Background Information.

Anyone who knows anything about Ethiopia knows that there was a serious famine in the country – “The Ethiopian Famine” – for a couple of years, roughly 1983-85. Those of us who are old enough may recall the heartbreaking images of starving women and children; perhaps we remember Live Aid and Band Aid and “We Are the World”. Western countries sent bajillions of dollars in aid – cash and commodities – to mitigate the crisis. In the end, despite the humanitarian response, it’s estimated that about eight million people were affected and one million people died as a result of the famine.

Along with the aid money, The Ethiopian Famine brought hundreds of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to Ethiopia to help deliver food and medical assistance to people in need. Food for the Hungry was one of the many organizations that came into Ethiopia to provide short-term humanitarian relief, and subsequently expanded their programs to include longer-term development work. By the time we arrived, ten years later, FH/E was operating at three locations (I am sure there were three, but I can only remember two of them – Cheha in the south, and Gondar in the north), providing a wide array of services including food-for-work, child sponsorship, health care and health education, agricultural assistance, reforestation, water access, and veterinary medicine to the communities where they worked.

I have to acknowledge that I do not know exactly where FH/E obtained all of the funding for its work. Some – a lot – came from USAID and other western governments as part of their foreign aid packages; some came from churches and individuals who sponsored children or supported specific programs. Some of it must have come from the international fundraising efforts of Food for the Hungry International.

At the time of The Ethiopian Famine, and for many years after, the need was so urgent and obvious that there wasn’t a lot of accountability for where and how aid money was spent – cash and commodities were sent to Ethiopia, feeding centers ministered to people in crisis, lots of people lived and some people died. Donors were just pleased to know that their funds were making a difference. There was minimal oversight from the Ethiopian government in the form of the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC), which directed the work of NGOs operating in the country. But nobody asked how much of every dollar was spent on overhead; nobody questioned the cost to purchase and transport food and supplies. With a population in turmoil, nobody could follow up to find out how malnutrition might influence the long-term health of individuals affected by the famine, even if they had wanted to.

But by 1995, the situation had changed. Other humanitarian crises had diverted Western attention, and a lot of aid money, away from Ethiopia. Individuals were developing “donor fatigue”, reluctant to give to the same cause over and over again with little indication of positive movement. Worst of all, it had become clear that a small number of charlatans were taking advantage of the crisis, lining their own pockets with contributions while their brothers and sisters suffered.

As a result, FH/E and other NGOs became responsible not only for developing and implementing programs, but also for demonstrating the effectiveness of these programs – to the Ethiopian government as well as to international and individual contributors. That’s the reason FH/E created the position of Research Officer, and that’s the reason they implemented an organization-wide training on monitoring and evaluation, shortly after we arrived in Ethiopia. More about that next week.

Minamin (This and That).

I have spent the past two weeks writing about the Ethiopian famine of 1983-85, and how it set the stage for our experience as development workers -- but I couldn't bear to post it today, after an extended absence. Instead, I bring you a few more photos from the interior of our apartment, along with some random memories.

Here's J, standing in the kitchen. He appears to be posing with a potholder on his head; this is certainly not the oddest thing he did while in Ethiopia. I would guess I took this photo while seated at the dining table. You can see our cooker behind him -- the burners on the top were electric but the oven used liquid propane gas, and the little door on the right was where you stashed the gas cylinder. It was just like the cylinder one would use for a gas grill, unwieldy and expensive, and we learned to check our supply early and often since there's nothing worse than running out of gas while you're trying to make dinner.

The kitchen sink and our scary cabinets are hidden behind the refrigerator. Bonus points if you can identify anyone in the pictures on the side of the fridge.

Down on the floor there you can see (or trip over) our soda supply. Soda was only sold in volume, two dozen bottles at a time. The first time we purchased a case, we paid for the glass bottles as well as for the soda inside them, which gave us incentive to return all of the empties for recycling -- in Ethiopia, that means you wash them out and refill them. If we ever broke a bottle we had to pay for a replacement to complete our case. Some of the bottles were well used and battered, so it was kind of a treat to get one that was obviously shiny new. When we filled our case we could choose between Pepsi products or Coke products (we were a Coke family), but never a mixture of the two. In addition to their signature cola drinks, each brand made a lemon-lime soda and an orange flavored soda. So it was Pepsi/7-Up/Mirinda or Coca/Sprite/Fanta. There were no diet options.

