I just spent eight days in Ethiopia and confess to not knowing what to expect. I was born in the 80’s and remember the famine then, and I work in development now, and know that drought and food security are frequent challenges for the country.
So I wasn’t really expecting to be blown away, but I was. And here’s why:
1. The lakes in the Rift Valley are incredible. Just incredible.
2. Many Ethiopians ‘fast’ on Wednesday’s and Friday’s, so they don’t eat meat. On these days, the country is a vegetarian’s delight, especially a lentil-loving vegetarian like me.
3. Addis Ababa, the capital, is a vibrant city on the move, and is full of excellent coffee and great places to eat and stay.
4. The country is on the up-and-up economically. Ethiopia is one of the fastest growing non-oil economies in Africa, and more and more people are lifting out of poverty every day.
5. There are heaps of tourist destinations. Ancient churches, mountains, incredible landscape, ancient history, modern cities, stunning lakes, and more (not that I actually got to do any of the touristy stuff, but it’s now on The List).
6. There are very few tourists there right now. And sure, there might be valid reasons why, but there is still plenty to do if you keep clear of the more unsafe border areas.
7. The people are always the best reason to visit a country, and Ethiopians are no exception. Especially touching is the little hug/shoulder touch people give each other when greeting.
I’m already looking forward to going back one day, but next time, as a tourist.
“A continent ages quicly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short space of time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away…The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts…We are the intruders and after we are dead we have ruined it but it will still be there and we don’t know what the next changes are.” — Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (in which he writes of his awful hunting exploits)
Lake Awassa, Ethiopia
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A typical family home in a village - Lindi, Tanzania
I’m waking up this morning to the beautiful sounds of chanting in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopa. It’s hard to believe I was sweating it up in Tanzania just yesterday - such is this crazy world of airflights and modern transport.
So, Tanzania. The land of Mt Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, and the Serengeti. Renowned for its animals and the island paradise of Zanzibar, not that I saw any of these things, of course.
I’ve spent the past week meeting families from Mtwara and Lindi, down the very bottom of Tanzania near Mozambique, who are ‘food insecure,’ as the jargon goes. Which means they don’t have enough to eat.
Because this is my first trip to Africa ‘proper’ (I’m counting Egypt as more Middle Eastern), I wasn’t sure what to expect. Heat and mosquitoes, red dirt….African people…poverty…Beyond that I really didn’t know.
It turns out I got all of these. Family homes in villages are mud huts, the ground is sandy red, the red of Australian soil even, and I’ve got at least six mosquito bites despite trying my very very best to cover up.
But I’m very glad to have added some nuances to my expectations. Tanzania’s cashew nuts are delicious and available roasted, salted or raw just about anywhere. The green jungle-like vegetation down south grows whereever there is space. The Indian Ocean coastline provides a welcome breeze in the heat of the day.
My Tanzania smells like frying meat, sweat, and the seaside. The people I met were friendly, despite my appalling attempts at Swahili, and I particularly loved trying to nail the Tanzanian handshake - a three-move combination that feels seriously tough.
Aid and development wise, I don’t feel like a week in one area of one country qualifies me to make sweeping generalisations, but what I did see where great challenges in earning an income, increasing crop yields of both food and cash crops, malaria and access to more expensive medications, and the costs of sending children to secondary school. These themes came up again and again, with most families I met eating two basic meals a day of porridge.
Through work I am following an agricultural project in Mtwara and Lindi which is only just beginning, but will extend for five years. I’m very interested to see how the people I met are impacted by the project. I hope I can tell a more positive story of the people I met in this trip in five years time.
I recently took part in an Triple J Radio ‘Hack’ program where they were looking into volunteering overseas.
You can download a podcast of the episode and hear just what I have to say about volunteering in orphanages and the problems with some short term volunteering posts.
The radio interview came about from a blog post I wrote - So you want to volunteer overseas? Read this first
Given I knew I was going to Africa for work this month (specifically Tanzania and Ethiopia, because we know Africa is not a country), I decided to load up my kindle with some Africa reading. This is how Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s book This Child Will Be Great made it into my head.
For those who don’t know, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is the President of Liberia. She was also the first female head of state in Africa. And by Liberia I do mean the country that spent over a decade living through civil war involving all the horrors of child soldiers, displaced people, destroyed cities and massive loss of life.
It’s fair to say that Liberia was decimated, socially, politically and economically. Not only that, but its neighbours are far from peaceful too. Sierra Leone and Cote d’Iviore have experienced terrible conflict themselves. All of this makes it a fairly unstable, and cripplingly poor, region.
So the fact that such an educated woman was elected in Liberia, and has actually stuck by the country implementing policies to significantly reduce debt, bring government spending under control, and is resisting the temptations of corruption which is so common in leadership is seriously impressive.
Ellen Sirleaf Johnson has just been reelected for a second term of government, and while Liberia’s problems are far from solved, it’s hard not to see the turnaround as a beacon of hope, a good news story, for a country which was synonymous with hopelessness.
Further reading on Liberia - Chris Blattman
“I don’t know what a family is, how to define it, other than as a collection of people who bind themselves together and get weirder and weirder until no one understands them.” — Eddie Perfect in his Letter to the Woman Who Changed My Life in Women of Letters.
