Friday, July 24, 2015

Week 8: Colleagues and Friends

I am in constant awe of the people I get to work with. From my first day in Ethiopia, it has been clear that I’m surrounded by exceedingly capable, intelligent, fun, and adventurous colleagues. Last week was the southern portion of our annual general meeting, which brought together all the staff from Mercy Corps’ southern cluster. Spending time with colleagues and other MC staff from all over southern Ethiopia reminded me how privileged I am to work alongside these incredible people, and I want to tell you a bit about some of them.
***
Getahun is the project manager for CHELBI, the USAID project I’m working on which I’ve 
Getahun conducts a training.
described in previous posts. My first foray into fieldwork was with Getahun, who patiently allowed me to tag along as he conducted capacity-building workshops for youth around the SNNP Region where we work. We have covered more miles in the Land Cruiser than I can possibly count; shuttling between villages so remote the closest guesthouse or hotel is two hours away takes a lot of gas. These car trips have been wonderful opportunities for conversation. We’ve discussed everything from the conflict dynamics of South Sudan to his new baby daughter; the time his car broke down in South Omo and they had to walk for several days to reach help with no access to food or water, to Amharic idioms that I’ve been trying to pick up; the virtues of a macchiato to his adoption into an Omo clan. Together we have perilously crossed rivers in our bare feet to visit project sites, and fumbled with uncooperative printers, projectors, and tablets. I will truly miss working with Getahun when I leave the south. He’s been an absolute delight to get to know.
***
Shimelle, who is affectionately referred to as Shime, is Getahun’s beloved minion. He’s one of the Mercy Corps drivers based in Arba Minch, and before he came to MC he drove for Catholic Relief Services for 15 years. Getahun seems to trust him infinitely; he’s often relied upon to collect and
Shime (right) and Tesfa, another MC driver.
transport supplies for projects, and his is the only car Getahun rides in. Shime is very short and very bald, and of these two lovable characteristics he is endlessly self-conscious. He also has a very dry sense of humor. During one afternoon in the field, I stood by the car fixing my ponytail. Shime looked out the window at me very seriously, and with his limited English said, “give me half.” He’s also exceptionally talented at napping. The alternative is absolute boredom; he drives teams to field sites, and then must wait throughout the day for them to finish working. On the day of my survey pilot, we delivered all the enumerators to their respective interviewees, and then Shime and I parked on a ridge overlooking the Rift Valley, waiting for them to finish. I got out of the car and walked along the ridge for maybe 30 seconds. When I turned around, the driver’s seat was tipped back, a jacket was spread over the occupant’s face, and Shime was snoring healthily. He is prone to do this at any opportunity. Of course, driving conditions here are such that a lot of rest is needed to compensate for the anxiety of being on the road, so I can’t really blame him.

Shime brought his son along to the Mercy Corps general meeting last week in Awassa. Their relationship is precious. His son, who must be about 11, is nearly his father’s height. But everywhere they go, Shime walks around with one hand on the boy’s shoulder. It is clear that they share a mutual adoration.
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Tesfaye practices our survey during training.
Tesfaye is one of our survey supervisors. While he isn’t a Mercy Corps staffer, I’ve spent a lot of time with him and the other supervisors as we’ve prepared for the survey. Tesfaye—which means “hope” and is a very common name in Ethiopia—has a regular job lecturing in the Geography Department at Addis Ababa University. Geography was for a long time my favorite subject in school (it’s really a shame that American schools don’t put more stock in this subject, by the way) and so we
got on right away chatting about geography. Tesfaye has two master’s degrees, one of which he obtained in Norway. I’ve made no secret of my admiration of Scandinavian infrastructure and social services, and we’ve had really interesting conversations about Oslo public transportation, and the banning of private vehicles from the city center. He’s also told me about his research on land use in Ethiopia, particularly in the town of Awassa where he completed his first master’s degree. We talked about the near-universal problem of a lack of affordable housing, from Washington, D.C. to southern Ethiopia. In October, Tesfaye is heading to Germany to pursue a M.Sc. in GIS, which he hopes will allow him to practically apply his theoretical research to improve land use and natural resource management in Ethiopia.
***
Visiting Lake Awassa
with Vimbai.
Vimbai was one of my first friends in Ethiopia. She started working for Mercy Corps just two weeks before me, and on my second full day in Addis Ababa she came with some others for lunch at the house where I’m staying. When we were introduced she told me Emma is her second name, and since then we often refer to each other as “Namesake.” Vimbai is from Zimbabwe, where she worked as a community health worker for several years. She then worked for a series of international NGOs, landing eventually at Mercy Corps on the PRIME project as the section leader for Nutrition Behavior Change Communication (that title is definitely not accurate since I can never remember the order of the words, but you get the gist). These section leaders are referred to by the “intermediate result” they work on, so Vimbai is “I.R. 5 Leader.”

Vimbai is a storyteller of epic proportions. Her years as a humanitarian and development health and nutrition worker have provided her with plenty of material. Once in Zimbabwe, she stood before 3,000 people from her community explaining the use of certain birth control techniques, causing her two older brothers to flee the premises. As she put it though, when it comes to talking about safe sex, “you have to call a spade a spade and not a large spoon.” While working in South Sudan, she often met with community leaders who would show up wearing naught but a cloth wrapped around their waist, and upon arrival this would be removed. They would plop down on a rock in preparation for a long meeting under the equatorial sun. Laughing at this display was considered the utmost insult; I can’t imagine the willpower it must take to keep a straight face under these circumstances.

