All eyes are on Ethiopia again as refugees from its even poorer neighbour Somalia invade. Just back from the relatively prosperous uplands, after visiting his doctor daughter who has been working in a hospital there, Steve Overbury sees a less typical side of the country.
If the flights to Ethiopia weren’t the best part of £800 and if it weren’t for the obligatory pre holiday immunisations and the necessity to get a visa, and there was something to do around here except drink honey wine in dark shacks with prostitutes, this could be a viable tourist destination. Hotels for less than a fiver a night and good beer for 37p!
First night: best restaurant in town (Gonder), two salads, three lasagnes (a relic of an Italian colonial past), six beers, a bottle of almost acceptable Ethiopian red and three large gin and tonics - twenty-five quid. Compare that to the last family restaurant meal we’d had to celebrate my daughter passing her med school finals - OK, it was Claridges and true, we had a bit to drink - but the bill panned out at about three year’s wages for our liveried waiter who was on $20 a month. He was saving for university to study engineering or tourism management but the course would cost him 300 Birr a month ($15) and when you factored in food and lodging, he just couldn’t make it. However, his real ambition was to get out through Sudan and Libya and catch one of the leaky boats across to the Eurozone, as soon as he could he said, but six of his friends had already died that way.
Slim hipped, high breasted, elegant girls everywhere fetch nary a glance from the libidinous men. Girls for whom the word ‘pert’ may have been invented were ignored, however, the one in a thousand with ample bosom and a spare tyre had to beat them off with a goat stick.
No one smokes. Food takes priority over cigarettes. Thirty men clustered around a TV watching Manchester United v Blackburn and the only smoker was me. Or I would smoke if the matches would strike or my new Ethiopian lighter would work. The matches and the lighter had only one function but neither could perform it. Perhaps that’s why they don’t smoke, they can’t get a light; still, the matches were cheap like everything else in Ethiopia.
One big plus: no mosquitoes. In fact I’ve seen scarier insects in Brighton. Gonder is above the malarial belt and the only function of the anti malarial tablets I’ve been taking is to fill my nights with wild and vivid dreams worthy of Coleridge himself. But perhaps the mad dreams are more to do with the two arms full of yellow fever, Hep A, typhoid and tetanus injections, which dreams apart have clearly stood me in good stead, since I haven’t yet contracted any of those maladies yet. However, Ethiopia’s got disease and calamity if you want it – all of the above plus HIV, TB, cholera and dysentery, as well as malnutrition, deformed limbs and loads of kids burned by falling into campfires.
There are few private cars or sunglasses, no footballs, skateboards or iPads, just hustling street kids, ladies with umbrellas, ill fitting clothes, noxious fumes, circling birds of prey, Unicef trucks, holy men with crosses on their sticks, donkeys that know the way, sheep cheerfully trotting to the abattoir, men with ten chickens hanging from a pole; it’s the rainy season but the water supply is as sporadic as the electric. And just down the road is Bono and Geldof land.
Here’s the puzzle, from where I’m sitting, as far as the eye can see is rather beautiful and fertile agricultural land. How can it and famine sit side by side in this perplexing country? Is it that the people are lazy; is it distribution problems or some other government snafu? How does Ethiopia’s rather sleek airline sit alongside mud huts and Band Aid?
Before me a blind young mother with two clamouring babies sits in the dirt with a breast hanging out, begging for Birr, but her hat is full and it’s the locals who are giving. The street kids scrounge popcorn from the restaurant for her. Behind me, a plump businessman with a Rolex chats on a cell phone and makes a bit of money of his own.
Apparently they loathe their poverty stricken image, that indelible picture of a skeletal baby with flies crawling around its mouth, and you have to wonder how us Brits would like being typified as South Park’s Starvin’ Marvin or have Matt Damon or Angelina Jolie parachute in every now and again to pat us on the head.
One of the NGO’s arranges 3rd World tours for the Americans at $1,600 + flights. Perhaps they are a great success, consciences are pricked and the mega dollars roll in but it smells like voyeurism to me. Then you see a youth jerking down the road and think he must be doing a little hip hop dance all of his own, but it dawns that the poor little chap has some ghastly, possibly preventable illness and it’s up to all of us to try and do something about it, especially us well fed Euros and Yanks via poverty tourism or whatever else it takes.
And I haven’t even seen the hospital yet.
When I do, it’s as grimy as a railway arch chop shop stuffed to the gunwales with the sick and their families, some of whom have trekked for days to get here. Everyone looks hungry, filthy and ill, even the relatives. Guards with AK47s stand at the gates sifting through the heaving queue. The relatives sleep in the grounds making campfires to cook on and wait as long as it takes.
A dazzle of white: a young female American doctor lectures thirty young Ethiopian medics under a tree. This is America at its best, giving, generous, hands on, trying to impose order on a dirty world.
I reflect on King’s College hospital in south London where gastric bands are fastened to the obese, where grey-faced smokers cough up their lungs, where weekend blood-covered, binge drinkers threaten the staff and spew on the floor.
In Gonder, patients wait patiently for ten hours or more to see a doctor without a murmur, and these people are properly ill, not self destructive, inconsiderate, ignorant or violent, just meek, tired, poor and sick, just pitifully, humbly, pathetically grateful.
When my white-coated daughter walks through the town, the kids shout, ‘Mrs. Doctor.’ The white coat helps us get cabs and also halves the fares. Before going to Ethiopia, she’d anticipated the squalor and the suffering, but was surprised by the calibre of the local doctors: overworked, unsentimental and brilliant she says. As ever, it’s the medics in the frontline trying to mop up the messes left by misguided governments and NGOs, by exploding birth rates (Ethiopia’s is the fastest climbing population in Africa), and corruption. Medicines in Addis Ababa are three times the price by the time they get to Gonder.
Perhaps the Chinese will put some money into the Ethiopian healthcare kitty before they’ve stripped all the minerals out of its earth, packed up their tents and left.
During a walk in the hills, I’d come across three youngsters lying on the grass in the shade of a tree doing their homework. The eldest of the siblings explained that he wanted to be a doctor, his brother wanted to work in medical sciences and the sister wanted to be a nurse. I muttered encouragement and praised their English, examined their archaic textbooks, noted their shabby clothes, and not for the first time thought how a little bit of money could transform their lives. I gave them my email address then became aware that the boy was explaining how expensive it is to go to college and what they really needed was a sponsor. I was being hustled and rather brilliantly at that. Did I want to put the three of them through college? Having only recently co financed my own two children through college, this proposition didn’t exactly thrill me and I made my excuses and left.
At the airport at Addis we saw a Dutch couple taking their two newly acquired Ethiopian children home. It smacked of 21st century slavery to me but the daughter advised me that the youngsters usually come from orphanages. Option 1: Ethiopian orphanage. Option 2: comfortable home in Amsterdam. It’s a no brainer. If the kids had been able to express a preference then they would have undoubtedly agreed: The future’s bright, the future’s orange.
Back home I thought about the three kids I’d talked to and considered how one could do them some good without breaking the bank. Sending a few pounds to a charity didn’t seem personal enough. Maybe I’d send some textbooks to their school or buy the football team some balls. They had been so charming and bright and in need of a leg up. Yes, I’ll do something I resolved, just as soon as I get the begging email. But I waited in vain. There I was in the unique position of anticipating a hustling email from Africa and feeling a bit disappointed when it didn’t arrive.
© Steve Overbury 2011
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