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The market in Chencha

The market in Chencha

At last: back in the Motherland

Claes Britton | Mar 29, 2009 | 2 comments

Our human memory is mercilessly short. Of this old truth we are constantly reminded, so that at least we should be able to keep in mind.

When I traveled in Ethiopia with my dear father in the eighties and nineties, in the times of the famin disasters, Bob Geldof and Bono, I was met with shocked expressions from my fellowmen, along with questions about how on earth I could stand to face all this starvation, this war and suffering (of war and real starvation, I saw nothing during my travels).

Now when it was time to return at last, for the first time in more than a decade, we received no such looks or questions. Instead, the common reaction from friends and associates when we told them wherabout we were traveling, was: "Oh, how wonderful", but with something lingering and wondering in their tones of voices, apparently in the vague presumption that Ethiophia was some new warm and sunny African tourist destination, in the same league as Gambia, Kenya or Zanzibar. It became quite clear that Ethiopia has completely slipped from our northern frame of mind. Few seem to recall that it was for the people of this land that Band Aid and We Are The World were created, or even less why.

Well, Ethiopia hasn't become any sunny international tourist destination. The country maintains its position as one of the very poorest nations in the world, alongside its neighbors Somalia and Sudan. The destitution and the suffering remain omnipresent, of this our journey gave decisive answers. New famine disasters appear more likely than in many years, some claim, with droughts and galopping over population. The Ethiopian population is now more than 80 million, with an appaling annual growth of three percent, meaning that the population will increase by some 50 percent in a decade — a figure wich few other nations, thank goodness, come even close to matching. Someone we met on our journey even harshly remarked that a new famine catastrophe may well be the best that could happen to Ethiopia, as such an event is probably the only thing that could get the country back into world focus, and as news images of starving children can always be exchanged into hard cash. Good news, if I may use that expression, is that the nation is currently not in war — a state of exception. Ethiopia recently withdrew its troops from Somalia, this disaster of a nation, which it has occupied for the past years, on orders from the United States. Ethiopia and its dictatorial regime serve as the United States’ private police in the hotbed for radical islamic fundamentalism and terrorism which this entire region, the horn of Africa, constitutes. The voluminous Ethiopian army and air force are fully financed and equipped by the U.S. Along the border with Eritrea, the nation whose mere existance is regarded as an ongoing deadly insult by Ethiopia, the nation maintains approximately 200,000 troops, as a reminder of one of several regional and ethnical conflict that are far from resolved.

No, wonderful is perhaps not the first adjective which springs to mind when I am to describe Ethiopia. So many others push forth, like wondrous, fantastic, magnificent, enchanting, exciting, Biblical, primordial, cruel, merciless, heartbreaking, mindboggling, and many more. It’s a land which grips and holds on. Ever since last, I've always been longing back to Ethiopia and all its views, colors, scents, flavors, sounds and people. It's a kind of fascination with which the country, in all its hopelessness, bestows many visitors, as I've understood. Perhaps this can even have something to do with its primordiality. It was after all here, in The Rift Valley, where we homo sapiens first emerged. It was here she was found, Lucy, the oldest ever discovered human being, three to four million years of age or so, not far from Awash National Park, dear in my memory after several visits. The fact that life evolved from here is something you can sense, because life is so incredibly intense here. Just sitting with a bottle of whiskey in the immense blackness, listening to the mighty symphony of vibrant life in the Ethiopian night ranks among the most sublime pleasures of life.

Now it was my father who, occasioned by his seventieth birhtday, had invited his entire family, a party of twelve, on a voyage to his second homeland where he lived for a number of years in the eighties and nineties and where he has always regularly returned over the past quarter century, frequently leading large groups of young doctors in field studies in tropical medicine. His home base during all this time has always been Alert hospital, towering on a hilltop in central Addis Ababa, originally a lepracy hospital, the only one in Ethipoia, but now, with lepracy on decline, with most of its patients suffering from the inseparable sister diseases of contemporary poverty, aids and tuberculosis. It was here that we slept the first night, after a day when we had first been invited to lunch by friends of my father, then spent the afternoon relaxing by the pool in obscenely luxurios Sheraton and then finally enjoyed an exuberantly generous dinner in the home of my father's dear friend and driver Girma in the so-called Lepra Village, below the hospital grounds. As the name indicates, this village, or city district, rather, has a population of leprousies and their families who have migrated here from all over Ethiopia, erecting sheds, huts and simple houses in the slopes below the hospital, where Girma's impressive home, built singlehandedly by himself, is a shining exception. The "village" today has approximately 20,000 inhabitants. The short walk through the pitch black night in the Lepra Village alone is a highly exotic, slightly frightening experience for us freshly arrived from the polished western abundance; carefully negotiating our ways with flashlights through rocky dirt streets, fires flickering through sparsly woven grass walls, the smells of smoke and goat dung, dogs barking, leprous ragamuffins jumping along on crutches i the dark — Biblical, was the word...

