Wrapping up an amazing teaching stint

Working with this group of students has been so rewarding and inspiring. It is hard to put into words the connection that I have grown to feel with them and the qualities that they radiate. They are among the most diligent, earnest, polite, kind, generous, funny, hard-working, joyful, and optimistic young people I have encountered in my nearly 25 years of teaching. They have also bonded into a model community of academic effort and intellectual inquiry, of collaboration and play, and of mutual support and care. They are going to make a great founding core of ILAE's first class. School will resume for them in September, and they - and their classmates - will be offered a full grade 9 academic program.   

As cheerful and delightful as these students are, they are also quite smart and savvy and are in no way naïve about the obstacles they face in their lives - both in Ethiopia and in the world. They are not from the privileged class in their own society, and they live in a relatively quite poor and marginalized country on the world stage. And yet they dream, they are proud, and they believe - in the transformative power of education, in their own potential, and in bright future possibilities for themselves and for Ethiopia. I wish I could feel more confident that the forces at work in the world - and in their own country - will in fact afford them adequate opportunity to pursue these dreams. I fervently hope so. If not, I will feel some guilt for having contributed to nurturing these hopes and dreams...   

In any case, I can't thank ILAE enough for the opportunity to participate in this project. I am also grateful for the ever-supportive NWS community. It has also been wonderful to find so many supporters and friends here in Addis, especially the volunteers who have joined the ILAE team as well as so many on the Hope University College campus. As sad as I get looking at this picture of the empty main classroom, I am excited to think of these students once again filling it with their personalities and energy in just a few weeks.

 

Infrastructure part 3, transportation

One striking thing about the visual landscape of Addis Ababa is the sheer mass of people seemingly constantly on the move. One example is the daily tide of white-shrouded worshippers ebbing and flowing, especially in the early morning hours, around the churches. While these crowds move with a peaceful rhythm, it's a different story with the less settled, more frenetic movement of the throngs of people trying to navigate daily travel from point A to point B in this city. Vehicle traffic, as I've described before, chokes many of the keys roads and intersections, and the crowds of people waiting for transportation seem constant. There is also a steady stream of people providing their own transportation by walking. These pedestrians, who decidedly do not have the right of way, must dodge one another, be always on the watch for broken pavement and other obstacles (street vendors, beggars, animals, animal waste, etc.), avoid (during this wet season) the patches of mud and standing water, and weave their way through the cars, trucks, and buses to cross any streets.

Like so many services and resources here, transportation options are largely dictated by how much money a person has. Even though Ethiopia has a relatively less unequal division of wealth (as measured by the Gini coefficient, an inequality index that ranks Ethiopia least unequal on the African continent), even small differences affect what is affordable. There is, then, a transportation hierarchy - as there is for schools, restaurants, medical clinics, grocery stores and other shops. For those not walking (the least expensive option, not considering time, health, or safety), the options are like a ladder, becoming more expensive but also more convenient and more comfortable with each ascending rung.


At the top of this ladder, as with everything here, are the VIPs – government officials, foreign dignitaries, NGO officers, and the wealthy. They drive around in big cars (think Land Cruisers), often with hired drivers, and seem to have (or just claim) road priority and right of way.
The government taxes car sales at nearly 100%, in part to raise needed revenue and in part to mitigate traffic. That latter goal is not working; even though Ethiopia has an estimated mere 3 motor vehicles per 1,000 people nation wide (compared to 809 in the US), they seem to nearly all be in Addis!
Many of the cars on the roads, especially the taxis, are 15-30 year-old Toyotas and Ladas (a Russian model), and even these can cost as much as four times what they would in the US, putting them out of reach for most Ethiopians. Also, gas here costs about the same here as it does in the US.  
Foreigner visitors like us, with some means, occupy the next rung down on the transportation ladder. We can afford to be driven around in contract (or private) taxis. We get taken directly to our desired destination, and we don't have to share our ride. We still jostle through traffic with the rest of
the driving public, and we compete for lane space with trucks, buses, and a huge fleet of min-van taxis.
 

 

These mini-van taxis, the next rung down on the ladder, are ubiquitous and operate along a surprisingly organized and efficient (when you can get on one!) network of routes. They cost about a 10th of what we pay for a private taxi (or less, depending on how far one travels and how many transfers one makes), and they seem in constant demand.

The big city buses, on the other hand, are even cheaper; one ride cost me 2 birr (about 11 cents). Again, the lines for these buses are quite long during peak hours, and they are usually jam packed with riders. As far as I can tell, they are the bottom rung (besides walking): crowded, hot, uncomfortable, and rumored to be unsafe.      

