Commemorations

Despite lots of publicity, as many as 15,000 reported visitors, and frequent roadblocks for passing dignitaries, there hasn't seemed much for the public to see or do to participate in the big African Union 50th Anniversary commemoration. At the same time, smaller events and programs are being offered around the city. For example, I went to a modest "African Aesthetic Exhibition" at the Institute for Ethiopian Studies (which was a nice chance to see part of the Addis Ababa University campus). I also caught part of two programs at the Alliance Ethio-franciase: the end of a symposium on panafricanism, and the beginning of a reggae concert. My guess is that there was more programming offered than was widely publicized in a timely or otherwise effective manner. Like many things here, that capacity and habit is still emerging.  

Tuesday, May 28th, is Derg Downfall Day in Ethiopia. The Derg is the socialist regime that rose to power in 1974, deposed Emperor Haile Selassie, and went on to rule the country until 1994 when it was driven from power. The Derg period is characterized by misguided resettlement and land redistribution policies (policies that worsened the devastating droughts of the mid-1980s), by near constant internal rebellion and external war, and by brutal suppression of opposition. I found this website a good summary of the history. I also recommend Beneath the Lion's Gaze for a vivid and heart-wrenching literary account of the Derg period. No one I've asked has known of any special commemorative events. It will be interesting if the bustle of life here is different in any noticeable way.

A city under construction

Something that struck me right away in this city is the construction. Everywhere one looks, buildings are going up and roads are being put in. One big project that affects the core of the city is a partially- elevated rail line that is being built to alleviate traffic and to provide much needed mass transit.
The people I meet all talk about how much and how fast Addis is growing and changing. A good example of this growth and change is my neighborhood. 

The "A" marks the college.

Located on the southeast edge of the city, Hope University College is between two neighborhoods, Lebu and Jomo. (This is considered the remote suburbs by many Addis residents and most taxi drivers, all of whom like to exclaim about how "far away" I live. I also saw four hyenas on the road in front of the college last weekend.)

View of some of the Jomo condominiums.

Lebu (recently very rural) is being transformed by the construction of luxury apartment/condo buildings and some fancy villas. Jomo is a large cluster of public housing. These five-story towers have been the topic of much discussion and debate among our little group of on-campus residents. Some see them as akin to "projects" in American inner cities, while others see them as a reasonable and even desirable solution to the HUGE (and unmet) demand for housing in this city. While not "attractive," they certainly seem safe, and they definitely provide shelter and support vibrant communities. Either way, we all agree that they could use some more open space (for gardens and recreation) and much better services - especially trash collection! 

One aspect of all the construction that fascinates me is the ubiquitous use of eucalyptus poles for scaffolding. The poles are brought in by the truckload and then deposited in piles of various sizes at depots throughout the city. The dominant building materials are concrete and cinder blocks. Each concrete floor is poured onto forms held up by these wooden poles, and the concrete is usually carried up to each floor by a system of wooden pole ramps. It was amazing to watch the intense but efficient labor involved in one of these pours. Pairs of men brought trays of stone, sand, and cement to a mixer, and then other pairs carried the concrete up the ramps. 

There was a big push to complete some of the key road projects for this weekend's celebrations of the African Union's 50th anniversary, but there are so many other projects underway that it's hard to imagine the city feeling "finished" any time soon.

AIFF wraps up

A great NGO that's tackling this issue.

What a treat to have found out about the film festival and to have been able to get to so many of the films. Along with the movie about cotton farmers (described in Friday's post), the other highlight of the festival for me was "Blood in the Mobile." In the spirit of the best aspects of Michael Moore, a Danish filmmaker seeks answers from Nokia about their response to the well-known violence and human rights abuses that take place at mining sites in remote eastern Congo/DRC. These mines are the source of the "blood minerals" (especially cassiterite, SnO2 - the primary ore of tin, and coltan) that are used in all of our cell phones (and many other electronics). There is a good trailer and other info at http://bloodinthemobile.org/). Besides the tragic human, highly endangered Mountain gorillas are also being lost due to this mining activity. (More info on that issue here.) As a Seattleite, it was great to see that hometown congressman Jim McDermott (interviewed in the film) is a co-sponsor and supportive of a House Resolution to take action to promote "peace, stability, and observance of human rights" in the DRC.   

