ANOTHER LITTLE, BUT LONGER, EXCURSION

Written before the 'war' with Somalia! Dec. 2006

Gosh, away two weeks and there is post with Christmas cards! One forgets in this country about this festivity as they only celebrate in January (the Julian Calendar also allow one to celebrate the true Millennium next September, don’t forget! The rehearsal 7 years ago was for this coming year’s true celebration). The Sheraton Hotel is the only place where wonderfully tasteful Xmas decorations have manifested themselves in Addis. But if there is anyone out there (and I am constantly surprised when someone casually remarks something about the blog and I am amazed to know they have read it), this come to you with my very best wishes for a jolly good Festive Season.


My work in the office of Habitat for Humanity Ethiopia is virtually over. I have translated into ‘good’ English whatever document or letter I could find. Leaflets have been redesigned and the large Manual prepared. How they are going to keep busy a USA volunteer who is coming for 9 months (all her living expenses to be paid by HFHE) and who does not speak the language either, I fail to understand. My cynicism about volunteers/volunteering and the often waste of good talent, continues. Here the policy is to employ local people and Faranjis are not really necessary. I was lucky to step in when I did, but was acutely aware that I was not really being fully employed. There is no house-building going on at present, so I cannot even get my hands dirty. Hence the chance to go off and do some exploring of Ethiopia. By the way, the National Director has just returned from a visit to Madagascar where he was “shocked by the poverty and pollution” (his words). Quite a statement when one thinks of the dreadful pollution in Addis and the signs of poverty wherever one turns. And, horror upon horror, he made final decisions about one of the leaflets, added more script and had it printed!!! Now my Proper English has once again been bastardized and I just cannot believe how tacky it is! Just what I have been fighting against!

We are supposed to be in a state of war with Somaliland within the week. To the North, there has been an ongoing border dispute with Eritrea despite the end of the war there a few years ago. To the south, the Omo People’s Liberation Front has been struggling for years to unify their claims on both sides of the border with Kenya where the Colonialists had divided their tribe in the 19th century (I was told that the two governments had come to a secret arrangement to stop this dispute by allowing their respective soldiers to cross the border in pursuit of ‘rebels’. A few weeks ago the Ethiopians killed three of these ‘rebels’ across the border.) The press is heavily censored and opposition leaders in prison. To the west, the freedom fighters for the Gambella region have been active for years. Two people were gunned down in Jimma (a town near to this area) a few weeks ago, according to ‘those in the know’. If one reads the Foreign Office email warnings that one can subscribe to, one will stay out of all these regions. But I have met enough travelers to know that all this has to be taken with a pinch of salt and that Faranjis are not a target and can cause more trouble than it is worth.

So off to Gambella with Fiker to see some of the west: The poor boy had a hard time with me as he had to be Guide, top-negotiator and translator, as well as meant to improve his English. He had never been to the west or even seen thick natural forests, so this was a good opportunity for him. I spoilt it by nagging him to improve his English, which just got stuck in bad grammar and unstructured sentences and the exercise book I bought for notes was not used. How dare I assume I can teach when I can only speak the language and have not taken a TEFL course?!

This western part of Ethiopia is full of natural landscapes, but not much of cultural value. Unless a tourist wants to see and visit villages, there is not much to justify the endless roads of bumps and delays. Privately owned vehicles are virtually non-existent. Only busses and trucks occasionally ply the roads, which are graded according to the expected daily usage; e.g. we were occasionally between major towns on RR (Rural Road) 50 roads, which mean that no more than 50 vehicles a day can be expected to use them. Our trip was a series of bus and truck journeys of varying comfort and speed. Fortunately only the first one from Addis had the usual mechanical problems. By breakdown No.8 the passengers were fed up and while Fiker and I were on our usual walk (I had decided to walk along the road and be picked up by the bus – mad Faranji! - when it is finally fixed), they had managed to commandeer another bus and get a 5Birr refund on the 39Birr tickets. Half the passengers remained and I decided to also sit it out to see what happened. We had only one other 2-hour breakdown and arrived 9 hours later than expected in Jimma. The road had been prepared for resurfacing for many hours. Large piles of grit littered the road and there was no sign of any road-working activity. It was as though the contractor for the grit had done his job, but the other contractors had disappeared off the face of Ethiopia. So bumps and delays (once we stopped right in the middle of the road and no traffic could go either way for over an hour) through glorious countryside where the final harvesting was being done and the cultivated fields turned into green tree-covered hills and valleys, gave one an opportunity to feel close to it all.

