Emma's Ethiopian Excursion: Week 7: Eating Dust

Nowhere is a more literal understanding of “eating dust” realized than in semi-arid regions of Africa during the dry season. I would say that I’ve lost track of how much ground we’ve covered on dirt roads in the last few weeks, but that would be a lie. We’re pushing 700 kilometers, conservatively. The sensation of inhaling dust that is invisibly suspended in the air long after a car has vanished down a dirt road was immediately familiar and intolerable to my body. There is a satisfaction that comes at the end of the day when you can feel dust saturating your hair, itching at your eyelashes, and settling in your respiratory tract. It is a feeling of accomplishment—a great journey must have been completed to feel dusted like this. On the other hand, I have sinuses that regularly punish me, and they seized the opportunity of being filled with African dust to rebel. A stubborn cold set in after the first 500 kilometers. Thank goodness for the NyQuil I packed.

Traveling in many parts of Africa is at once a trial and a delight, and Ethiopia is no exception to this. I often find myself snorting involuntarily at some of the more amusing sights, but it is also exhausting and occasionally terrifying. For the most part, travel between major towns and cities can be done on a tarmacked road, which, in my experience, are typically in pretty good condition here, with intermittent patches of potholes the size of a small cow or short stretches of missing road. Arba Minch, the town which houses Mercy Corps’ last field office before you enter the districts where projects are implemented, is also the point at which the road quality begins to falter and eventually peter out entirely.

The communities participating in the survey I’ve been administering are located as much as 6 hours’ drive from Arba Minch; as such, we were based in Konso for a couple weeks, a town about two hours south of Arba Minch that, according to my Bradt Guide, is at first look simply an over-developed intersection. From Konso, roads diverge toward the Kenya and South Sudan borders as well as further west into Ethiopia from the single roundabout intersection in the town. Unless you follow the main tourist route toward Omo National Park, which I have not, the roads out of Konso are some mixture of dirt and gravel. The Land Cruisers, which are an essential asset for anyone hoping to stray off the Google Maps-beaten track, can take these roads at 60 km/hour, although the drivers must frequently slow down to negotiate bits of road that have been washed out by the recent rainy season. Further out into the communities where we are working, however, the roads often become nearly or totally impassible. At one point, my program manager and I had to get out of the car and cross a seasonal river on foot—which truly wasn’t that big of a deal, but was fun—in order to reach a project site. In other instances, however, traveling 10 kilometers has taken upwards of 45 minutes as the driver slowly picks his way among gullies and potholes in the dirt road.

Land Cruisers are truly unsung heroes, and a huge accomplishment in Japanese engineering. When my family lived in Kenya, we had a Toyota Hilux pickup truck, featured on some History Channel show as a vehicle that is very nearly indestructible. The Hilux, which is driven widely here, does not have the unnervingly solid suspension of a Land Cruiser, so a long trip on a dirt road leaves one in desperate need of a chiropractor. The Land Cruisers, however, really put their pickup cousin to shame, creating a ride that feels effortless even when the roads seem quite dubious. I feel pretty spoiled getting to ride around in the vehicle I always wished we had in Kenya. I also feel rather smug when I see tourist caravans pull up in the newer Land Cruiser models, which resemble luxury SUVs in the US but which do not have the utilitarian power of the old white model that is ubiquitous amongst aid organizations. Ah those poor devils, they don’t know what a true driving adventure is like here. In all vehicles used for travel outside of major towns, manual transmission and four-wheel drive are a must, as is a mastery of how to use them appropriately. (More than once I’ve thanked heaven for Mercy Corps’ incredibly skilled and trustworthy drivers.) Another essential feature is the “Jesus” or “O.S.” (an unprintable exclamation one might use in a near-miss situation) bar, as my aunts call them. On some of the rougher roads, one must hold tight.

Technicalities of the roads and vehicles aside, there’s a lot to pay attention to when you’re driving in the field. Other vehicles aren’t of the greatest concern, although there are certainly some interesting and frightening encounters with them. Today on the road to Teltele, a town about 60 km from the Kenya border, we saw an overturned bus that had conveniently laid itself to rest across the road. The farmer whose land it had encroached on as it crashed had set up an impromptu toll booth, hoping to stop vehicles from passing around the erstwhile bus by stretching a piece of string between the bus and a small post. My team was absolutely livid at this. Most vehicles can be seen from a long way off, their dust rising in their wake. As they approach, everyone frantically rolls up the windows in order to avoid the eating of dust. On paved roads, the bajaj taxis—auto rickshaws called by their Indian brand name here—are of the most amusing annoyance. They are incredibly slow but do their utmost to take up as much of the road as possible. I have a strong feeling that the driving test for bajaj operators is not very rigorous. Further outside of the towns, and often in the middle of a downtown, livestock pose an enormous inconvenience. The communities where we work are for the most part pastoralists or agropastoralists, but even in Addis Ababa it’s not uncommon to find a goatherd crossing a major thoroughfare with his charges. In the more rural areas, the roads are of course the easiest way to move animals to grazing land or market, but the bleating beasts have no interest in sharing the road. Some are more responsive than others to car horns, but many will not move unless threated with the prospect of momentarily becoming a pancake.

Those responsible for the herds are often children who look to be about 10 years old. These children are one of the more entertaining features of a drive through this region. They are typically entirely unperturbed by the vehicles barreling towards them and their families’ most essential assets, preoccupied instead with eliciting a response from the car’s occupants. I fancy myself a bit tanner than when I arrived in Ethiopia—my right arm in particular has taken on some color from hanging out the car window all day. Even so, it’s absolutely no secret that I’m white. My appearance immediately elicits screeches of “Faranji!!”—“foreigner”—from these children, usually accompanied exclamations of “You! You! You!” and “Highland!”—a brand of bottled water in Ethiopia. These bottles are multi-purpose and highly coveted devices for these kids, and some of the staff I travel with will occasionally indulge them with an empty bottle, much to their delight. In order to convince the faranji—or, for that matter, any passing driver—to share a plastic bottle, these kids along the road perform a little dance that involves squatting and leaping up repeatedly and in quick succession, wobbling the knees with inhuman agility. This, more often than not, is what gives me a good chuckle.

What I have enjoyed most, perhaps, is the scenery on these drives. Southern Ethiopia is absolutely breathtaking—it is not only the incredibly diverse people, its flora and fauna, and grand landscape—it is the sum of all of these things, and more, which lend an ethereal and otherworldly feel to this region. From the Rift Valley and its escarpments to high plateaus and low arid semi-desert, from mountains jutting up beside the road to bright flashes of colorful succulent blossoms between the scrubby brush, from dik-diks and guinea fowl and baboons darting across the road to the world-famous terracing of the Konso farmers and the Borana pastoralists with their distinctive turbans—the sights of culture, animals, and geography are almost too much to take in. I probably started to irk my colleagues with the number of times I said, “Look how beautiful it all is!” But I can’t get over it. I watched Out of Africa the other night, and felt reassured that I’m not the only one whose camera cannot capture the true majesty and overwhelming expanse of the landscape and all that occupies it. Frequently Shime, my favorite driver, has seen me pull out my camera and slowed down so I can take a picture. But no matter how many times I try to pull this larger-than-life place into a tiny frame. I can’t do it, but how else can I try to convince everyone back home that I’m living in a place this beautiful?

I returned to Addis this afternoon with a feeling of grief that it might be a long time before I again ride those roads in that sturdy white truck and watch the wonders of this corner of the world go by.