In a line-up dominated by quite intense and sobering films, a joyful stand-out was the story of a group of Sudanese blues musicians. Here's a taste. The most memorable lines from the festival come from Propoganda which referred to Paris Hilton as a "narcissistic parasite" and to celebrities in general as "trained monkey collaborators of death."  

Kind of mean and a bit (but not entirely) outrageous, of course, but memorable! 

Getting out in the city

This past week has been a veritable boon of cultural activity, starting last weekend with hearing a terrific chamber music ensemble, made up entirely of Ethiopian born and trained musicians. Under the direction of  pianist Girma Yifrashewa, the featured artist, the group performed original music composed by Yifrashewa,  as well as a pieces by Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and Bottesini. Here's a news report on the concert with a video clip. You can also hear samples of Yifrashewa's music from his website and on abytube. A solo summer tour of the United States will bring Yifrashewa to New York on June 8th (at the ISSUE Project Room) in Brooklyn) and Seattle on July 26th (at the Good Sheppard Center Chapel).



The concert was hosted by the Italian Cultural Institute, the same venue for the opening night of this year's Addis International Film Festival (AIFF). AIFF offers six days of documentary films from

around the world in five different venue, including the Alliance Francaise, the British Council, and a community center. The opening night was well-attended (~150 people?) and featured four films, ranging from a 6-minute profile of a Somalia refugee stuck in a Tunisian refugee camp after fleeing the unrest in Libya to the 52-minute story of a Borana (a Rift Valley ethnic group) boy learning to travel the multi-day route to deliver salt to market (by camel). Also on the program, a brief film about the Sahrawi resistance to Morrocan rule in Western Sahara and the story of an Afghan refugee in Spain waiting for her son to get permission to join her from Athens. It was great to have a human face put on stories that I'd only heard about in the news or that were entirely new to me.

Another notable film was Propoganda, a North Korean version of a Michael Moore movie. Even though it is its own piece of biased propaganda (offering North Korea as the world's one hope for a transformed future) and ragingly Marxist, it also offers some disturbingly cogent critique of Western media, consumerism, imperialism, and war-mongering. This film (and its companion film on Egypt after the revolution) only drew a handful of people to the community center where it showed - on a slide screen via laptop and digital projector, which was unfortunate. In its 7th year, AIFF is still a work in progress. The website was down until the festival's opening day, and the schedules posted on it don't match the printed information being printed. At the same time, the whole thing has an indie, grassroots, and ultimately authentic feel to it.

Tonight, when the laptop at the British Council froze, I found myself helping troubleshoot and connecting a back-up computer. This was after being mistaken for the director of one of the films: a horrifying account of bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan. Despite being illegal since 1994, one third of rural girls are reportedly subjected to this criminal form of courtship. Another powerful film from tonight's program was Cotton for my Shroud, which recounts the struggles of Indian cotton farmers who face a losing equation of rising input costs (such as pesticides, fertilizers, and the Bt seeds that they are pressured to use) and falling cotton prices. The end result for over 250,000 desperate farmers has been suicide, leaving behind bereft and impoverished families. Encouraged at one point to replace food crops with a cash crop, entire families and communities find themselves struggling just to eat enough to stay alive. 

This kind of grim math featured in many of the AIFF films and is emerging as a theme of my time here in Ethiopia. With 41% of its 87 million people under the age of 15 and a fertility rate of 4.8 children per woman, falling but still double the world average (all according to pr.org), it's hard to imagine a form of economic and social development won't leave many people mired in deep poverty - or, for that matter, that can be sustained with the country's already strained resources and environment.

Yikes! That's not a very cheery note to end on. Consider watching the video clip of the pianist.
 

Class picture for GiveBig

Classes resume

Rec time.

School

After missing a Saturday class due to the Easter holiday, we got back into full gear with class on Wednesday and Saturday. Wednesday was a dramatic day! Heavy rains made it hard for most of the students to get to class on-time, and then the power went out (for the first time in almost a week) just before our start time. Eventually everyone made it (the first time we had all 20), and we had a spirited discussion of a Jomo Kenyatta short story, "The Gentlemen of the Jungle." The story for Saturday was from Zimbabwe, "Why Don't You Carve Other Animals" by Yvonne Vera. Saturday class runs from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and the students have been impressively focused and productive. They are motivated to learn, to engage each other, and to improve their English. They also really like the clean, open, uncrowded spaces of the college campus; it is, unfortunately, a contrast from their regular schools. (The picture to the left is the courtyard of one of these schools, with 1,400 K-8 students.) 