When we arrived in Jimma, after sitting/walking since 5am, it was midnight and we flopped into the nearest hotel without supper (the Ethiopians eat early). All these basic hotels are the same and are generally very cheap, but unfortunately I came up behind Fiker just as he asked the price, so we were charged 25 instead of probably 15Birr (one pound) each for our rooms. After that I learnt to hide in the shadows until he had determined the price of whatever hotel we decided to use. They are generally, by Ethiopian standards, very suitable: a large room with uncomfortable double bed, clean sheets, bottle of local water and potty under the bed, bedside cabinet and chair. Light bulbs are very dim as they do not read in bed… If you are lucky, a cold communal shower and the usual unspeakable toilet hole somewhere. The architecture, however, always left me frustrated because the rooms are generally in a long row off a verandah with only a window on the front entrance wall and a ‘compound’, which is often a restaurant/bar with accompanying deafening noise, in the centre. Note that I refuse to call their loud noise, ‘music’, although it can be pleasant when not so overwhelming, especially when one wants to sleep. Not to have windows to the back makes sense to deter burglars or non-paying guests, but it means that one cannot have the window open as there are no curtains and anyone can see/climb in. It is also just part of their culture to sleep in very dark, enclosed spaces, so my need for fresh air is not understood. Nor do Ethiopians understand the Western way of life and to them the only dirt is what falls on the floor. Walls, furniture and other surfaces are never cleaned or repaired once they are installed, so things are often grubby or non-functioning. But that is what one must accept if one wants to be a non-invasive tourist! I take a delight in leaving my small bar of hotel soap (saved from the Addis hotel where one gets a new bar every day) in the room, knowing that it is probably going to be thrown away as soap is an unknown. This is not true of course, but generally, for daily use, soap is not used. However, I have seen people bathing in rivers or dams, soaping their bodies, so this is a real prejudice on my part!

During one of our breakdowns on that first bus, the sun was setting and we were eventually walking along a deserted country road in total darkness. Fiker kept quiet, but when we eventually saw candlelight on the side of the road, we pounced on the tiny shop selling a few items. Little packets of dry biscuits were a welcome source of food. I wanted to continue, but Fiker insisted on walking back to the distant bus. Only then did I realize what fear he had been under. As a city boy, he was not used to the total dark and had been imagining wild animal attacks. Years ago in Ireland I had been told of two city girls taken out of Dublin for a ride one night. They were suddenly confronted by a dark world and became completely hysterical. So Fiker’s forbearance was admirable.

Jimma was once a capital city for the area and the 19th century king, Abba Jiffar, had a palace built on the nearby hilltop by an Indian Architect. He was king of the Kafar region and you can therefore deduce that we were in the original home of the coffee plant. We hired bicycles for the day and rode about town (the museum was inexplicably closed, although I suspect they do not have many visitors) and we cycled/pushed our bikes the 8km out of town to view the wooden palace. All sadly neglected, but as always, there are hopes of restoring it when a kind organization can offer the funds. The downhill return journey was difficult as the one brake each on either bike was not functioning well and the hills and gravel roads meant one could skid badly. My left wrist was sore for days!

That evening I decided to reward ourselves with a meal in the local tourist hotel which did Faranji food. The Jimma Centeral Jimma Hotel did us proud despite a sudden and violent downpour which struck the electricity and left us stranded and in candle-lit conditions. The ‘English’ menus are always a source of wonder and amusement. I had Fille steak centeral style with rise and vegetable. All it meant was a piece of tough beef which had been pounded into pieces, some rice and chips. I asked for the ‘vegetable’ they had promised and was reluctantly give some super, garlic-over-killed kale. The garlic gave me a sleepless night, or maybe it was the change from the usual goats’ meat. Fiker had Zebra shafe stick which, translated, meant that the meat was cooked in coffee (not that one could taste it or see the black and white effect), that it was the chef’s special and a piece of steak. These literal (?) translations without reference to spelling reflect the fact that in Amharic, there is no spelling rule and, with an alphabet of 33 letters, each of which can be written in 7 different ways, one can understand their lack of care when we make a fuss about spelling. I wish sometimes I had written down all the menu listings I have seen…. The other day, in my own hotel, I ordered beef boil, thinking that a bit of boiled beef would be a pleasant change from the usual stuff one gets in their meat dishes. What eventually appeared was a plate full of hard little balls of minced beef.

