Traffic Anarchy

Nancy and I are staying in Addis for five days to meet with several official people here on behalf of SCOPE. On Wednesday (4 hours after my arrival, in a major league jet-lagged state, I might add) we met with Teodros Bekele, head of Maternal and Child Health at the Ethiopian Ministry of Health. In summary, Teodros and the Ministry of Health are extremely interested in partnering with SCOPE to increase the number of pregnant women availing themselves of antenatal care and prevention of maternal to child transmission of HIV (PMTCT.) He told us that despite a huge increase in the number of Ministry of Health initiatives through establishing health teams in communities, still only 34 % of pregnant women access available care. The fact SCOPE’s pilot project at Woleka Health Center, using trained priest/volunteer female teams, increased uptake of available care there by 33%, was especially impressive to him. We will be talking with him further about how SCOPE and MOH will be working together and about the possibility of MOH providing some funding for the expansion of SCOPE’s projects into other health centers.

Yesterday, we met with Craig Jaggers, National Programs Director for the NGO Food for the Hungry (FH.) We discussed ways in which FH and SCOPE might work together to expand the services provided to HIV+ women and children. FH is particularly interested in the possibility of providing nutritional support and possibly their community support group efforts alongside SCOPE’s antenatal care and PMTCT projects. As we all know, nutritional support is hugely important to the health of all HIV+ people, and particularly for pregnant and lactating women and their babies. There will be some sensitive donor-relations work needed for FH to commit to partnering with SCOPE, and we will learn more about this in the coming weeks—so, please keep that in your thoughts and prayers.

 

Now, on to the traffic issue. I don’t need to tell you that in order to get to these meetings, one must arrive by some sort of vehicular method. Let me just say that accomplishing that in Addis Ababa is pretty much a terrifying endeavor. 

First of all, by ‘traffic,’ I do not mean traffic in the traditional sense of sitting on I-5 over the ship canal bridge in six lanes of dead-stopped commuters. No. I am talking about tens of thousands of cars jockeying for position in near constant motion with absolutely no regard for lane divisions, left turn lanes, crosswalks or—even—direction of travel: “yield” is better known as a motorized duel to the finish. Even though traffic is supposed to be traveling, say, east to west, cars come at you from every point on the compass; though there may be two distinct lanes, cars pack the road six or seven vehicles across, squeezing into nonexistent space between vehicles, honking constantly. It’s basically a gigantic, city-wide game of chicken played by everyone from giant over-loaded trucks to cars to un-helmeted motorcyclists. And the traffic circles? They are hair-raising cyclones of rocketing vehicles giving absolutely no regard to those entering the whirlwind of centripetal force.

Then there are the pedestrians. It is astounding that the streets are not littered with corpses. Pedestrians, literally, just jump into the vehicular chaos. Yesterday, in the pouring rain, a woman looked right at us and then just ran across the road; we missed smashing her by inches. Hoards of hawkers, men pushing carts, children, women with babies, and everyone else, do not seem to understand that crossing the road is a very high-stakes game of pinball. 

And, did I mention the goats? Herds of goats on the sidewalks, spilling into the streets; a goat market at the side of an unimaginably congested intersection, the goat owner lifting up one animal after another for the buyer to examine while cars are driving up on the curb to gain ground over the mob of interlocked cars in front of him. And the donkey? I kid you not. Yesterday, there was a donkey standing in the middle of a freeway on-ramp (“freeway” is a very loose term, as there is nothing free about the freeway.) Last night, there was a train of boys pushing their carts of soda and chewing gum in the right lane of this said “freeway.” And speaking of last night, our trip to a restaurant was complicated a hundred-fold by the fact it was the opening night of the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament. It was mayhem.

Addis traffic is not traffic. It is traffic anarchy. And we get to enter it all again today to meet with Dr. Getachew, medical director of I-Tech. Yeee-haaaaw!