Yup – freezing cold, peeing down with rain, electricity every second day – it must be July in Ethiopia. To be fair, they even call it their winter, but nothing quite prepares you for the sheer misery of it all.
The mighty Hotel Tommy in Debre Zeit, where we have just spent a luxurious week, doesn’t do hot water, and doesn’t even attempt breakfast on those days when electricity doesn’t make it down the grid.
So we just have to wait ‘til lunchtime for the next portion of Injura. Now there’s something pretty special. It’s the only thing the locals really love. They eat it for breakfast, they eat it for lunch, they eat it for tea. And if at any time they’re feeling a little bit peckish, the cry goes out “Why don’t we just have a little bit of that delicious Injura?”
The only way I can think of describing it to the uninitiated, is to imagine a cold, wet washing-up cloth, rolled up like a Swiss roll. And if you’re rich, you dollop a blob of meat sauce on it, or some raw mince. Mmmm, yummy!
Now to prepare this gastronomic miracle, you have to have Teff.
Teff is a cereal unique to Ethiopia – just can’t imagine why it hasn’t caught on in the rest of the world – and must be one of the lowest yielding and unproductive crops in the history of the world. It yields about ten per cent of what any other crop would do. And to get it in the ground, you plough the field six times with a maresha plough - SIX BLOOMING TIMES!
You do this with a team of oxen, or if they’ve given up the ghost, a couple of donkeys. I suppose that’s where we come in.
There are still something like eight million working animals in the place – though God knows noone’s ever really counted the teaming masses of donkeys – there’s probably twice as many.
These can be seen streaming along the roads into any of the towns, carrying loads of dried cow-pats. They use them for their fires to cook the blinking injura. Amazingly, a farmer with a cow can make more money selling the cow-pats than the milk.
But we’re really more concerned with the horses.
Donks are so tough and resilient, that given even the slightest chance, even just a sniff at a bit of feed, they will cope. They are the hardiest, most stoical creatures on the planet – they need to be.
But with horses, it’s a different ball-game. In the same conditions – poor food, endless work, pitiless heat in the summer, and wet and cold during the winter - horses really don’t cut the mustard.
So that’s what we do. Endlessly. We take a mobile clinic every day to one of the towns in central and southern Ethiopia, and try and help the endless queues of taxi and cart horses waiting for us.
What a job. Not only are most of them skin and bone – they’re covered in scabs and fly-blown harness sores, lame on as many feet as you can see, and a fair number will have an eye missing or a tooth abscess. What a crew.
Then there’s epizootic lymphangitis. This is where flies carry the infection onto an open wound and it gradually develops down the lymph tracks, until the poor wretched creature is a mass of suppurating boils and sores, and abandoned to die beside the road. Lovely.
Yet, when you look at their owners – wizened, starving looking things themselves, that don’t look as if they’ve got the strength to lift a cup of tea, it’s easier to understand. Poverty in their homes and children like I’ve never seen before.
And some of the kindest, gentlest people in the world.
What a country. I just love it.
Jeremy Hulme
Tuesday, 28 July 2009
Ethiopia
Friday, 14 November 2008
Ethiopia
Writing this at about 36,000 feet flying across southern Sudan – about 4 am UK time – courtesy of the magnificent BMI (Used to be British Midland, now 80% owned by Lufthansa).
Frankly it’s pretty grim – only one toilet working for 120 people and half the televisions not working. It was exactly the same on the way out here on Sunday night, so they’ve made absolutely no progress in the ensuing five days. (I wonder if the engineers take as much notice about engine problems).
But it’s all getting a bit predictable, isn’t it – if I’m not moaning about BMI, it’s likely to be my dear friends at Air France, or even Air Mauritanie. It’s all become a sort of ‘Mr Grumpy does air-travel in Africa’. But at least when you get to Ethiopia life cheers up a bit.
It really is wonderful.
Apart from the injura, obviously. (That’s the Ethiopian staple diet, made from tef, a cereal unique to the country, and served up in a sort of swiss-roll, that looks and tastes just like one of the ‘refreshment’ towels served up by air-lines).
We run a couple of mobile clinics, treating the horses that are used as taxis and general haulage in most towns across the country. The state of some of these animals has to be seen to be believed – but of course the owners that depend on them are not much better. Nice to report we’ve had some real success over the last couple of years with one particularly evil disease – epizootic lymphangitis – where septic abscesses burst out all over the poor wretched creature’s head and body leading to a long agonising death.
They would be abandoned and left by the roadside – in abject pain and misery, waiting for the end – which could take days or even weeks. We managed to get the municipal authorities to support us when we take these animals and put them out of their misery (in the past, an ‘owner’ would materialise out of the soil and demand immense sums of compensation).