Addis Ababa, yes, the name means "New Flower", is a city which has undergone a dramatic metamorphosis over the past decades, its population growing from three million or so a quarter century ago to over seven million, all according to very rough and uncertain estimates. More than half of this population live on daily incomes of less than one dollar a day. My memories from here are manifold and vibrant: the sizzling hot tennis matches, the birdsong and the blazing colors of the flowers in my father’s hospital’s compound garden; the jackal that peeped off from the porch when we came home one night; the nerve-tickling drives at night into the nearby, violently stinking garbage dump, where the hyenas' eyes glowed visciously from the car lights and obscure Blade Runner figures shuffled about in the halflight outside the beams; the boundlessly swarming, almost Hades-resembling market, the largest in Africa, where some half million souls manage their daily affairs, and where everything from grain and rope buts to refrigirators and roadwork machines can be purchased, with growing crowds of children and beggars following our rear, surrounding us, grabbing, screaming the inevitable "fareng, fareng" ("stranger, stranger"); the open air slaughter house on the road to the hospital, where four-foot high vultures sat squeezed together covering the entire rooftop and the at least forty-foot high pile of white polished bones in the backyard, where children and vultures climbed around among eachother, looking for scraps of flesh; a salary man dressed in a rugged three piece suit, hat and brief case, standing pissing with a proud and mighty golden arch into the creek crevice at the bus stop below the hospital in the morning; the shepherds calmly herding their cattle and goats through downtown traffic, dressed in timeless moss green cloth — once again, straight out of the Bible; beggars with elephaniasis och grotesque disfigurations, blind beggars, legless beggars rolling along among the cars on simple wooden boards or hopping on their hands, and then these countless child beggars; the delicious Italian dinners at Castelli, this oasis in the midst of the turmoil; the thousands, yes hundreds of thousands head strong choir of dogs barking after nightfall that merges into a sound backdrop so consolidated that you don't even notice it if you don't listen carefully — only then can detect the individual barks; the many fires flaming at various distances in the hills of the blacked out city as we sit drinking on my fathers back porch after dusk.

Addis, on first appearance, has changed a lot since last time. Skyscrapares have been erected in the city center, and the Chinese have built a ring road through the city. The Western features are more flagrant, but the timeless remains. Donkeys and cows walk and shit in the thick of traffic. Goats and chickens are sold and slaughtered in the roadside.

This time we’re not staying in Addis. I awake around four in the morning, long before dawn, to the beautiful, hypnotically monotonous chants of the morning prayers being called out, orthodox Christian as well as Muslem, as I understand, lying there in the in the darkness listening to the city and nature awakening with their mounting myriad of sounds. After breakfast, which we eat in company of patients from the hospital in the already burning heat in the hospital garden, we're picked up by Girma and his co-driver in two Land Cruisers för the 500 kilometer long journey south, which dad has divided into three days. The first two stages are short, with just a few hours driving, and nights spent in hotels by the lakes Langano and Awasa. Langano I've visited several times before. The lake water has the color of tea with milk and lathers your hair without shampoo or soup, due to its richness with calcamine and minerals. At Awasa, the hotel compound is alive with inumberal green guenon monkeys. In both places, I savour the Ethiopian night with wine from the box and mini cigars.