The tedium that is travel in Africa…. Another day of bus occupation followed until we had gone through the area of large coffee and tea plantations and ended up in the town of Tepi. We managed to arrange to be at the local government-owned coffee plantation for departure on a day-tour at 8am the next day. But there was no vehicle and after a few hours’ wait, we were told to return at 1pm. The guided tour was worth all effort to get there! As I had never seen coffee growing, everything was fascinating; from the types of trees to the rows of bananas on the edges of the plantations which are used to keep the monkeys happy so that they do not eat the small, sweetish coffee berries; the vast tree-cover to ensure that the coffee trees only get 50% sunlight was a delight and the fact that every bean is individually picked or picked up (the same of course applies to the collection of tea leaves) is just mind-boggling; the final operational buildings where the beans are graded, squashed to remove the outer husk, left in water to soften, washed and then finally separated and dried in the sun on wooden structures, was all new to me. Finally, in a shed, women were sitting on the floor and laboriously going through the dried beans to remove impurities. It does make one appreciate this wonderful bean! I once watched a street seller of freshly-brewed coffee fill a container of boiling water over a wood fire with the contents of a half kilo packet of freshly ground coffee. The little cups of coffee she then sold for one Birr were as good as any one can get in any smart coffee shop throughout the world. Somehow it does not seem right…

It took two days to get to our next destination; Gambella. The first bus took us to a village from which there was no further bus that day. Whilst patiently and optimistically waiting for some kind of transport, I bought a piece of material and then decided there was enough time for the tailor to make me a blouse. In India, I had done the same and my little Sikkim man had ‘knocked up’ a blouse in 5 minute. This tailor, with the Indian blouse in front of him, made a complete hash of the job and the more tried to correct things, the worse it got. So I have not yet worn it. But it saved getting bored and by 3.30 we were ready to get a hotel when a truck suddenly appeared. It was heavily loaded with enormous hard balls of beeswax. The area is famous for its honey and it was interesting to see the quantity of wax produced. It is one of Ethiopia’s major exports.
We had just settled in the back under a tarpaulin with other people and children when everybody was suddenly ordered out. I crouched in my corner on a sack of grain whilst a soldier and small child and I sat out the ‘inspection’ of the usual traffic police. But they had seen the personal belongings of the others and the driver was fined. Everyone knows what goes on, but one has to adhere to the pretence. This meant that Fiker and the others had to walk about 3 km along the road before they could join us again for the rest of the trip. And as the rain had been coming down very heavily, it was a bedraggled group who finally managed to get back on the back of the truck. We continued to pick up customers and arrived late at night, a bit sore and cold in a town where there would be a connecting bus to Gambella the next day.

The bus ride through dense tropical forest and then open scrub should have taken a few hours only, but when we arrived at the bridge which crosses a tributary of the Baro River, there were no other vehicles to create a convoy and we had to wait for hours for someone else to arrive to justify the convoy. The locals were about 40 soldiers (I had asked how many lived at this camp and was told that it is ‘top Secret’ information) and their ‘hangers-on’ like the women who cooked their food. Interesting to see how they can create a meal for about 60 people in their small tented areas. Mind you, it was ultimately only the usual injera and a lentil sauce.

In the mean time we could go down to the river and dangle our feet in the cool water. In no time the feet were being ‘attacked’ by small fish. Definitely the latest fashion for getting smelly feet cleaned! I caught one in a plastic bag for my ‘fish research’ but the locals did not even have a name for them and the species was christened ‘Hilda’s toe suckers’.

It was getting late and the soldiers finally decided that we should move on before the dark set in.