So, no more of that rubbish now, and not only are we able to put a humane end to their suffering, but doing so cuts down the rate of infection to other animals – which anyway (provided treatment starts early enough) we have a good chance of curing.
And it has made a huge difference – which boosts everbody's morale.
We also have a great little education programme, where we built science classrooms in three schools – they have almost nothing normally – eighty kids in a class, no books, no teaching materials – but boy, do they want to learn things. So we have a series of lessons in animal husbandry, welfare etc, and they are fighting to get on the courses (we can only do fifty at a time). I don’t remember that enthusiasm, when long ago, I was facing double maths on a Thursday afternoon.
One of the schools is up in the highlands, and the trip there is always stunning. Especially so this year because they’ve had good rains and the crops are just starting to be harvested. Doesn’t seem to stop food aid though – WFP is still doshing out 40kg of wheat per family per month. A very mixed blessing really – not only does it keep everyone ‘dependent’ – it also destroys the sale value of any surplus the local farmers produce. How are they supposed to raise spare cash to buy shoes for their kids ?
It will be interesting to see whether it carries on when the harvest is al cut and carried.
Jeremy Hulme
Friday, 2 November 2007
In the company of wolves
After ten years of working in Ethiopia, Diana and I kept saying we ought to take some time to see the rest of the country - we finally did it. We organised a trek with 'Walks Worldwide' through the Simien Moutains in the far north of the country, on foot (but with four hill mules to help us out).
It was wonderful, but I have to admit, it was so knackering that there were three or four days when I really thought I wasn't going to make it.
At one stage we climbed over a col at 4200 metres high - I felt sick and ill, and very, very old! I am eternally grateful to Simon (one of the mules) who gave me a helping hand one afternoon when I was struggling up through a thousand foot of alpine forest.
But of course the payback for all that suffering is the stupendous view you get from the top.
And the wildlife.
We lay on our stomachs on a bed of pungent wild thyme, perched on the edge of a two thousand foot cliff, looking down at a group of Walia Ibex (the males equipped with enormous semi-circular horns) grazing on a ledge below amongst giant lobelia trees. At the same time, lammergeiers ('bearded' vultures) and Lanner falcons swooped and soared on the up-currents, whizzing unconcerned a mere twenty feet in front of us.
Then one morning, as we were again struggling upwards, we heard that distinctive bark, answered by a yowl. Wolf! Frantically we searched the hillside with our binos, then suddenly, with his eagle-eyes our scout spotted one.
The Abyssinian Wolf, or Simien Fox - now one of the rarest animals in the world, is reduced to probably only twenty or so individuals in the Simiens, though there are probably still about a hundred in the southern Bale mountains.
'Our' one, a beautiful pinkish-orange with white throat and chest, trotted up to the skyline, before posing for us, silhouetted against the dawn sky, and calling occasionally to his mate, before finally disappearing again, as suddenly as he'd appeared.
They feed on small rodents, particularly the Abyssinian rat - which needs long tussock grass, and so is suffering from the overgrazing of villagers' goats and sheep. They also prey on the beautiful Gelada baboons, adapted to the freezing cold of the high places by their long, thick coats. The baboons also feed on the grasslands, but sleep at night on the cliff ledges for safety. So a battle of wits develops between wolf and baboon - hunger or safety?
Sadly though, for once it is not loss of habitat that is wiping out the wolf, but his cousin the domestic dog. Or more accurately the diseases the village dogs carry and spread to them - distemper, parvo and perhaps even rabies. These diseases have already wiped out the Golden Jackal from the mountains. A simple, cheap programme of vaccinating the local sheepdogs would go a long way to preserving these wonderful creatures.
The flowers were breathtaking. Whole hillsides of red-hot pokers, lillies and exotic shrubs, with African marigolds filling in the spaces, and of course hosts of butterflies and small birds, including irridescent Sunbirds drinking the nectar.The people were fabulous too. For them we must appear as if from outer space, and with unbelievable wealth compared with their simple lifestyles. Yet we met nothing but kindness and hospitality.
But the starkness and brutality of life in the mountains was brought abruptly home to us one night, as we camped in an isolated village at the edge of the plateau. We were woken at midnight by groans and moans from a grass-thatched hut about fifteen feet away. A young woman was in labour, and there was nothing that could be done to help her. Mercifully nature did not need any help that night, and about five o'clock in the morning we heard the little cries that said another life had come into the world. But twenty miles from the nearest track, and even then perhaps a day's drive to the nearest doctor - it was very clear to us how hard life is for everyone, animals and humans, in those magnificent, towering, mountain fastnesses.
