First reflections from Ethiopia

 

I’ve been in Ethiopia now since Saturday night – enough time to pull together a few thoughts and reflections on just being here.

Another day you can have an update on the teaching and training that Jude and I are delivering whilst we are here, and I’ll update you on the partners as well at some point, but for today – just some general first impressions for this trip.

This isn’t the first time of being in Addis, but it’s interesting coming here after a few weeks in another African capital, and I think that is leading to some heightened awareness and comparisons than might previously have happened.

Ethiopia is very proud of its status as being one of only two countries that was not colonised (the other being Liberia), and that history permeates into daily life in many ways. For example, unlike many other African countries, a white person is not a mzungu here, but a firenge. They have their own calendar (it’s currently 2016 here), and their own way of telling time (0hrs daytime is at 6am, and 0hs nighttime is at 6pm, so what we would call 10am is 4 in the morning!). And it feels like a country that is independently driving forwards in its own way, rather than struggling to shrug off a colonial past and a sense of being owed something by those previous colonisers. This independence is also highlighted in the fact that it is home to the headquarters of the African Union, another fact of which Ethiopia has great pride.

The skyscrapers are being thrown up, the architecture is exciting and a bit different, and the drivers follow the rules and wait their turn at traffic lights (to be fair, they do that in some other bits of Africa as well eg Kigali, but definitely not always in Kampala where I’ve just been!). Yes the roads are busy, but they have an overland light railway to help ease the commuter burden, and the drivers just seem to better at realising that waiting a bit longer is better than trying to steal an inch and end up blocking the road the other way and causing a crazy jam!

But there are aspects that are similar to all cities I’ve been to in Africa. The pockets of total poverty living in the shadows of very high-cost accommodation is something that never ceases to shock me. Homes made out of tarpaulin and rusted metal sheets sit precariously on the bits of ground that are of no value to anyone else, or that could get washed away if the river flooded. There seem to be more people living on the streets this time round as well, something that is attributed to the number of internally displaced people as a result of the war going on in the north of the country.

This was exemplified by a conversation we had yesterday when out for a walk. We ended up chatting to a lad who is in Addis to try and do some university – he wants to be a doctor and said he had wanted to do it back home but the war meant he had to relocate. Now he is trying to get registered locally so that he can go to a local University until the time when he can go back.

A sight that made me sad on the night I arrived was the number of girls standing at the side of the road waiting to be picked up. I know it happens in every city, but I guess I don’t tend to be out much at night, and certainly not in the red light districts. But on Saturday the route to the hotel took us that way and it was a very sad reminder of just what so many girls and young women are having to endure on a nightly basis for various reasons. Poverty, escaping from forced child marriages, the lure of the city lights, rural-urban trafficking, escaping domestic servitude… My heart bled for those girls, so many of them just teenagers, and the positive life opportunities that are just not available to them.

The national drink is coffee, and the national food is injera – a huge crepe sort of thing made out of tef (local grain) that comes rolled up, and which is eaten with various sauces, using just one hand. Not quite mastered the art yet, but I’m getting better.

Addis Ababa is a buzzing city with sights, sounds and smells to stimulate the senses. In the evenings coffee ceremonies are taking place on most street corners, with people stopping by to sit and enjoy a cup of their favourite drink before carrying on home. Other folks stand patiently in amazingly long lines of people waiting for the next taxi minibus to come by and squeeze in as many passengers as possible. In some ways it feels like a bit of a grey city, as it doesn’t have the red dust that comes with the dirt roads of so many of the cities in sub-saharan Africa. But it’s surrounded by hills, and I’m hoping that by the end of the week we’ll have been up into some of them to have the chance to look down on this fascinating place.

So there you have it – a few snapshots of this city, one that I’m fast becoming very fond of, and one that I’m looking forward to exploring more over the coming days. I'll end with a few snaps that between them capture a sense of the variations of the city!