Back to Addis
Kombolche to Addis, Friday 5th October
We are ready for an early start on the morning of our departure and although the usual minor chaos reigns, we aim to get back before dark. Farewell breakfast at Tekle is enjoyed with a strange sense of slight relief mixed with determination and something else that’s hard to define but could be somewhere on a continuum to despair. The poverty and lack of opportunity witnessed over the past ten days gets through to me in ways that are quite disturbing. Believing that we are all responsible for this ongoing disaster and that the affluent world knows – on some level – and chooses to ignore for the most part, is getting close to what I think disturbs me the most.
The world knows how to solve most if not all of these problems. The solutions are very simple on one level, and the collective ‘we’ can well afford them. But we choose instead to over indulge in our own well furnished corners of the world, to be greedy and selfish with our consumer choice priorities and turn a blind eye to what is happening somewhere in the world that we don’t have to witness every day, or on a personal level. Reflecting on this to try and write about makes me realize that maybe disgust mingled with abandoned responsibility is more like what I am feeling.
The trip back is no shorter than the one up – naturally enough – though it doesn’t get affected by the common phenomenon that makes it feel like it is. I start of sitting in the back and end up with a huge headache same as the one I had on the drive up. The diesel fumes from a faulty exhaust are probably the cause so I move to the front and sit beside an open window. The conversation with Ron in the back up to this point had touched on many interesting topics, his faith – which I do not share but respect enormously – particularly in the way he and Maria appear to live it every moment of their lives. Their life in the Cheleka Valley in the 1960s and 70s and some of the hard times they lived through then. Great droughts, famine, people on the move in search of food and deaths through epidemics. It was not all bad times though naturally enough these are the ones that stick in mind. He is a good story teller and I a keen listener.
The experience of revisiting the stunning scenery on the drive up to the tunnel and back to the capital on the other side has more depth than the first impression. I know what life is like for the people in the rustic looking village compounds and walking alongside the road with the necessities of life on their backs. I can see the difference in the crops that tell which areas have rain and which ones don’t. The shops, clinics and amenities in the busy towns of Debre Berhan and Debre Sina stand out from the stark peace, sparse population and lack of services that has become so evident in the countryside and smaller towns. The pace of life is far from being the only difference.
A few attempts to capture pictures to illustrate the story I know I mean to tell provide breaks in the mood of reflection; the man, the ox and the hand plough, the grown up child carrying the comparatively huge water container and the walled rural compound against a backdrop of fields and mountains in hundreds of shades of green and brown.
The driver is clearly keen to get home as he isn’t sparing the horses - or bothering about the slight inconvenience of blind S-bends on poorly maintained roads in the rush to overtake wheezing old buses on the winding uphill sections of the road. The road is busy today as dozens of busloads of pilgrims are returning from a major event somewhere in the north. At one point he is racing another minibus driver. Sam pulls him up and tells him to slow down – we want to get back alive, not end up roof down in a ditch. We count seven buses stuck in impossible to recover positions in ditches and gullies off the side of the road. The picture of what happens after the crash is chilling. No emergency calls, no fleets of ambulances, no clean hospital beds and suitably qualified nursing or medical staff. We have seen a couple of groups of people carrying someone wrapped and tied onto makeshift stretchers walking into towns. A bus crash would need an awful lot of carriers and these have happened miles from the nearest towns. Each time Sam tells him to cool it he does for the next ten miles or so.
We make good time anyway, until traffic jams on the outskirts of Addis bring us to a halt at the same spot we were delayed at a police checkpoint on the way out. Welcome back to civilization!
We are ready for an early start on the morning of our departure and although the usual minor chaos reigns, we aim to get back before dark. Farewell breakfast at Tekle is enjoyed with a strange sense of slight relief mixed with determination and something else that’s hard to define but could be somewhere on a continuum to despair. The poverty and lack of opportunity witnessed over the past ten days gets through to me in ways that are quite disturbing. Believing that we are all responsible for this ongoing disaster and that the affluent world knows – on some level – and chooses to ignore for the most part, is getting close to what I think disturbs me the most.
The world knows how to solve most if not all of these problems. The solutions are very simple on one level, and the collective ‘we’ can well afford them. But we choose instead to over indulge in our own well furnished corners of the world, to be greedy and selfish with our consumer choice priorities and turn a blind eye to what is happening somewhere in the world that we don’t have to witness every day, or on a personal level. Reflecting on this to try and write about makes me realize that maybe disgust mingled with abandoned responsibility is more like what I am feeling.
The trip back is no shorter than the one up – naturally enough – though it doesn’t get affected by the common phenomenon that makes it feel like it is. I start of sitting in the back and end up with a huge headache same as the one I had on the drive up. The diesel fumes from a faulty exhaust are probably the cause so I move to the front and sit beside an open window. The conversation with Ron in the back up to this point had touched on many interesting topics, his faith – which I do not share but respect enormously – particularly in the way he and Maria appear to live it every moment of their lives. Their life in the Cheleka Valley in the 1960s and 70s and some of the hard times they lived through then. Great droughts, famine, people on the move in search of food and deaths through epidemics. It was not all bad times though naturally enough these are the ones that stick in mind. He is a good story teller and I a keen listener.
The experience of revisiting the stunning scenery on the drive up to the tunnel and back to the capital on the other side has more depth than the first impression. I know what life is like for the people in the rustic looking village compounds and walking alongside the road with the necessities of life on their backs. I can see the difference in the crops that tell which areas have rain and which ones don’t. The shops, clinics and amenities in the busy towns of Debre Berhan and Debre Sina stand out from the stark peace, sparse population and lack of services that has become so evident in the countryside and smaller towns. The pace of life is far from being the only difference.
A few attempts to capture pictures to illustrate the story I know I mean to tell provide breaks in the mood of reflection; the man, the ox and the hand plough, the grown up child carrying the comparatively huge water container and the walled rural compound against a backdrop of fields and mountains in hundreds of shades of green and brown.
The driver is clearly keen to get home as he isn’t sparing the horses - or bothering about the slight inconvenience of blind S-bends on poorly maintained roads in the rush to overtake wheezing old buses on the winding uphill sections of the road. The road is busy today as dozens of busloads of pilgrims are returning from a major event somewhere in the north. At one point he is racing another minibus driver. Sam pulls him up and tells him to slow down – we want to get back alive, not end up roof down in a ditch. We count seven buses stuck in impossible to recover positions in ditches and gullies off the side of the road. The picture of what happens after the crash is chilling. No emergency calls, no fleets of ambulances, no clean hospital beds and suitably qualified nursing or medical staff. We have seen a couple of groups of people carrying someone wrapped and tied onto makeshift stretchers walking into towns. A bus crash would need an awful lot of carriers and these have happened miles from the nearest towns. Each time Sam tells him to cool it he does for the next ten miles or so.
We make good time anyway, until traffic jams on the outskirts of Addis bring us to a halt at the same spot we were delayed at a police checkpoint on the way out. Welcome back to civilization!
posted by Cathy Gunn at
December 10, 2007
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