Out of Africa Part II

On Sunday Morning we took Ethiopian Air to Arbaminch a city on the shores of one of the Great Rift Valley lakes, Lake Abaya.

I have always wanted to go to Africa. The reason was to see the vast herds of game animals. To see elephants, wildebeest, herds of zebra being chased by a pride of lions, the cackle of hyenas tussling with wild dogs over the carcass of a warthog. Well, I didn't see any of those things, although once a troop of baboons crossed the road which thrilled me. Also I did get a glimpse of the rare and nocturnal dik-dik, a small rabbit-like deer. They are very shy and hard to spy. Here's all the closer I was able to get:



Actually this one was begging bread at our table at our Hotel. There was a mom, dad and baby dik-dik all moving carefully through the tables begging people breakfast. There was also this swimming monkey. One night as we were sitting at a table talking, this conniving beast jumped into my lap. I screamed like a little girl and jumped to my feet. Udo thought it the funniest thing and roared with laughter. I didn't find it funny at all. Stupid monkey.



The hotel was very nice. It was in a gated compound with an armed guard that carried a long gun that I sware looked exactly like the guns that the Sand People carried in Star Wars. The rooms were very small, scarcely big enough for a bed and a couple of night stands. My room had a leaky spray hose used to wash down the room and had to kept in the toilet, so about twice a day I would take it out to pee and forget to put the nozzle back in the toilet. I had to ask that someone come and mop it up.

In Ethiopia the drought has left little water for hydro-electric power and so they have rolling blackouts that cause day long power outages three or four times a week. We had power about half the time we were there. Running water was on a different schedule and we had it about half the time, but usually a different half. The morning we left we had neither power or water so I used a liter and a half bottle of water to take what Udo called a "Russian Shower." Somehow this all seemed normal and not a hardship in Africa. In a Western hotel I would have been incensed, here I was just grateful for the times we actually had both power and water! It was beautiful though. This was taken standing at the door of my room:




So here is the reason I came to Africa. Tsetse fly devastates Africa. It transmits trypanosomiosis (sleeping sickness) in people and animals. Most of the crops are grown with the help of animal traction. I never saw a tractor in Africa I saw many Ox-drawn plows like this one:



There are many areas being cleared. We drove deep into the forest on a four-wheel drive road that would have made any Moabite happy to have navigated and found little settlements like this. These grass houses are actually very well insulated, keep out the rain and are very energy efficient to heat, and keep cool in the summer. These lands though are being turned into croplands at a rapid pace. We are very close to a National Park here. We had dinner that night on the escarpment above this forest and could hear large trees falling. I asked about it and they told me that the people were clearing the forest to plant corn and at night the guards were easy to avoid.




This is the view from the escapement with the forest we were in earlier below. It causes a strange mixture of feelings. I want the people to be blessed with the ability to grow crops, but I also hate to see the wild places of Africa go down under the Ax. Africa constantly challenged my assumptions about there being easy solutions to anything.



Africa is in the middle of an unprecedented drought. It is feeling climate change in the form of fewer rains. This year the February rains never came at all meaning the people would only get a single crop in rather than the two they used to get. The summer rains were also supposed to start weeks ago and in most areas they have not come. You can see the difference in these two photos that I took on the plane from Addis Ababa to Arbeminch. In the first the area has not received the summer rains in the second it has. The difference is dramatic. This has created a complex food shortage in which a combination of hoarding, bad government decisions, and wars have driven food prices in Ethiopia up 50% in the last two months. This can cause huge instabilities. The poor cannot afford this and the World Health Organization is trying to bring in food for the children of Ethiopia to keep them from starving. Many die everyday anyway due to hunger here. The worry is that this was how both Somalia and the Sudan collapsed into the chaos of the present situation there.




So one thing that would help would be to keep the people's animals healthy and so this was why the Southern Tsetse Eradication Program (STEP) program was set up under the African Union. This is the vet I mentioned in the last blog and in the distance you see a tsetse target. They attract the flies by looking like a large animal and smell like one--they have cow urine in a bottle attached. The cloth is impregnated with pesticide. These are set up in a grid covering hundreds of square miles in order to get rid of the flies.