Other ILAE News

Last Monday, May 6th, was a big day for the school. There was a fundraising event at the city's oldest hotel, the Taitu (built for Menelik II's wife Empress Taitu in 1888 E.C.) that, despite heavy rain and subsequent snarled traffic, drew a large, supportive crowd. Also, an on-line magazine for Ethiopian diasporans, Tadias, came out with an article featuring one of ILAE's founders. It's exciting to see so much enthusiasm for the school and to hear that this program is helping to fill the gap between potential and opportunity for the students it is serving.  

Field trip to Adama

The landscape along the way (new highway in background).

Today we headed 100 km east to Ethiopia's third largest city, Adama (with a population between 250,000 and 300,000 depending on the source). Compared to the massive, sprawling capital, Adama seemed quite small and navigable. Adama is also known as Nazret (or Nazreth). The city was given this Biblical name after the Second World War by Emperor Haile Selassie, but in 2000 the city officially reverted to its original Oromo language name.

Our journey was meant to take under two hours, but we turned out to be traveling on the only major road out of Addis toward the east and one of the busiest corridors in the country. It goes all the way across the Rift Valley into Somalia and also links up with the major north-south route that connects Ethiopia to Kenya. The drive took over two and a half hours going and almost three returning. There is a new 6-lane express tollway under construction - and due to open ahead of scheduled April 2014 completion date. Reportedly, it will cut the distance between Addis and Adama by 20 km and reduce the travel time to 40 minutes.

Traffic!

The two lane road was packed with a steady stream of cars, buses, and trucks. We passed through a couple of towns and some significant industrial zones, and all along the way - in and between these developed areas - the roadside was full of people walking and waiting, livestock grazing, and small settlements.

The welcoming reception at Seeds.

 Our destination was a pre-K/kindergarten and after-school support program called Seeds of Africa, founded by a former Miss Ethiopia (2005) Atti Worku. Here is a Tadias magazine interview with her. We were there with staff from Changing Our World, a fundraising and philanthropy consulting firm that is helping ILEA raise money.

The environment rules posted at Seeds.

The students gave us an enthusiastic welcome and then put on some performances to demonstrate the learning that they are doing at Seeds. We were also treated by Ms. Worku's mother to a delightful traditional meal (and coffee) for lunch.

After the LONG drive back to Addis, we ran one last fateful errand and ended up caught in gridlock. At perfect storm of rush hour traffic, construction, and heavy rain, trapped us for another hour in the vehicle - which we finally abandoned and sought refuge in a restaurant for dinner.

I'd like to go back to Adama, but may need to wait for the new expressway to be done.

Weather

It was a busy Easter weekend here (essentially holidays from May Day through today's "Holy Monday" recovery day). I have pictures and some stories to post later, but we're off on a field trip this morning (Tuesday already) with some out of town visitors. For now, someone asked about the weather. It's not been as hot, sunny, or dry as I expected; in fact, it rained as hard as I've ever seen for about an hour early yesterday evening - and I'm from Seattle. Here's what the week ahead looks like:

Weather Update:

Okay, so it really rains here - and not in that endearing Seattle misty-drizzle way. It's not quite a monsoon (more like summer afternoon showers in D.C. or the Rockies), but when it starts, everyone scrambles for shelter. The dirt roads turn to mud, and the sides of the paved streets flow like small rivers. It's Thursday now, and the forecast above has been accurate.

Playing tour guide

 

A quiet Monday at the market

Funny as it felt, with my mere two weeks on the ground in a city that still confuses me, I got to help show around some visitors from New York today. With the necessary help of a driver, I took them to visit the En Toto market and the shop where the former women fuel wood carriers sell their baskets and fabrics. It was great to get out of the car, and I was much more comfortable wandering the street market having seen it before. I also decided to just ask when I saw a picture I wanted to take. People got a kick out of seeing themselves on the camera's little screen, and it made me wish that I had brought an old instant Polaroid camera or one of the new instant digital ones. When it was lunch time, I was also able to take the visitors to a restaurant that I had already tested.

The boy on the right, an outgoing 3rd grader with good English, helped me negotiate a reasonable price for two pineapples - one for our group, and one for him and his friends.

These fruit and vegetable stalls are everywhere.