A truck with 9 gunmen outside (and probably 4 inside) led the way. Our ‘convoy’ was two busses and a truck. The cost of all this is mind-boggling, but I suppose it does give work to some people. After a few hair-raising minutes (and that is only because of the fast driving on the usual bumpy roads and sharp bends as we descended the plateau), we stopped and 4 soldiers crammed into the already overcrowded bus. This was our protection for the next hour or so. But as they could hardly hold on to the bars in the passageway, let alone look through the steamy windows (Ethiopians do not believe in fresh air), I doubt that we were very safely protected from the bandits or freedom fighters or whatever they want to be called, who are supposed to roam the hills. There has been ‘trouble’ in that area for years and one does hear about the occasional gunfight, but as far as I am concerned, all was peace and light.

Gambella is on the only navigable river in Ethiopia and was once used extensively for the transport of slaves (25,000 per annum) as it is close to the Sudanese border and the Baro joins the Nile on its way to Egypt. Today, at 526m above sea level, it is the home of a virulent species of mosquito which causes a very high rate of malarial deaths. It is also the sub-quarters of the UN Commission for Refugees or some such high-fuluten name. I did not see a faranji anywhere during the two days we spent there. On the evening of the first day, we were having a beer by the riverside, watching the extensive riverine birdlife and the sun setting over the water. A vehicle with a loudspeaker was hailing the people to tell them that the next day would be a holiday and they must go to the Stadium grounds to celebrate the anniversary of the ratification of the New Constitution. Across the river is the longest bridge in E. (as we were constantly and proudly told) and we could see the man in charge of the police force training his men to march in step. They just could not master it and the next day, at the official parade everyone attended, as he proudly led them, he was constantly looking back at his marching troops to check if they were in step. They were not.

The night we arrived we had a meal and were charged double what it should have been. On reflection the next day I was not going to let them get away with it and went to speak to the manager. He was furious that I had been treated like this and the waiter was summoned. Sadly, although the waiter confessed and gave us back the money, the manager stripped him of his money-apron, slapped him around the head and dismissed him. I had nightmares after that as I could only imagine the man being unemployed in an area where there is no work anyway. Have I caused the starvation of yet another family?

We spent days visiting the tribal villages of the Nuer and Anuwak which are within the town. These tribes have distinctive building styles, clothes, habits (the Anuwak are great smokers of tobacco through a gourd water pipe) and tribal body-markings. However, they are both very dark, very thin and very tall. We attended the parade to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the Ethiopian Constitution (anything for a party!) and for the first time in my life I felt short in a world of tall people! It was held on the stadium grounds and there was not a white face to be seen. Usually some dignitaries would attend and sit for hours in the hot sun on the podium, but I suspect the UN Faranjis knew when to keep away! The last time I was so surrounded by a mass of people was in Athens in the 1960s when the vast crowds swept one along in their frenzied anti-govt. mood. This was a happy crowd using the excuse of a holiday to have a jolly good time. Small groups of people would have their own dress and music and dance for hours up and down the streets and around the parade ground. Speeches were often ignored while everyone just danced and sang.

I had met a member of Women Welcome Women World Wide (5W) in Addis when she went there for a course and she had invited me to visit her in Dembi Dollo, a village not far from Gambella. To get there though, would involve two days as one would have to return on the ‘protected road’ to the original town we set off from and then get a bus back to this village. The other alternative was to find a truck that might be doing the short-cut route on a very bad road through bandit country. Neither of those two elements arose, although Felik admitted that he was scared throughout the trip and I just never thought of it. I was well into reading ‘The Balkan Trilogy’ with its wonderful descriptions of the Romanian peasants, the starvation, the begging, the homelessness, the fear…. And one could but reflect on the African situation which is just mirroring what Eastern Europe was like a few years ago.

Staying in a ‘Western’ house for a change was very pleasant! Hana and her husband had been influenced by a German nurse who had been working in the local hospital and eventually married an Ethiopian. She returned to Germany with her family and left her house to the newly married couple. They had been taught many of the western ways and I reveled in being able to peel onions, lay the table, play with the dogs, sweep the floor and make beds. All the domestic chores I have not been doing for so many months! And then to lay in the garden and read peacefully or go for long walks, was just what a holiday is all about.

To get back to Addis took two more days of bus-riding. Not something to be recommended when there is really nothing much to see or do after so many cramped hours. But I am glad I did go west, if only to say that it needs a lot of hours to see very little.