More running, soccer mania, and Internet connection woes

Our "team" prepares to run.

It's now day four of no Internet connection on campus, which - along with the multiple daily power outages has made it quite hard to keep up with work tasks, news, email, and blog posts. The tech department says that the problem is off-site with the provider's infrastructure (this blog's new official word) and that it may be next week (or longer) before we have service restored. It's also been hard on the contents of the fridge! 

Mass start.

Haile Gebreselassie.

Anyway, a couple of updates: Sunday was a big sports day - building on the success of the "Run for Hope." The morning started early (6:00) as I taxied to the other side of town for a 7 km road race that I was invited to run with a few friends. It was a challenging course - a bit longer than I've been running and with a lot more elevation change than our flat course near the college. The air was also heavy (it had rained overnight), but I had fun and enjoyed how supportive the group of runners I found myself with was. Running is very popular here, and it was exciting to have celebrated Ethiopian runner Haile Gebreselassie on hand to pump up the crowd and then sound the starting horn.

Me with the goalie after the game.

That afternoon, a double-header at the European Film Festival lost out to watching Ethiopia play South Africa in a World Cup qualifying game. Tickets to watch the match live here in Addis were in short supply, so a group of us watched on tv. Ethiopia won - thus winning their group (with one game left to play) and earning a berth in the final round of play for one of Africa's spots in Brazil.* One of the guys watching with us works at the hotel where the team was staying, so we ended up heading down there to join the festivities and greet the team. The whole city was celebrating; flags were waving, horns were honking, and everyone was waving and screaming. This enthusiasm is a sign that Ethiopia's football (soccer) team is enjoying a resurgence. They made it to the Africa Cup of Nations for the first time in 31 years, and they are looking to get to their first ever World Cup.

* After Sunday's exciting victory, it came out that an ineligible player (due to yellow card accumulation) had been fielded in an earlier game against Botswana. FIFA fined the Ethiopian Federation and took away the three points from that win. Still leading the group, Ethiopia must now win that final game, September 6th against the Central African Republic, to advance in qualification. Needless to say, there has been a lot of disappointment and frustration among fans here. 

It's funny to find myself a regular runner here when I'm a rare, even reluctant runner at home. I also have hardly kicked a soccer ball in my two months here, which is odd since I'm such an avid soccer player at home. Then again, my daily life and habits are different in lots of ways: I also consider it normal to see donkeys and sheep every day now, I drink bottled water, I almost never wear a seat belt (because they're broken), I shoulder bump as part of greeting people, and I eat at least one meal a day with my hands.

Running for Hope!

Today was the "Run for Hope" 5K. About 60 students, staff, and friends of Hope University College took to the damp streets this morning to run, jog, or walk a 5 kilometer route through the neighborhood.

The goals were to build community through fun and fitness, to raise money for the campus waste collection and disposal program, and to increase the college's visibility in the immediate area.


By all accounts, it was a successful event! My jogging partner and I organized the run with student help and support from the administration (especially with reassuring the sub-city authorities that this was in no way a "political" event).

The participants were energetic and playful (indulging in quite a water fight at the finish line), and there was even some enthusiastic flying of the national flag. Very fun.

Infrastructure part 2, housing

When I first arrived and started trying to learn more about the housing projects just down the street, I found this article reporting on the late-February opening of over 20,000 new condominium units, including some in our neighborhood. The article reports that, "With an average population growth rate of 2.7 percent, Addis Ababa needs 600,000 additional housing units in the coming decade alone, according to the Addis Ababa City Housing Development Office." Since then, I have heard that the city has pledged to build 1.3 million housing units in the next 7 years - a VERY ambitious number!

As part of this campaign to provide housing, the city has launched a series of financing programs (described here). The goal is to make housing affordable and accessible to the city's large population of what I would call a lower middle class, people who have steady work but don't make enough to save up for a house purchase. Without this kind of public support, locals have told me that purchasing land and building a house is affordable only to the quite well-off.

As a result, there is a lot of interest in the current program, and for the past week people have been lined up all over the city to sign up for this opportunity.  Although there are many banks in Addis, only one, the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, is authorized to administer this program at its branches. The bank reports that nearly 400,000 people have signed up so far.


For many Addis residents, those with some money saved or access to some financial support, these programs will provide a chance to secure a housing upgrade. For the wealthier, there are many more options, and the building boom shows no signs of abating. Just behind the college (on the other side form the condo buildings), a new street of comfortable villas has just been completed - and more are going up throughout the neighborhood.

Here is a description of the building boom in Addis from the Economist: "Addis has one of the higher densities of slum dwellers in the world. But their geographical pattern is unusual... Addis is 'more of a scrambled egg'." (Read the article for an explanation.)

Next up: roads and transportation

Update on Infrastructure, pt 1

In garbage and recycling news, the collection barrels were deemed inadequate, and thus were emptied to avoid, I was told, encouraging people to make use of a temporary and insufficient system. Students and staff, a university official explained, are meant to take care of their own waste (which mostly means tossing it on the ground or over the campus fence). It's unclear when - or even if - a new system will be put in place. For the time being, those of us living on campus are on our own if we don't want to just toss our garbage onto the pile (likely to be burned). A decidedly negative development as we prepare for Saturday's fun run event that's raising money for waste disposal!

On a lighter note (pun weak but intended), it turns out that some of last week's frequent power outages were part of planned upgrades to a nearby major transmission line. That said, the campus started the day without electricity.