We had an absolute blast together during Mercy Corps’ general meeting. After spending only bits of time together, we now had three full days to hang out. We visited the beautiful Lake Awassa, sat together in sessions, and practiced our Ethiopian shoulder dancing at dinner.
***
Jeton does the produce shopping on the way home from work.
Jeton has been my host in Addis Ababa. He is the “I.R. 1 Leader,” the resident livestock expert for the PRIME project. I have repeatedly felt so thankful that I get to stay in a beautiful house in a quiet Addis neighborhood where I feel safe and happy. Jeton’s house has a beautiful garden and a tortoise, which gave me a good surprise the first time I saw it. (Tate, the regional resilience advisor, left it behind when he moved to Nairobi. I’d expect nothing less from Tate.) Jeton is from Macedonia (FYROM), but has lived in places like Mongolia and Azerbaijan throughout his career in development. His wife and two daughters are back home in Macedonia, so both of us enjoy having someone around to talk to. As definitely-not-morning-people, we have a mutual and unspoken agreement to maintain silence from breakfast through arrival at the Mercy Corps office, which is suits me just fine. Our dinnertime conversations, however, reflect our shared interest in history and politics. The looming Greek debt crisis has occupied a good deal of our discussions, but we’ve also talked about the political climates Macedonia and the US, and watched the absurd shows of the History Channel.
***
Michael is the PRIME Chief of Party, a position with unimaginable complexity and responsibility, which he seems to approach with the jolly lightheartedness he wears at all times. While I don’t work directly with Michael, he was another of my first friends. He immediately reminded me of someone
Michael and Cathy at dinner in Awassa.

my parents would be friends with (I’m looking at you, Coppocks and Sinexes). He’d started at the same time as Vimbai, so was still a newbie when I showed up. For my first week in the office we had lunch together on a daily basis. We exchanged stories of living in crazy places and doing nutty things; his tales always won. Michael and his wife Cathy have worked together as ecologists for about 30 years. They are the sweetest couple, and I imagine they’ve had a blast sharing some wild experiences together. They’ve tracked grizzlies in Alaska, worked with pastoralist communities in Afghanistan, and written management plans for two of Ethiopia’s largest national parks. They’ve had run-ins with everything from a hungry pair of grizzlies to armed groups in the Ethiopian bush, and relay these experiences as if they’re no big deal.

What I admire most about Michael is his humility and modesty. Noticing it in him, I’ve realized what a rare commodity this is, especially amongst development professionals who enjoy touting their vast experience and deep understanding of different cultures and countries. Michael has all this, but tells his stories without a hint of pretention. It’s clear he’s more experienced and intelligent than anyone in the room, but never makes you feel as though your experiences or opinions are any less important than his. I aspire to be this kind and open-minded no matter what my place in life.
***
Esther is one of my two supervisors, and is based in Addis. Her title is very long and essentially designates her as the person in charge of humanitarian programming and monitoring and evaluation. She makes me feel lazy. I don’t think she ever runs out of energy, and I mean this quite literally—she’s a triathlete, and is currently casually training for her third or fourth Iron Man, while at work she is always on the go, never tired from her 4:30 am workouts despite the long list of responsibilities she’s always on top of. (I, meanwhile, lose my breath walking up a gentle slope in Addis, where the elevation makes oxygen intake a daily struggle.)


Esther during a staff outing in Awassa.
The most important thing Esther has taught me about working in Ethiopia and development more broadly is to “be a Type A person with a Type B attitude.” This sounds totally contradictory of course, but in this context it makes perfect sense. With a portfolio of projects and responsibilities as complex as hers, you have to keep meticulous track of your performance, monitoring your work plan to make sure you’ve not missed any tasks or deadlines. However, not everyone in the world is as Type A as the two of us. To deal with the different work paces of others, and the fact that things can go wrong a fair bit in this line of work, you can’t be uptight or get easily frustrated by things not going the way you expect them to. Having a laid back attitude, while ensuring nonetheless that all your ducks are in a row, can smooth and ease the process of working in some very challenging contexts.

Sunday, July 19, 2015

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.

The floor of the Rift Valley is a patchwork of agricultural land

Ye olde Lande Cruiser

Driving from Konso to Burji, SNNPR

Traffic jam, pastoralist-style.

Sometimes you have to cross a river on foot to get to the field site.

Riding in a bajaj, the motorized tricycle that plagues Ethiopian traffic.

Driving north from Arba Minch to Awassa, SNNPR.

Mountains and farmland in Teltele, SNNPR, about 60 km north of the Kenya border.

Dusty roads through Teltele, SNNPR, a semi-arid region populated by numerous pastoralist groups.

Wildlife sighting! Guinea fowl in Teltele, SNNPR.

Views of mountains in Teltele, SNNPR.

Pit stop.

Mountains EVERYWHERE!


 
The Konso people have been terracing their land for generations,
and the terraces have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.