Out here in our neighborhood, two other transportation alternatives. Bajajs and horse carts. The former are quick, affordable 3-wheeled motorized carts that buzz up and down short routes along the arterials. The latter seem an anachronism, but they both reflect the area's recent rural past and offer a very practical and necessary way of moving people and material into the undeveloped fringes of the city.

Visiting Lalibela

 

The historic rock-hewn churches here are a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was remarkable to wander among and between these 800 year-old monuments to faith and engineering. (More info from UNESCO.)

 

China bashing

I started think about this entry back in my first weeks here. I jotted down a few notes at the time - and since, but it's been hard to feel comfortable with how to approach the topic. Since I'm running out of time, here's what I've come up with. I'm curious what others have seen elsewhere in Africa and in other parts of the world. I'm not sure that China is doing anything different from the earlier imperialists. At the same time, I'm quite wary of the long-term concessions being made here (such as land and other resource access) for what seems like relatively short-term development assistance. Capacity-building for African prosperity doesn't seem to be the priority, as much as "developing" Africa as a consumer market (again, a phenomenon that echoes the continent's colonial history). China's role in Africa is a much discussed and debated topic. I found this short book interesting and informative: China in Africa (2007). Please send along any articles and books that you recommend.

The past few weeks have been plagued with more frequent power outages than usual. From my observation, a definite issue is the rapid growth of the city. Even though the power cuts are not limited to our relatively new area, it seems a lot to ask – at least in such a relatively resource-limited country – for reliable infrastructure and service delivery to keep up with the growth. A recent newspaper article blamed, at least in part, a cut-back in transmission line maintenance. Some power lines (and transformers, etc.) are aging, and others seem to have been of dubious quality in the first place. Here in Addis, nearly everything that breaks down, doesn't work properly, or is otherwise of dubious quality gets blamed on the most common place of origin: China. 
 

This issue of cheaply-made goods and material extends across the Ethiopian economy. Like in other African countries, the markets here are awash in cheap (and cheaply-made) product, largely plastic but metal too. Well-made and durable products are too expensive for most consumers here, so instead they buy the less expensive and poorly-made alternatives: products that break quite fast and then need to be replaced. In our compound, we’ve experienced this short product lifespan quite a few times (a tea kettle, a couple of brooms and dustpans, pots and pans, some cleaning brushes, a power strip), and the waste produced by this cycle is evident in the ubiquitous mounds of trash that plague many neighborhoods here.  

 

Since most of these products come from China, that is where the blame gets placed. “Chinese-made” or “Made in China” are used as short-hand for anything cheap or shoddy or that doesn’t last. This includes many of Addis’s new main roads, since Chinese companies secure most of these construction contracts and thus provide the bulk of the design and engineering, as well as much of the materials, equipment, and even labor. Whether through willful negligence or more innocent inexperience, these roads are clearly not well-designed for the local conditions. They are, for example, buckling or subsiding in many places, and they are rife with potholes. Further, because they are not able to drain off the water that accumulates during the rainy season, entire sections of road all over the city become impassable due to literal lakes of standing water. This is in part due the volumes of mud that clog the drains (mud that the highway department could and should do better at removing), but there are clear design flaws as well. This was evident a few days ago when we drove through deep standing water on an overpass!

Just like with the shoddy household products, the state of the roads frustrates drivers here on a daily basis. It makes an already strained transportation situation that much worse (especially in the rain), and it must put a significant damper on both personal and general economic productivity. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine either Addis or Ethiopia being able to develop as quickly without the considerable Chinese investment. The biggest current such project is the urban light rail network (the cause of – or at least the scapegoat for – the chronic traffic jams in the city’s center). There are also numerous other Chinese construction projects in the city (such as a big new hotel at the AU compound), and I have seen a couple of big Chinese industrial sites on the outskirts of the city.  The Chinese are also rebuilding the historic rail connection between Ethiopia and Djibouti.     

 
Although the frustration here is legitimate and there is a technical truth to the origin of the poorly-made products, the frequency and derisive ease with which the Chinese are blanketly blamed feels both racist and unfair. While policies and decisions at the highest levels of government and business could certainly be more responsible, the masses on both ends of this exchange are pretty powerless. Ethiopians can only buy what they can afford, and it’s hard to imagine that the factory workers somewhere in China have any control over the quality of their output nor any conception of where the products they are making are going to end up. Nonetheless, hardly a day goes by here without someone (Ethiopian or Western visitor) blaming the poor quality of something on “the Chinese.” As a result, despite frequent media images of beaming officials sealing deals and embracing one another, the Chinese people here seem to be somewhat excluded, at the street level, from the warm hospitality that other foreigners enjoy.

