children ran out of their homes yelling “franji” and ran by the side of the car.  This fascination with foreigners actually became pretty funny from a photo standpoint – as soon as someone saw that I was taking a picture of them, they would pose, or just run at me.  For example, I wanted to get a picture of kids playing soccer with the landscape of farmland behind them, but as soon as I got out of my car, one of the boys saw me and soon all of the kids playing soccer, as well as 20 other kids who seemed to have appeared out of the bushes started swarming me, laughing, and asking for money.

One of the poorest kids that I saw

Finally, I made it to Wenchi Lake after 4 hours.  The view was pretty cool, but this trip wasn’t about seeing some lake, it was about meeting people on the way to the lake.  By that point, we were in another tribal area so my driver could only speak with some of the people in the villages because they spoke a different language.  We communicated through a mixture of broken English and Oromo, and as is the case everywhere in Ethiopia, were accepted with incredible warmth.  One of the most striking things at the lake was a little girl that was playing in the bushes.  I snapped a picture of her, and unlike most other kids, she didn’t run at me laughing and begging for money.  Also, unlike other kids, I saw that she didn’t even have shoes, so I knew that she was truly the poorest of the poor here.  After making her take a few dollars from me, I realized that there was a guesthouse overlooking the lake.  At that point, I regretted staying in my palace in Addis, and wished that I knew about the guesthouse beforehand.

At dinner with Alazar and Girma on my last night, I promised both of them that I would try to convince everyone I know to visit Ethiopia.  No other place in the world is as desperate for tourists, so I urge everyone who is thinking of taking a vacation off the beaten path to explore the option of visiting this amazing place.

I hope to go back there at some point over the next couple of months, but hopefully on a longer trip where I can go to the Omo River Valley and see some of the tribes, in their traditional surroundings.  That’s not doable on a weekend, so I’ll have to find a bit of extra time… as Saudis say, Insh’Allah.

~ by Adrian Grabicki on March 30, 2009.

Posted in Ethiopia
Tags: africa, culture, poverty