Madiba vigil

© 2012 Zapiro (All Rights Reserved)
Printed/Used with permission from www.zapiro.com

As I join so many around the world in following Nelson Mandela's frail health, I enjoyed listening to "The Mandela Tapes," an episode of CBC radio's Ideas program. It reviews Mandela's life with audio drawn from over 50 hours of interviews with the icon. Also, as usual, South African political cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, aka Zapiro, has a gift for capturing the mood of his country. To see more of his incisive cartoons, here is a link to his website.

Infrastructure part 1, electricity and garbage

In a 2012 interview, the much-revered late Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, proudly spoke of the progress that his government had made: "there is a school in every village and clinics in every village, roads, infrastructure." Indeed, Ethiopia has set an impressive pace for development, which is reflected in the country's progress on the Millennium Development Goals. At the same time, behind any such national average lies a range of "on the ground reality." In the Geography classroom, I try to illustrate this for students with the example of population density, a statistic that misleadingly implies a uniform distribution of population ("like icing on a cake"). National wealth measures are another good example, as they leave out the crucial question of how that wealth is distributed across the population.

In any case, living in a rapidly growing neighborhood on the edge of this rapidly growing city, I am witnessing first-hand the challenges of providing adequate infrastructure. It has been, for example, a week of frequent power outages, including Wednesday when a computer lab-based lesson had to be postponed when the campus lost power just before class. There were also at least three outages  yesterday - all while I was working on the computer preparing class materials! It's been a good chance to practice patience, flexibility, and advanced planning.

A big challenge for both the campus and the neighborhood is trash disposal. Despite the relative proximity of a landfill (about 4 kilometers away), a striking amount of garbage gets tossed by the side of the streets and into open areas. Much of this trash is food waste, which attracts vultures and dogs by day - and, by night, hyenas from the nearby forested hills. A lot of it is plastic, especially bottles and bags, and it is common to come across piles of this trash being burned in an open area or by the side of the road. Some of it does get hauled away, and there are often people picking through the trash piles for anything that might still be of use or value, but much of it just spreads out and slowly becomes part of the surrounding dirt and vegetation.  
 
On the college campus, there is no city trash service (because it is combined with water service, and the college has its own well). At first, rubbish was just piled in an open area on campus. Once that was deemed too unsightly, the facilities staff resorted to either burning it or tossing it over the fence into the adjacent fields. More recently, an Environmental Science teacher and a group of students (the aptly-named Positivist and Visionary Club) set up a collection system that separates garbage from recycling. The next step is arranging for the collected waste to be hauled away. Another promising sign is the development of a composting area. Besides reducing the volume of garbage that needs to be hauled away, there is a productive school garden that will make good use of the decomposed food scraps. 

The campus waste disposal station.

To raise awareness and to help fund this modest infrastructure, a group of us have planned a 5km fun run for next weekend. In consultation with students and administrators, I designed t-shirts for the run, and all the proceeds from shirt sales will go toward offsetting the waste disposal costs. We sold out of the first order of 60 shirts in one hour yesterday! After some quick negotiations, the administration agreed to fund a second order. The enthusiasm is promising. Although it might be better if, instead of running, we all just walk the route and pick up trash as we go. (But then, where would we put it...?) One step at a time.

Coming soon: more infrastructure, housing and roads.        

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Early morning web surfing

Here's one of the Editorial Cartoon All-Stars from the Union of Concerned Scientists. See the rest at the UCS website.

According to allAfrica.com, apparently "thousands protested in the streets" here on Sunday (the first significant political protests since 2005). I had no idea! (I also had no idea that an Ethiopian "Spice Girls" group is being formed.) Clearly, it pays to Google.

Here's the weather that's in store for Addis Ababa this week:

Ethiopia in the news

I've had quite a few interesting, Ethiopia-related media pieces forwarded to me in recent weeks. For example, an article from the French newspaper Le Monde, "Boomtown Ethiopia - Can Former Poster Child Nation Become A Model For African Growth?" (translated into English here), and an Economist article that takes a critical look at Ethiopia's state-controlled development policies. Also, the video of  an Ethiopian-born graduate delivering the Valedictorian speech at Morehouse College, sharing the podium with President Obama. Another is a radio piece produced by a Seattle student whose mother left Ethiopia during the civil unrest of the 1980s. Then there's this great blog that covers "Politics and Religion in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa." A search for "Ethiopia" brings up coverage of negotiations between Ethiopia and the neighboring countries with whom it shares the Nile River.

NPR and other news outlets have also been reporting on concern and controversy around the major hydroelectric dam projects underway here, one of which - the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam - will be "Africa's largest" and promises to generate over 5,000 megawatts of electricity when completed in about five more years. Among the issues are concern in Egypt over availability of vital water farther down the Nile, the displacement of people for the construction, the push for public funding of the projects, and detention of journalists for reporting on these issues. This CNN video from last year gives good background and images.

In Ethiopia, the dams are being celebrated as essential steps toward economic development, and the government is understandably sensitive about this criticism. The website of Ethiopia's Embassy in London is a great source of information from the government's perspective; it includes a link to "A Week in the Horn" a Ministry of Foreign Affairs weekly publication and "Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance," a special section from the May-June 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Lurking in the background of all this news coverage are the challenges of accommodating a rapidly growing population (both in the capital city and across the country), extending the benefits of development to the poorest people, and protecting the environment along the way.