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My African Adventure - Part 3

Submitted by editor_en on Thu, 04/03/2008 - 16:53.

DAY 3, 1ST APRIL 2008

We left Addis first thing in the morning for Awassa, a city 275km's south of the capital. We had a 4 hour drive ahead of us.

Driving in Ethiopia is very different to driving in Kenya. This time it's "drive-by-hooting": I think I figured out the rules: if you hoot loud and long enough, then you get to overtake all the other cars. But it wasn't just the cars that we had to worry about as we drove through the (very barren) landscape of Ethiopia - it was the people, the donkeys, the cattle, the people travelling on donkeys... the donkeys were carrying loads that must surely break their backs – and people, young and old, were walking by the roadside doing the same.

There were a few casualties that we saw along the way: living where I live, just outside of London, I'm used to seeing the odd squashed hedgehog or fox by the side of the road. But never before have I seen the bodies of cattle or dogs or donkeys, lying where they've been hit, the back end of their body no longer attached, waiting for nature to take its course.

In some places we drove through, it looked as if, with the exception of the road that we were driving on, things hadn't changed for 100's and 100's of years: at best, some people were living in shacks (all one rooms, of course) with corrugated roofs, but others made do with mud houses, and others still in round straw huts -these huts were usually seen grouped together in settlements of 5 or 6, with another group half a mile away... but nothing in-between: no road, no shops, no nothing. I saw people washing their clothes in a dirty river, and people herding their cattle by the side of the road: and when I took a second look, I realised that the cattle-herders were children who looked no older than 7 or 8 years old. I hate to write clichés about poverty, but on the drive, it was all I could really see.

Interestingly enough, the only buildings that didn’t seem to suffer from lack of money were the religious ones: we saw large numbers of churches and mosques along the way (the two religions live happily side by side here in Ethiopia, about equal numbers of both)– and without exception, these buildings had large gold or silver domes, occasionally they were truly enormous buildings, and often beautifully decorated. I wonder about religion sometimes: why is it okay to spend so much money on a house of worship (where no one will sleep at night) yet the community that attends the church or mosque is, without a doubt, sleeping in a one-room mud hut, with their donkey or cattle sleeping at their feet, and not enough food to go round? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

I noticed on our 4 hour drive that we saw just ONE advert for HIV prevention, and no signs for HIV testing or counselling in any of the small towns that we passed through. I was pretty surprised at this, but as I learnt later in the day, discrimination of people living with HIV is enormous, and it seems that no one wants to talk about it at all, let alone advertise it.

In Ethiopia, over 2% (about 900,000 people) of the population is HIV+ - and when you go into a city like Awassa, this number jumps dramatically to 10%... and in some of the sub-cities of Awassa, even higher. So a project like Joy Development Association, which we were going to visit, has its work cut out for it, having to tackle enormous challenges every single day.

When we got to Awassa, we had a long day ahead of us. Joy Development Association (JDA) were showing us around, and wanted us to clearly understand how they spend the funding that they receive from us - by the end of the day, I was blown away by how many people they reach with their activities over a year, and how many different areas they cover.

First, we attended the graduation ceremony of 22 HIV+ youth, who'd taken part in JDA's income-generating course. As I mentioned above, discrimination against people living with HIV is so high, that if you are open about your status, pretty much no one will employ you, and the likelihood is that your family will throw you out of their home; so JDA's mission is to give positive young people income-generating skills; these young people were described to us as "the poorest of the poor", so it seems that their job opportunities are somewhat limited, even with ambition: shining shoes, mending clothes, beading etc, - but it's all about providing for yourself, finding enough money to feed and clothe your family, and put a roof over your head. But you do have to be careful about what business you go into if you're HIV+ve: for example, you can't make & sell food by the side of the road, because people will ASSUME that they can catch HIV from you. And we were told about one group of +ve people who were given a small amount of amount to buy a washing machine, so that they could wash other people’s clothes: but when they found out that HIV+ve people were washing their clothes, everyone stopped using them (and didn’t even bother to pick up any clothes that they’d left with them), and their business collapsed.

JDA then introduced us to 3 young women who'd taken part in their course, so that we could understand how it benefited them. One of them now volunteers with JDA, and takes part in house-to-house awareness raising, by literally knocking on the doors of people's houses, disclosing her status and talking to them about how she's able to live positively. But when we dug a bit deeper, we discovered that this beautiful young woman, who was working so hard to improve her life, had 2 young children that she'd had to give up for adoption (in America) because she couldn't afford to take care of them. Just entirely heartbreaking. Another girl we talked to is herself pregnant (her baby was literally due any day), and she has some very immediate worries: the first is to make sure her baby will be born – and remains - HIV-ve - she is on treatment for herself and her baby, but being HIV+ve means that she shouldn't breastfeed (in case she infects her baby through breastfeeding) - but she has no money to pay for powdered milk: so should she breastfeed, but risk infecting her baby? What would you do? And being heavily pregnant, she no longer has a job (following her course with JDA, she was working as a cleaner), and has no idea how she will feed/clothe/look after herself and her baby over the coming weeks. And yet both these amazing women had smiles on their faces as they spoke to us. I was incredibly humbled.

At the end of the day, we went to join about 75 young Awassans sitting in a small community centre. Now my Amharic is not what anyone would call 'fluent' but I figured out 2 words today: how to say hallo,’tena yistillin’ and 'Ishi', which means 'all is cool'. So when I was asked to speak to the room, I figured that if I began and ended my speech with my Amharic, all would be, quite literally, Ishi. And I was doing pretty well - until the dancers appeared... and the room thought it would be very amusing if the "Farenji" (literally, 'white woman') would show everyone how well she could dance. For your amusement, I have a photo, which I will upload to the site on my return - and you can see the colour of my face at the time, which was described to me "as a tomato"... oh yes, I was truly mortified - for those who've ever had the privilege to see me dance, you'll know that I don't have the best rhythm in the world... and here I was, having to shake my shoulders and spin my head around in the 'typical' Ethiopian style of dancing. I'm happy to report that everyone seemed to enjoy it: assuming that laughing hilariously at my fabulous rhythm and easy ability to pick up Ethiopian cultural dancing indicated that they appreciated what I was doing!

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