The infrastructure stars are aligned

So here are a few photos from the summer session:

All five NWS-affiliated visitors were on the ground together for about 24 hours.   

We're having weekly community meetings to share work from our classes. 

I choose to read these expressions as rapt attention.

Me having a Lorax moment upon return to the mountain top.

Pictures courtesy of Andy and his nice camera.

We decided to drag the whole summer session to the top; they loved it!

 Campus infrastructure update:

 The generator has arrived! It came from the Netherlands in a shipping container and reached Addis a couple weeks ago after spending months stuck in customs limbo in Djibouti. No immediate relief, however, for our frequent power cuts, as the installers/electricians aren't coming until September.

Window of opportunity

Well, yesterday turns out to have been quite a gift – and an anomaly: it was mostly dry, which kept the tracked-in mud to a minimum and allowed the students to play outside a bit after lunch; we had power all day, which was great for the computer lessons we had planned (PowerPoint sharing and an Excel intro); and, for the first time in two weeks, the internet (which came on in the afternoon) lasted into the evening and was available in our living quarters. Wow! Of course, after catching up on some email, photo processing, and school prep work, I saved blog posting until this morning… and now the power is off again –and it’s raining. Oh well. In our group here, we’ve adopted and modified a popular phrase from the African aid community: T.I.A., “This is Africa,” has become T.I.E., “This is Ethiopia.” We use it uncritically (like “c’est la vie” or “ni modo”) as a reminder to just accept and roll with what we get on any given day. We still have all the important stuff – food, shelter, community – and, like so many Ethiopians have said to me so often, each day of life with these basic needs met is gift. I feel the truth of that more viscerally here than I ever have before. 

Posted during the lunch break. More posts and pictures coming... assuming the stars are still aligned after the teaching day.

The Joys of Living with Unpredictability!

The theme of service delivery over the last few weeks (and months) can be summed up in a word: unpredictable. For some reason, the local infrastructure has been particularly challenged in recent days.

An example: on Friday afternoon, at the end of a long week of teaching, a colleague and I sat down at the two office computers to wrap up some work before enjoying an evening out. Just as the computers were booting up… ZAP! The power went out. It came on 90 minutes later, but that’s how it’s been going here; we never know what will work and what won’t, nor how long something will keep working. It makes cooking an adventure (the pasta water may or may not get to a boil, and that egg just might get fully fried, or it might not…), and the daily suspense involved with taking a shower is exciting (will there be hot water or water pressure this morning?). Besides being unpredictable, there never seems to be an explanation for any particular service outage - except for the routine blaming of any such problem on inferior components from China (see next post for more on this phenomenon).

It’s been a good exercise in taking nothing for granted, in being flexible, and in appreciating the simple luxuries and conveniences when they are available. The power goes out 2 or 3 times most days, which mean no hot water, no internet, and low to no water pressure. Sometimes the power stays off for a short time (45 minutes or so), and other times it’s gone for half a day or more. This makes prepping for class hard, since no power means no printing or photocopying teaching materials and no getting the students into the Computer Lab (which we try to do for a period each day – and we’ve had good luck in that goal). At worst, it has also meant not being able to flush toilets or wash hands before lunch – which is a challenge since we eat with our daily lunch our hands!

Independent of the power, the campus internet service also disappears a few times each week (at its worst, we were more than 10 days without service). In addition, the ethio tel cellular network (nicknamed the “not-work”) is very spotty in our area. We often can’t make or receive calls, and text messages can arrive anywhere between 20 minutes and 6 hours after they were sent. Again, unpredictability! 

What’s been inspiring in the face of all this inconvenience is how many people manage to stay laid-back and not get worked up by the service interruptions.Our students are especially resilient and perpetually cheerful. For myself, I feel like I’m doing well at appreciating the days and times that the services all work – and not worrying too much when they don’t. It helps, of course, to know that just outside the college gates people are living in much more challenging conditions, for example with no plumbing and no appliances to use even if the power is on.

Monday morning update:

power? YES

Internet? NO

hot water? YES

water pressure? NO

Monday evening update: all systems off (am posting this, more than 36 hours after writing it, from an Internet cafe with a generator)