After a memorable early morning visit to the Awasa fish market, we then set out on the final leg, bound for the goal of our journey, Arba Minch, the regional capital of southern Ethiopia. The 220 kilometer drive takes us more than seven hours to negotiate, including a lunch break, on miserable roads. The start of the journey is adventurous. We intend to fill up with gas in the utterly scruffy, hot and filthy town of Sodo, known for its colony of rastafari migrated here from Jamaica who have lived here for generations. We ask at least at a dozen gas stations, but the answer is always "yellum, yellum" — there's no gas. At last we find the only station in town which has gas, where over hundred-yard long lines of trucks are stretching out in both directions. Dad suggests that we go up into the hills and spend the night in a hotel by a hot spring, while Girma and the co-driver set out to find gas, but Girma decides to take a chance and go for it, hoping to find gas in one of the small villages along the road before we run out. The first stage of the drive takes us up on an dreadfully dry and impoverished high plateau, where crowds of people carrying yellow plastic drums swarm in the dust around dried out wells, surrounded by herds of skinny cattle. At last, sure enough, we find a gas station which indeed has diesel in its pumps, in a hellish hot, dust covered, fly buzzing village that could have been something straight out of a spaghetti western, only much more dilapidated of course, with beggars with watering eyes surrounding our cars. This far arrived, we no longer meet any cars, nor any horse trolleys, just the occasional old truck laborously puffing along in the heat, blowing clouds of deep black smoke, and shepherds driving herds of cattle in the road. The road is scattered with pot holes like a swiss cheese, and the Land Cruisers bounce about violently, though we can't do more than 40 miles an hour maximum. For long sections, the road is closed for construction, and we drive long detours in the dusty red dirt. Then the landscape turns greener and more tropical, banana plantations flanking the road, as we descend down to the great lake Abaya, Ethiopia's second largest, along which we drive for the last hour or so of our journey, before we finally arrive, tired and dusty, at the Catholic Mission in Arba Minch which is to become our home for the next five days. Here in Arba Minch, a small city gorgeously located overlooking the so-called "Heavens Gate", the mountain pass separating Lake Abaya and Lake Chamo, labeled "The Brown Lake" and "The Blue Lake", for very visual resons, there is a hospital and a young university where dad frequently brings his groups of students. This is also where some advanced travelers come, en route to the lands of those primeval tribes in the accessible parts of the Omo valley, several of the less accissible of which I visited myself, together with dear father (see further down in this column), on our adventurous river trip more than twenty years ago. Even further south in this district, Gamo Gofa, dry, unforgivinging, roadless witdths of land expand, populated by a multitude of tribes, many of them nomadic. This land is also where you'll find the so called "marginalized people", a kind of Ethioian untouchables, cast out of society as they're deemed to ha "evil eyes", bringing curse upon the evermore. These people live in indescribable misery, working with extremely health hazardous crafts such as tanning and galvanazation in they're horrificly miserable huts.

It amounted to five unforgettable days and nights, which I gladly share with you in images. The Ethiopian south filled me to the brim with its impressions, most of them acutely sensual, many horrible, often in combination. I awoke at two in the morning, at the first calls of the roosters, then lay there listening to that approaching orchestra of the tropic day. It can't be helped the fact that the memories most firmly embossed in my memory are those of the all too adult and aged faces of all those inumberable, ever present children who from the age of three or so live their lives on the roadside. herding cows and goats, running begging after cars or just stading, staring, or, as on the road ascending to the wondrous mountain village Chencha, dancing joylessly in the middle of the road, in the vain hope of stopping some of the few passing tourists. An bad memory is when the fiancé of my dear step sister, Big Mike, threw an empty plastic bottle over the fence from the Catholic Mission, and a herd of children threw themselves at it, fighting desperately for this booty; another was that of the torn and dirty little boy who snatched that wrinkled one-birr note out of the hands of Christina, then ran for his life, chased by the other children. It's so cruel to say it, but it's not high that these poors have been able to elevate themselves above the grim reality of the animals. If the rains don't come as they should in April, and above all in June, many of these children will be dead, that's the simple fact of it. The only thing at least I can do is to push back these truths, othterwise I couldn't travel in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, I see those faces so vividly before myself now, several weeks later, when I'v e returned to this absurdly privileged western world, where street lights light up up the night and the hot water of profution flush with force from the taps.

When we return to Addis by luchtime on the day of our departure, by domestic flight from Arba Minch, my impression of the Ethiopian capital is different. It now appears as a perfectly proper, western city, let be that we in this day move only in its business center, where we are also treated with an abundantly generous dinner by yet another friend of my father, the fourth in line on this journey,

On homecoming, I'm reached by the news that our new Swedish ambassador in Ethiopia is no other than my old friend Jens Odlander. See there — yet another reason for me to return, and return I will, the sooner the better. All my senses, with the exception perhaps of the taste, already yearn to go back. It is also my firm conciction to return to this land literary, in deeper, more extensive forms in the near future, not in one but in two very different books.

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