We drank a lot of soda, but we also developed a taste for Ambo water, a fizzy mineral water from a spring in the highlands northwest of Addis Abeba. Ambo water has a fairly strong mineral flavor that takes some getting used to, but these days one can purchase Ambo "Lite" with a lower mineral content and less carbonation. It's now available in plastic bottles, though the label hasn't changed in twenty years.

Our friends Chip and Cathy sent us this Little Red Riding Hood hand puppet and other thoughtful gifts for our birthdays in June and July of 1995. (If I recall correctly, one of the pictures on the fridge is of their newborn son Nate, who just turned 20). My sister made and sent the crocheted doily on the back of the chair. It was always a hassle to get packages out of customs at the post office -- a subject that will get at least one post of its own -- but we are eternally thankful for the love and generosity of our friends.

The striped wall hanging was made locally; we might have purchased it at the craft market but I am fairly sure it came from Hope Enterprises, an organization that taught people to weave as part of their vocational training program. Hope also operated a cafe near our apartment where we could get waffles with whipped cream on a Saturday morning, and they had a shop where we could buy flowering plants as well as textiles of all kinds. We have red Hope place mats on our dining table at this very moment; if we gave you the gift of a doll or a scarf or a tablecloth it was almost certainly from Hope as well.

This picture was taken a few months later, after we had moved the furniture around a little. You can see the raveling seam on the left hand cushion of our custom-made sofa; we kept turning that cushion to hide the damage but eventually all of the seams were equally frayed. J is reading (well, marking his place in) an Isaac Asimov novel sent by our friends Fred and Kathy, who decided to use our time in Ethiopia to brainwash us into becoming science fiction fans. They sent us two paperback novels every month and we devoured every single one of them. It was fairly difficult to find English-language fiction in Ethiopia and anyone who knows me knows how much I love to read, so this was a lifesaver. I probably read each of those books at least twice before passing them along; I am sure they are still in circulation, delighting sci-fi fans, twenty years later.

About the House.

After writing about the apartment a few weeks ago I pestered J to sit down with his home design software and put together a floor plan, to refresh our dimming memories as much as to share on the blog. Here it is:

The front entrance is there at the lower left corner, next to the bathroom, with the living area and balcony at the top and the bedroom on the upper right. It’s far from perfect but it’s a good representation of the space; it's probably drawn a little larger than the apartment actually was. As I said, it was more than enough space for the two of us and the few items we brought with us, though we definitely acquired “stuff” to make it more comfortable.

Money, Money, Money.

One of our loyal readers asked last week about what the deal was with purchasing expensive imported items from a government-operated store, so I thought I would take the opportunity to write about how our understanding of money expanded while we were living in Ethiopia.

The unit of currency in Ethiopia is the birr, from the Amharic word for “silver”; one birr is made up of 100 cents or centimes. Twenty years ago, the exchange rate was about six EB to the US dollar, so one birr was worth just less than seventeen US cents. As I write, the exchange rate is about twenty birr to the dollar, yikes! Which is exactly why the Ethiopian birr is considered a “soft” currency, as compared to a “hard” currency like the US dollar, the British pound, and the euro – globally traded currencies that are expected to maintain a relatively stable market value over the long term.

We Move In.

I mentioned a while ago that we spent our first few weeks in Ethiopia living at the SIM Guest House while we waited for our permanent home to become available. In early May, we made the move.

Our new home was a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a four story, 16-unit building that was occupied mostly by Ethiopian families. It would be an understatement to say that the building was architecturally undistinguished; made of concrete block, and painted an institutional dingy dark green, it would have fit into any Communist-bloc urban landscape.

License to Drive.