Here is Udo and the two vets in charge of the program, by the target.



The other approach is to but a band of pesticide on the cattle themselves. We drove to some of the small villages near Arbaminch to see this happening. This was probably my most scary moment in Africa. It was not a good idea to see Blood Diamond (about the diamond trade, complete with accurate depictions of boy solders and The Last King of Scotland (the rise of Ugandan President Idi Ahmin) before going. I should have watched The African Queen or something. Blow up this picture and look closely before going on:




Ok, in retrospect, I suspect the gun was for leopards--these are cow herders after all and there is probably no difference between this kid and a Wyoming ranch teenager looking out for coyote and cougar, but at the time that didn't occur to me. All that kept going through my head was the song, "Mama told me not to come." and the scene from blood diamonds where the doctor is shot arbitrarily by the boy shoulders. Was I really scared? Yes. I was.

They treated over 1000 head of cattle this day and tsetse has been reduced drastically.




Here Udo showed the kids pictures he had taken of them. They were delighted. An older lady wanted her picture taken too, so he took it and showed it to her. She laughed historically. Udo really knows how move in Africa. I was glad I was on the ground with someone so experienced.



What was also cool is that we went where tourists never go. We went into the heart of the real Africa, seeing people that aren't on the tours. People living their lives. The people were friendly and warm. We were indeed a curiosity, but in a good way. They were clearly surprised to see us, as few Westerners visit these parts, but there was no hostility or resentment. Kids kept smiling at me and giving me the thumbs up. Ladies and men greeted me warmly (although a little shyly). It was a wonderful chance to enter a world that few ever see from the West.





We drove back to Addis from Arbaminch. It's a distance similar from Salt Lake to Moab, except the roads were mostly like this:



And this:




It took two days. Our diver honking and moving back and forth to avoid ubiquitous potholes, people, and livestock. I kept up the mantra "Please don't hit anyone, please don't hit anyone, please don't hit anyone." I really didn't want to get in a wreck. We would have a close call of one kind or another with near misses about every 15 minutes that had it happened in the states I would have spend the evening telling everyone I knew about my close call. After a while I realized the driver knew how to maneuver in the world of people, potholes and animals and relaxed.

We drove the first day to a city called Awasa and stayed in a nice hotel almost as good as a Motel 6. It was suppose to have a generator but power went off at about 11pm. Udo was furious as he had tons of work to do and they promised he had a generator to keep the power going. I'd been warned by my travel book so had brought a flashlight and the power outages were just an inconvenience. I also had not brought my computer because I was afraid of loosing it and I don't think we could have afforded to have it replaced.

The drive was very long, but I don't think I minded. We passed hundreds of donkey carts, cows, people walking, more people walking, more people walking in an endless sea of people carrying loads of water to firewood, Ox plows dragging through the fields.

Well, in the end it was a life changing event. I met with a professor from Addis University and he wants to do collaboration. I saw things that restructured everything I think about Africa. I thought life was hard. I had no idea what hard is. But then it wasn't that long ago that our own ancestors lived close to the edge. I think of Grandpa Peck farming and using a milk cow to keep the family afloat. Perhaps in the next few years Africa will emerge into what we think of as 20th century life. There are deep problems though. Government corruption is rampant. People are afraid. Wars and conflicts are scattered everywhere. I was thinking that one of the things that allowed our country to emerge from it's initial chaos was the deep integrity and wisdom of our founding fathers. They were willing to sacrifice power for right, to put the building of a Nation before their personal desire for wealth, to commit to the rule of law and to make the sacrifices and commitment that that takes. I think Africa will not emerge until they can have similar commitments to truth and justice. Of course they are facing challenges we can't imagine. Desertification is making cropping harder, tribal warfare creates suspicions and resentments that last for generations, poverty is consuming many of its best and brightest minds. Religious differences spawn wars without end. But again, that history is ours all through the middle ages, think of the crusades. We got past these problems and my hope is that Africa can too. There is a lot to be done. I'll be working on the Tsetse fly problem. Not much, but it is a place to start.