Nile Perch and Powerful Men

Nancy and I will leave Addis early Sunday morning and catch a flight up to Gondar. Our time in Addis has been extraordinarily successful. In addition to meeting with the Ethiopian Health Ministry’s director of Maternal and Child Health and at the Ethiopian headquarters of Food for the Hungry, we also had a very positive meeting on Friday morning with Dr. Getachew, the medical director of I-TECH (International Training and Education Center for Health)  Dr. Getachew put us in direct contact with Dr. Shigau in the Bahir Dar office of the Health Ministry. Dr. Shigau invited us to Bahir Dar next week to speak with him directly about SCOPE and our potential relationship with the Ministry of Health in the Gondar region.

We also had dinner on Friday with the director of HIV/AIDS at the Centers for Disease Control/Ethiopia (name redacted.) The CDC gentleman was not so interested in working with SCOPE for various reasons, and implied that while SCOPE’s mission is laudatory, it might not be necessary because of declining HIV rates and the success of government programs bringing women in for ANC (antenatal care.) This attitude flies in the face of every Ethiopian health, academic and religious professional we have interacted with. Hence, being the outspoken, opinionated woman I am, I made it clear that he and I did not see eye-to-eye on either his statistical analyses of ANC uptake in Ethiopia (the surveys are valid only in areas where people actually access care and do not take into account that nearly ¾ of Ethiopians live outside urban centers) or the utility of the SCOPE partnership (he claims that the people most likely to be influenced by the priests are the least likely to be exposed to HIV. Ahem . . . clearly he doesn’t have a very deep understanding of how this culture works re: the ubiquity of religion, regardless one’s lifestyle.) Anyway, despite our ‘lively’ conversation, the dinner meeting was fruitful as we learned a lot about how the CDC is transitioning much of its HIV/AIDS work to the Ethiopian government.

Saturday was a day off for us in Addis. I woke very early (I’m still not quite on East Africa time); an hour later the pre-dawn calls to prayer began. The Muslim imams alternate with (or, maybe compete with) the Orthodox priests, both intoning their messages over loud speakers placed all over the city. I suppose it could get annoying, being woken at 5 a.m. every single morning, but for me it was a reminder that I hadn’t prayed much lately. I had a bit of a worshipful hour, then conked out again and slept until 8.

After a lovely lunch in the garden of the incongruously opulent Addis Sheraton, the major highlight Saturday was a visit to the Red Terror Martyr’s Museum in Meskel Square. Here we learned about the military coup that toppled (and poisoned) Emperor Haile Selassie and led to the 2 year reign of terror by the communist Derg. The communist Derg terrorized the Ethiopian population from 1989-1991, a period during which I—and, I bet, none of you—remember hearing a thing about the genocide occurring in Ethiopia. The Derg, supported by the Soviet Union, abducted, tortured and murdered more than 500,000 Ethiopian men, women and children and buried them in mass graves all over the country. The Derg were ousted only after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Our guide was a victim of torture himself, scarred from whippings and burns, who had lost his older brother and countless friends. There is a room in the museum that depicts a mass grave and is stacked floor-to-ceiling with skulls and bones only recently excavated from the graves. It was sobering, sad and shaming to know that the rest of the world never paid attention to this period—the perpetrators, though captured, were never tried in the international criminal court; Mengistu (the general in charge of the Derg) is still alive and well in Zimbabwe, protected by his fellow despot, Robert Mugabe.

Oh. I almost forgot about the fish. Two nights ago, we had a delightful dinner at a little French restaurant, La Mandolline. There, I ordered Nile Perch, sautéed in garlic butter. I don’t know if that Nile Perch came from the actual Nile River, but I prefer to believe it did. I admit to having a little hankering for the exotic, and it seems just that to have my dinner caught in the Nile River. We will soon see Lake Tana—the source of the Blue Nile—just a few hundred kilometers north of here, at Bahir Dar.

Our last day in Addis ended with a thunderstorm and a 6 hour power outage which prompted several raucous rounds of Bananagrams and a lovely candlelight dinner with the Teusinks. Many thanks to Tim and Muriel for their hospitality!!

Photos: sisters at Selam Cooperative; Addis Ababa skyline; street fruit stand; Mosque prayer tower; razor wire and broken glass on Teusink's wall; female street cleaner.