Plastic sandals. Economical footwear, if they lasted.

Overall, after two weeks, I feel like I'm moving into a more reflective state of mind and beyond the reaction phase of culture shock (and, if there is such a thing, setting or location shock). The again, I may just be in the "Surface adjustment" phase of the classic model (see graphic) and headed for "Confronting deeper cultural/personal issues." Uh oh.

Life in a developed country, especially a place like Seattle, offers so many comforts and amenities - parks, garbage and recycling service, paved streets with sidewalks, well-stocked grocery stores, vacuum cleaners, home postal service, street signs, etc., and I certainly appreciate and miss all those material luxuries. At the same time, I am impressed that people here persevere and make life work, despite all the challenges and deprivations. Providing basic services to the people here is the government's biggest challenge, and I can't help thinking that the wealthier outside world could be doing quite a bit more to ease that burden.   

Religion, photography, and sleep patterns

5:30 am. I'm up - not my customary schedule at home, but increasingly normal here. With all due respect to early the risers I know (Daniel, Jill, Sean), my morning routine is designed to let me get up as close to when I need to leave the house as possible and still get my bowl of cereal eaten and be on time to work. Here, a combination of factors is getting me up -without an alarm - by 6:00 on most days. One factor is that the sun goes down relatively early here, setting by 7:00 most evenings. The evenings are dark (even more so when the power goes out - although it's been quite reliable for a few days...) and relatively quiet.

Another factor getting me up early is the noise from the low-flying jets who pass over on their way into Bole Airport. I've given up trying to determine a set pattern, but there always seems to be a cluster of 3-5 flights arriving between 5:30 and 6:30 am, sometime in surprisingly quick succession. (My brother's used mini van came with an "I Love Airplane Noise" bumper sticker. I'm not there yet, but I have gotten used to it enough that I don't jump at the sudden deep rumble anymore and can even sleep through the din if I'm tired enough.) There goes another one...

My most conspicuous encouragement to wake early is the amplified religious chanting that echoes daily from two nearby churches, starting about 5 am.

Since this is Easter weekend here (see Sunday, April 28th post for a calendar explanation), I have yet to find out if this is a year-round custom or something special for the period of Lent (observed here for the 8 weeks prior to Easter). I have met many Orthodox Christians (the majority religion in Ethiopia) who have been fasting during this build-up to Easter, avoiding meat and dairy. The markets have also been full of chickens, sheep, and goats - all candidates for the fast-breaking feast menus. Religion infuses this society in both overt and subtle ways that I have noticed but am still sorting out.

I'd love to be documenting so much of what I see here, such as the daily stream of religious worshippers and pilgrims heading to the nearby church out on the main road, but it feels obtrusive and disrespectful to turn their piety in an object of curiosity for my camera. Or, in other cases, their culture, customs, or poverty. This reluctance keeps my camera in my pocket a lot - or limits me to taking rushed photos from a moving car. I was quite conflicted, for example, about trying to take a photo of the fuel wood carriers on the way down from En Toto (see last Wednesday's post). This has become a common refrain among the Westerners I've spent time with here; we find a person or scene compelling and want to capture it for memory and sharing, but what right do we have to do so? It also doesn't help that we are so often experiencing street scenes from a moving car, yet another barrier (along with our obvious foreignness) between us and the people we're observing.

Getting out of the city

Today is a holiday here in Ethiopia for May Day, and we took a short hike in the En Toto Hills. Addis Ababa is ringed with hills, mostly covered in fast growing eucalyptus trees (an imported species that has crowded out a lot of the native land cover).



The drive up took us through a crowded market of people shopping for Easter (this coming Sunday here), and then past a lot of donkeys and women carrying down loads of fuel wood. The women carried bundles that were both thicker and wider than they were tall, and it was difficult to see them so loaded down without likening them to the beasts of burden they walked alongside - and without wondering why this toil fell exclusively on them and not the men.




There is an ambitious organization working to give these women an alternative way to earn a living, the Former Women Fuel Wood Carriers Association. This group trains the women to make and sell fabrics and baskets, and we stopped at their small store on the way down the hill. The Christian Science Monitor published a story about these women and the project back in 2007. 

It was great to get out of the city and into the woods for some exercise. I was also happy that the boys who rushed over to our car (to offer to "watch it" for us while we hiked) were also interested in letting me kick around their soccer ball with them.