Rural Ethiopia                                                                         Feb. 04

 

I've been camping twice now since arriving. (When I say camping I mean real camping—trees, lakes, vegetation, trails, fire pits etc. I've taken pictures; check out "Amboe" on my Facebook site.) The first time was in a preserved park about two hours from Addis. It was my first experience outside Addis and I was overjoyed to be able to travel outside. On the way we went through lots of villages, which didn't take long. A village is basically a cluster of shacks on either side of the road. As usual, everyone stared at us as we drove through. We had to stop once to get fuel before we turned off the paved road; that was like a parade. People stood and watched us as we waited in the car for our friends to go to the bathroom. You'd have thought we were movie stars. Again, it's the celebrity status we have here as white people. I took a couple of pics of these people.

 

Anyway, we made it the dirt road and went about 15 miles. There, we went through rural villages with round huts and thatched roofs—like you imagine all over Africa.  That was an incredible sight—when reality replaces imagination. The kid in me was saying, "Wow…some people really live like that." I took loads of pictures. Again, check out the "Amboe" photos on my Facebook site. In this rural area everybody farmed. Hay was everywhere, there were no tractors, and mules were very common. Teenage girls were hard at work, alongside boys. It was a great display of simple yeoman farming; simple subsistence husbandry. Children do get to go to school now (I believe this is one of the lauded recent government achievements) in the evening, after work I assume.

 

But the best part about that journey to the camp site was the children who ran, literally, as hard as they could from their huts to the road to see us as we drove by. They would all wave, say hello and give you a huge smile. The three year-olds especially were fun to watch run as fast as they could. We'd slow down to give them a chance to catch us, and we'd put our hands out of the windows so they could shake them. (Pictures in that same album.) That's one thing about Ethiopians: shaking hands is a very respectful act, there is much more dignity and respect displayed in the gesture than in the West.  Many of them, rural and urban people, bow just a bit as they shake. But kids especially love shaking hands. When I walk down the street in my neighborhood back in Addis, kids are always looking to shake my hand—after they say "You!", of course. 

 

But back to the villages, we were definitely the event of the day for these kids. We must have waved to a hundred kids by the time we reached our destination. Once I waved at some girls in the middle of a field and one of the girls threw down one of the buckets she was carrying so she could wave back. Things like this, the smiles you see, make you think that even though these people in the countryside are incredibly poor, living without any sign that the 20^th century had come, practically, they're happy.

 

That's one theme I discovered during my first trip into rural Ethiopia: it was what I imagine life was like 100 years ago outside big cities in America (the West). Everyone farms without tractors, there's no running water, toilets are outside, big families to work the farm, etc. This will probably be a reoccurring theme here in the developing world.

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