Twenty-six hours after leaving Gondar, I’m back on the
continent of the Americas in Toronto, Canada. A 12-hour layover here in the
land of the maple leaves was helped considerably by a hot shower and an almost
6-hour snooze in the airport hotel. It’s still another 6-hour flight to Seattle; I needn’t point out that northern Ethiopia is a long, long
way from the west coast of the U.S. Both literally and figuratively.
More than any of my recent trips to East Africa, this one
feels to have been the longest. Not long in the sense of time, or of having to
endure—not at all! This visit has been full of work well done, new friends and
contacts made and the excitement of opportunities ahead. It feels long in the
sense of distance, in the sense of deep disconnection from my other life. As if
I was swallowed, for 18 days, into the belly of the whale and have only now
been coughed up on an almost unrecognizable shore. No doubt this feeling was jump-started by four days in the
frenetic jumble and chaos of Addis Ababa coupled with Ministry of Health, CDC and
FH meetings attended amid the thick fog of serious jet-lag.
Conversing with multiple
Ethiopian government officials in Addis and in Bahir Dar not only conveyed an
unmistakable legitimacy for SCOPE but also emphasized how very far from Kansas I
had traveled—not only have I never considered a life in any way connected to ‘officialdom,’
(my inadequacy in this capacity was confirmed when I smashed to smithereens the
gift mug given me by the President of the University of Gondar after dropping
it into the coffee ceremony set up in his office . . . ) but I was impressed
time and again with the seething undercurrent of tension between believing in a
cause/the desire to help and the recognition that as a white ferenji my service could easily be
perceived as patronizing or given with the attitude that these smart, strong
people are incapable. In no way are these things true and I am so proud that SCOPE works in partnership and is working even harder to create a locally sustainable model. As I said in one of my first blog posts, East Africa is
rising, and I am so privileged to be a very small part of it.
And then there was all that I saw on this trip. Ethiopia is
a large and varied country and so very far from the media images of my
childhood: parched desert filled with starving children with flies on their
eyes. Certainly, there are still starving children and a horrendous degree of
poverty (this is why we do what we do, no?) but in a country where 2/3 of the population is under 26 years old, there is also a strong
undercurrent of hope that the educated youth will turn this place around (they already
are.) The challenge is keeping these change-makers in their homeland; the lure
of the ‘west’ is, for so many, irresistible.
Addis to Gondar to Bahir Dar to Gondar to Debark to Gondar
to Gaiynt to Gondar to Addis and then, gone. I pretty much covered the Gondar
region and in addition to all I’ve written above, as usual, I was transfixed by
the landscape. Fourteen thousand foot mountains in Ethiopia? Who knew? The
green of the rains, the plowing of fields on land that because of its
topography would anywhere else appear non-arable; the gorges, the rivers
running full at this time of year, the people walking everywhere against the
backdrop of a dramatic land that tells the story of hardship and trouble but,
most of all, pride.
I have been a long, long way from home for what seems a very
long time. And so thankful to have been gone, and to have been in Ethiopia. As always,
I hope there’s a next time. For now, ciao, as they say in the country where after two millennia of
existence, the only outside occupying force was the Italians.
PHOTO: kindergartners, BEZA project, Gaiynt; woman, Gondar; 2,000 bicycle for Health Extension Workers, Amhara Regional Health Bureau, Bahir Dar; boy on the road to BD; me and our UofG driver at Lemmolimo, Simien Mtns; siblings, Gondar market; Toronto skyline from the airport.
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