Ethiopia Trip: Final Thoughts

I am flying out of Addis Ababa this evening for the US and want to write my last email partly about my week in the coffee growing/jungle area of Southern and Southwest Ethiopia and my final thoughts on leaving this wonderful country and this incredible experience I have had during the past three weeks.

Most of the past week was spent in Southern Ethiopia in the towns of Jimma (the capital city of the Kaffa region) in the birthplace of coffee. I also spent time in Bonga and Chira that are smaller towns and villages. My hosts for this visit were the Catholic Secretariat that has a series of schools, health care clinics, programs for women, economic development activities where they provide coffee plants for farmers and help with forming coffee growing cooperatives.

This area is the most beautiful area of the country where hunger (because it is in the jungle and gets plenty of water) is not an issue. Inside the compound where I stayed with the Catholic priests we picked guavas, mango, papaya, banana, vegetables. There are coffee plants everywhere and they roasted coffee for our drink at breakfast. The area is all jungle and with incredibly green hills and thick with plants, trees and animals. We saw moneys and baboons everywhere we went and there are many lions in this region. Hunger is not an issue because people could grow whatever they need for food, but once you get past the hunger issue poverty is just as rampant here as anywhere in the country.

We had to drive 4 hours in a Land Cruiser over mountains and jungles to get to the small town of Bonga where I stayed for three days. In the early morning we drove through dirt roads with the priests to a small town called Chiri and had two interesting experiences with mission programs of the church. One was a health care clinic that was started by American’s who live in Colorado and the Catholics are very involved in supporting the clinic. This is the only clinic in this area of 20,000 people and I met with the medical staff. The medical director is a physician assistant from the United States (Long Island) who has been working in different third world countries for the past 20 years. The clinic provides the most basic of health care. The laboratory had a microscope and a few vials. I walked into the isolation ward and the door was wide open and saw one women lying on a bed. There were dozens of people waiting outside of the compound waiting to be seen and many have to wait a day or two to be seen by the medical staff. The medical director, Steve, was telling me about their outreach programs into the rural areas where they have to walk days thru jungles to traditional tribal villages. He was telling me that he just got word that in one village 74 people just died primarily from parasites and bacteria in the water and other infections that compound themselves over time. Almost none of the water is treated in any way. Clearly this clinic would not pass inspection with Kaiser Doctors, but it is the best they have and provides incredible service. There was no electricity at all and generators are the only way they get power. The medical staff is providing me with a list of drugs and equipment that are critically needed to treat the people.

After this appointment the priests took me to a school that I will never forget. This is a public school in a very small village that 2,300 kids attend. As soon as I walked thru the gates I was inundated and surrounded by over 200+ kids looking at me and wanted to communicate with me. I asked the head of the school to show me a classroom and I walked into this room with dirt floors and 40 desks with two students per desk. The only light coming into the classroom was from the opening where the students walked into the classroom. There was a blackboard and the students did not have any textbooks. I started to communicate with one of the students and asked to see her homework assignment. This was a mind blower. She showed me her writing in English and her math. The writing was in perfect English and the math was accurate. It was so sad to see the thirst for learning and how unbelievably attentive the kids were and how little they have to work with. It was very sad for me. Everywhere I went in the country, the kids were so hungry to learn, but had little materials and textbooks available.

Another experience I had was when the priests took me to see a government official. There is a tiny town called Mutti (it has a few thousand people) that is 14 K from Chiri where the closest high school was located. There is no road from the elementary school in Mutti to Chiri( where the high school is) and kids have to walk 14K every day to get to school through the jungle. There is only small path winding thru the jungle that takes them to school and back every day. In many cases, the mothers don’t want to send the girls to school because they get raped and kidnapped by the boys who take them for their wives beginning at the young age of 11 or 12 years old. So the government has paid for a study for the costs of this dirt road to open up the town and allow the children to attend middle and high school. This is a project the priests and the community very much want me to help with. The costs for this road are about $500,000 USD for the 14K stretch.

It was fascinating being in the jungle and we drove back to Jimma( to catch my plane to Addis) in the rain in a land cruiser that did not have windshield wipers. The drive took about 4 hours. I had a quick lunch at the Catholic rectory and got a phone call from Ethiopian Airlines saying my plane was cancelled and I had to get to the airport immediately to make another plane they were sending down from Addis. I had the priests drop me off at the airport and after going thru extensive security searching we waited for the plane to arrive. Then another group of people, mostly Moslems arrived that were flying to a small town near the Sudan ( a very high risk security area) and there started to be a fight between our group that was flying to Addis and this group that was going to an areas near Gambella ( western part of the country). Eventually the Addis group won out and we got on this little prop plane with canvas seats and flew up to Addis. I did not hear what happened to the other group. Apparently this kind of thing happens quite often as Ethiopian Airlines is the only plane service inside the country and if there is not enough traffic on scheduled flights they have been known to cancel or change flights around.