As volunteers, we could never have afforded to purchase and/or operate a vehicle from our own resources so it was a real bonus that FH/E had a vehicle that we were able to use. Our car was a 1980s-era Renault 9 sedan. Here it is, in all its glory:

 

This car had seen better days: it had mismatched headlights and dented fenders and faded upholstery. So it was the perfect vehicle for newbies navigating the chaotic streets of Addis Abeba, and we were grateful to have it. We eagerly embraced the responsibility of transporting ourselves around town.

Of course, before one can legally operate a motor vehicle, one must obtain a driver’s license in one’s country of residence. We had gone to the trouble of acquiring our international driver’s licenses from the AAA office in Eugene but those turned out to be useless in Ethiopia. So we needed to make a pilgrimage to the Ministry of Transportation.

In the western world we complain a lot about government agencies, and the DMV is one of our favorite targets. Our visit to the Ministry of Transportation was our first personal encounter with the soul-crushing bureaucracy that is (or was?) the Ethiopian government. Thankfully we had a navigator in the form of Messay, the ever-cheerful Logistics Officer for FH/E, who guided us patiently through the grinding gears and became one of our favorite people in the process.

You know how, at the DMV, there’s a little machine where you take a number, and then you sit down and wait for your number to be called? And you can read, or daydream, or fret about the time you think you’re wasting? In Ethiopia, once you got past the guard at the gate, it was a free-for-all. First you had to figure out which window you needed (thanks, Messay!) and then you joined the scrum in front of the window, elbowing and jockeying your way forward. Being a foreigner got you lots of stares but no preferential treatment. The clerk could decide at any moment that it was time for a tea break or lunch. Since it was rainy season, it might start to pour – did I mention, this was all outside? Finally you reached the window and presented your documents for scrutiny, and were directed to the next window. And the next.

You know how, at the DMV, there’s a little camera, and when you get your license they take a picture of you and stick it on your card? In Ethiopia, you had to provide your own picture, black-and-white, of particular dimensions, just like a passport photo. Which meant that before you could go to the Ministry of Transportation you had to find a photographer and have your picture taken (and bonus points if there was no hot water for a shower that morning). So: photograph, passport, Oregon driver’s license, international driver’s license, and Ethiopian ID card. And cash, of course. Hand them over and hope to see them again soon. (Not the cash).

It could have been worse: at least we didn’t have to take a road test to demonstrate our skills. By that time we hadn’t been behind the wheel in weeks and the mere thought of driving was intimidating enough. As it was, obtaining our licenses was an all-day process that wore us out with hurry-up-and-wait. But by the end of the day, we were street legal.

I have to confess that I have dragged my feet about writing this because I keep hoping to find our Ethiopian driver’s licenses and include a picture of them. A search of internet images indicates that the format has changed completely in the past twenty years. These days, an Ethiopian driver’s license is a computer-generated laminated card much like the one you get in the USA, but in those days it was a paper booklet printed entirely in Amharic with your photo stuck in there. It seemed so foreign and so official, and also, it in no way prepared us for the actual challenges of driving.

Wisely, Messay did not offer to let one of us drive back to the office that day.

We Get Around.

It’s hard for us to believe, but in 2015, Addis Abeba has a newly constructed light rail system that is due to open to the public at any moment now. Twenty years ago, public transportation in Ethiopia was much more random and haphazard.

The cheapest way to travel around town was via the government-operated Anbessa (Lion) Bus Service. The large red and yellow buses ran on routes throughout the city, with rides costing EB 0.10 (ten cents, equivalent to maybe two US pennies). The buses were crowded and unreliable and, rumor had it, a great place to have your pocket picked; we never once rode on the Anbessa bus. In retrospect I wish we had risked it, just for the experience.

The next level up was a shared taxi. These blue and white vehicles also ran on set routes but with a smaller number of passengers, and the price of the ride depended on how far you were going, maybe up to EB 1.00 (about 17 US cents). One could hail a shared taxi by standing on the side of the road and flagging one down, but there were also set transit stops where one could wait for a taxi going in the right direction; there was no timetable so it was imperative to plan ahead during busy commute times, as a full taxi would pass by without stopping.