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Feminism, in my view at least, should not use the power of institutions, including the state, to protect women from the right to make up their own minds. Equality must both redress gender biases and redistribute power so we all take on our share of responsibilities as well as rights. Setting up women as needing protection from male-driven sins means denying the role of Eve as the tempting source of knowledge. As an unbeliever, I quote these archetypes to illustrate my objections to some forms of so-called conservative feminism. It is not feminist to infantilise women by removing our right to make the wrong choices.
We need to recognise that all genders have similar capacities to make good and bad choices and need similar conditions in which to make them. While I am no fan of sexploitation, of objectifying and commodifying human beings, I do not see tactics of censorship and banning of particular manifestations as useful. Emphasising women as victims also contributes to gender-based biases in political thinking.
” —Eva Cox speaks out with her ever-intelligent mind on who gets to use the ‘f’ word. This is in response to the Melinda Tankard-Reist storm started by Rachel Hills which is leading to some nasty in-fighting among the ‘f’ crew of Australia.
For the record, I don’t think you can be a feminist and ‘pro-life’ or anti contraception. Try being a woman in a developing country having your 12th child in as many years, with no access to contraception, and unsafe abortion being your only option? Women need access to family planning resources, and this includes options for safe abortion.
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Yesterday I posted about an incredible book I just read called “I Shall Not Hate” by Izzulden Abuelaish. It’s incredible because it was written by an incredible man who, despite everything, still manages not to hate. But this post isn’t about the book, except to say go read it.
What I want to talk about is what the book motivated me to do. After reading the book, and gaining a much greater insight into the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, I wanted to do something. Of course, one of the most powerful things you can ever do for a cause you care about is to tell people. In our ever-connected world, the telling people part is made about as easy as possible. And I’m telling people, don’t worry about that. But then I decided I wanted to do more.
Coincidentally, I got an e mail yesterday saying that my kiva loan had been paid back. About 6 months ago I lent some money through kiva to a woman’s group in Senegal, and yesterday, they paid me back. “Great,” I thought, I can now lend this money to a Palestinian woman who is looking for a loan.
According to Kiva, since 2005 they have leant $275 million in loans around the world, and there are thousands of people at any one time looking for a loan on kiva. Thousands.
Naively, I thought I’d be able to lend money to any number of Palestinian women. But when it came time to look through all the loans and choose, all I saw was a wall of male faces. In fact, there was not a single woman looking for a loan on her own.
In the end I chose to fund the only female face I saw, who was a woman pictured with her husband. She runs a grocery store, and wants a loan to increase her produce so she can sell more. Apparently, her husband has a stable job, but there is always need for more income.
So I lent money to this woman’s grocery shop, but was left feeling a bit depressed. This only got worse when I looked at the overall kiva loans and saw that there are about 1,500 men looking for loans, versus 500 women.
And yet another piece of the poverty puzzle becomes blatantly obvious once again. We will never be able to eradicate extreme poverty when women are being excluded from education, and earning an income.
As I (figuratively, of course) turned the last page of the book ‘I Shall Not Hate,’ I felt an instant urge to to shout to the whole world the importance of reading it.
I wanted to buy copies for my friends. Have talked about it to my boss, my boyfriend and my sister.
And I’ve made a kiva loan today to a Palestinian business woman.
All thanks to the eloquence and sheer bravery of Izzeldin Abuelaish, whose three daughters were killed, or should I say bombed? Or maybe even had their limbs and brains and blood torn apart and thrown around a room?
Despite from the unthinkable tragedy of losing three daughters in a matter of seconds, Abuelaish manages to tell his story about life as a Palestinian, born in a refugee camp in Gaza, and his fight to be a doctor despite all the challenges (and checkpoints) in his way, with an admirable eloquence.
It’s about so much more than one man’s life, too. It’s about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The stubborness of people. The need to emancipate and involve women in the running of society. The desperate need for peace. The denial of human rights to Palestinians. The exhaustion of both the Palestinians and Israelis at the conflict in their worlds. The failure of leaders to bring peace. An unwavering sense of hope.
It’s only January, but I’m calling this one a must read for 2012.
It has (finally?) happened - I am now the owner of my very own e-reader, thanks to a very well chosen birthday gift.
To see if we like each other, I’ve been testing it out while on holidays. Jasper Jones (which I paid just $3.63 for!) is my very first kindle touch book, and it’s beginning to look a lot like true love.
So 2011 was a big year, yeah? The Arab Spring. The death of notorious dictators. The East Africa Famine. More natural disasters. The continued evolution of social media. Climate Change. It seems like it’s all happening.
Back in my own little corner of the globe, I’ve experienced a seismic shift too:
Those are the things I count as really big and important in my life, and I’m pleased to say most of them are in the right direction of where I want my life to go. After so long being restless, traveling, being absent from the lives of my loves, and feeling like was always in a rush to get there, I’m starting to feel like I am there. Which is a pretty cool feeling.
If 2011 was the year of committment, 2012 is the year of consolidation.
So, what next? As a tragic goal setter, here are a few on my list this year:
While the list seems a lot more ‘boring’ than my goals in the past, I like the idea of consolidating the big things I did this year. Of stopping to smell the roses. Of strengthening my links with family and friends. Of continuing to read and write and stay nerdy (like there’s any other choice!)
Happy New Year everyone, and here’s to a sensational 2012
p.s. Want to know how I went with my 2011 goals? I did stop eating tuna. I didn’t become debt free, but my net worth is greater than my current debt. I did cook many, many, many more meals at home than ever before in my life, and while I didn’t drink as little as I would have liked, I certainly cut back compared to 2010. Not bad, not bad at all.