Yesterday morning,. Sabbath, we drove to the Mother Teresa Orphanage that was an unforgettable experience. We met with Dr. Rick Hodes who Daniel and I have gotten friendly with and he takes care of the severely disabled children at the orphanage on Sabbath in addition to his regular job of being the medical director for about 10,000 Ethiopian Jews that are waiting to immigrate to Israel. They must have about 500 children and adults staying at the orphanage and it are a remarkable place. It is bright and seems like a very decent place for the kids. Daniels talked about his experiences there, but it is a place you can’t forget and it is almost impossible to be there without tears in your eyes. I was so proud to know someone like Rick who was conducting grand rounds with children who had severe spinal cord injuries, tuberculosis of the spin, kids whose knee’s were near their waist and other deformities. Rick has also adopted 8 of these children that were his patients and another 5 or 6 live with him at his house in Addis. He is a remarkable human being. There are about 8 of the Mother Teresa Orphanages throughout the country and they provide a tremendous service to not only the thousands of children that are orphaned or abandoned because of the parents dying of AIDS or financial reasons. The lucky one’s get adopted by parents from Western countries.

DEPARTING THOUGHTS ON ETHIOPIA
I want to write a few thoughts on the country and people as I am leaving this experience after having spent three weeks in Ethiopia. Let me start off with an interesting conversation I had with an extremely intelligent man who lives in Ethiopia and who was educated in the West. Let me go over some ideas to begin to look at this country.

The history of this continent has been one of colonization from European countries and Ethiopia was the only country in Africa that was not colonized except for a few years by the Italians during World War II. He feels that that there is a total need to control the citizens of Africa and Ethiopia and that is a very high priority for the governments in Africa. It is curious when I was looking for presents to bring back to the states the quality was not very good of things made in Ethiopia. He was talking about Ethiopia has not produced significantly great art, literature, writing, and other creative endeavors. Many times people are suffering so much that they don’t strive for excellence or quality. The focus is on survival. Even wealthy people don’t strive for excellence. The educational focus in Ethiopia is to have classrooms and schools and not quality education. Students are learning by rote and are not developing much creative work. Literature and arts are not given in the schools. Students do not read Shakespeare. In other countries that have been colonized the ruling counties in Europe have developed a culture and these countries, such as Ghana, Kenya and others have developed in ways that Ethiopia has not. Perhaps that is the good part of colonization. Driving through the rural areas, people are still living a peasant culture using all animals and hand tools probably similar to the days of Solomon and Sheba. The ox and plow were the only instruments I have seen in the fields throughout the country.

Ethiopia has been the recipient of billions of dollars of aid from Western countries for the past decades and has it made a difference? From a humanitarian standpoint it has certainly helped people live and stay alive, but it has created a feeling of dependency on the part of its people. They are looking to the West and others to give them hand-outs rather than hand-ups.. People are created by the culture and the culture creates the people. The mentality seems to be not to break out and excel but to do what is expected to survive and take care of your family. The breaking out of the mold comes when some people are lucky enough to leave for America or the West. The society is pretty closed and there is a lack of trust among people who are not your family or close friends. The churches seem very rigid and are not actively involved in the community or helping people with food, employment, health care but are concentrating on the spiritual side of the person. Millions of burr are raised each year for churches and mosques, but little seems to be coming down from these institutions or the government for housing, health care, education, revenue enhancement, etc.

It seems that part of this culture is a LOCKED society. Addis is a city where trust is a foreign concept. People lock everything. In Yohannes home, the gates to the compound are locked, when we leave the car in the compound the car is locked, even when people sleep they lock their door to the bedroom.. This is also true with the nonprofits or NGOs I consulted and trained. People were trusting of me, but not themselves. This is a new concept to share information, to network and trust each other. However, with NGO’s it is critical when you form coalitions, associations and alliances that you trust the other person to work together. This will take a decade or a generation( or more) to break out of this pattern.

However, the GOODNESS of the people was remarkable. It is easy to focus on the poverty, desperations and survival for 80% of the 80,000,000 people in this country. It is too easy to focus on the issues of control, the locked society, the guns and the military, but what about the people. How does this government and its priorities impact the daily lives of its citizens? How did I find the people I met with, and worked together, shared dinner and coffee with? I found the people, especially the children to be warm, loving, and kind. Ethiopians are physically beautiful people and as my son Daniel said these are the largest number of “stunning girls and women I have every seen”. I have to agree with him. I went to an adoption agency to check on a child that a Jewish couple in Denver will be adopting in March. The baby was 8 months old and was abandoned in the southern part of the country by the Kenyon border. This baby was one of the most beautiful infants I have seen and he was one of the lucky one’s. People cared for him with love. Because of the poverty and stress that people feel that must be hundreds of thousands of children that are abandoned or orphaned.

There is a lot of love and caring in this country and the hospitality that was extended to me was very special. Everywhere we walked people touched and held each other and it is a very physical society. In many ways people seems happy to have what they have, but were reaching for more without the tools necessary to live a plentiful, happy and healthy life. This is the challenge for the people and the government of Ethiopia and the rest of the world.. I believe that Ethiopians want exactly what people in the US have, and it is the responsibility for all of us to see that we live in a global society and it is the responsibility of ALL OF US to realize we are dependent upon each other to create a world of love and caring. It takes the world to create and make a village.