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.