Escape from Addis

Wow! I mean, wow! What else can I say after I finally spent a week in the field out in rural Ethiopia. We were in two of the wheat growing areas (meaning the elevation was higher than Addis for both) and of course on the road for the many hours in between. Addis is fine and everything, but it’s definitely losing this battle by blowout, in straight sets, by unanimous decision…all right, that’s probably enough sports analogies for you to get the point. Outside the city, the air is clean. The people are friendly and happy despite their struggles, and the countryside is astonishingly beautiful.

Man, it felt good to get out of the ivory tower and see something happen. Between two years at a consulting firm and six months at ATA headquarters in Addis, I crave seeing actual on-the-ground operations. This was by far the best week I've had at ATA. Not only was it a great experience, but spending time with the farmers, cooperatives, woreda officials, etc. taught me a ton about how things really work here.

The two places we visited were Gassera and Tiyo. Gassera is a woreda (think US county) that’s a little off the beaten path (which I think adds to its charm). We left Addis Monday morning and got to Goba that night. By the way, quick side note – the fact that we spent a bunch of the week driving was great because (1) I got to see more of the country, (2) I am a huge road-trip junkie, and (3) I forgot how nice it is to drive somewhere instead of walking. Anyway, from Goba it’s just a 2-2.5 hour drive on a gravel / dirt / mud (especially this time of year) road to Gassera. Tiyo is near Assela, so we stopped there on the way back to Addis later in the week.

On the map below, point A is Addis, point B is Gassera, and point C is Assela. But wait Charles, those look pretty close together. Why does it take so long to get between them? Between traffic, road disrepair (much rarer than I expected), and the animals / people in the middle of the road every 50 meters or so (though “continuously” may be a more accurate description), it takes a long time to get anywhere here. Personally, I enjoyed the more leisurely speed; it gives you more time to see the country.

I have to apologize for the pictures you are about to see. I would see something amazing (pretty much every five feet), take a picture of it (or whatever was right after it since, as you’ve learned with my blog, my picture taking reaction time is pretty slow), look at the picture, and think, “that’s not what I saw.” Seriously, several times I would be looking back and forth between the picture and the real thing trying to understand why they weren’t the same. Trying to capture the beauty of Ethiopia in pictures is kind of like trying to get a bad picture of Barney Stinson (HIMYM reference alert) or trying to get a picture of a ghost. It just can’t be done. I think this is a combination of (1) the quality of my cameras – a seven-year old Canon and a camera phone from a couple years ago (always blame the equipment first), (2) the fact that most of my pictures were taken from a moving car, and most importantly (3) my lack of skill (it’s possible I didn’t even realize these cameras have a “landscape” setting until halfway through the trip; turns out only ever using the on/off button and the shutter button is not maximizing the camera’s ability…who knew?).

All this is to say that if you want to see what I saw, I guess you’ll just have to come visit me :)

My chariot. Land cruiser is definitely the way to go in Ethiopia. If you look closely, you can see Mesfin, our driver. He's got some serious skills (as his ability to not hit anything the whole trip and to prevent the car from getting destroyed can attest).

I thought these mats were kind of funny when I first got in the car. I like that the little car icons say "car" underneath them.

Later their necessity would become apparent, as would my "farmer boots" (which is what I get yelled at me when I walk around Addis in them). Turns out this is a pretty accurate description as several of the farmers wore them, too.

In Gassera, there is a beautiful gorge right off the road in between the woreda government office and the primary cooperative we visited. I'm trying to compensate for the lack of quality in the pictures with quantity :)

Beard alert!

I'm a huge sucker for the beauty of farmland (maybe it's the Midwesterner in me). Here it's even prettier because you'll have farmland in the foreground with mountains, hills, forests, etc. in the distance.

Rural Ethiopia goes on the list of potential retirement locations. This is definitely the way to do Africa – up in the plateaus and mountains where the temperature extremes are “warm” and “chilly.” By the way, these goats definitely agree that July-September is the "chilly" extreme.

Between pictures and videos (which as we’ve learned previously, I can’t share until I visit a country with better internet connectivity), I’ve got seven GB of stuff from the last five days. In other words, this may become several blog posts.

Heck, I haven't even discussed input credit yet. We went out to witness input credit disbursement and to interview smallholder farmers who had gotten input credit previously, MFI branch employees, cooperatives, and woreda government officials. Until next time, let’s just say some things are working and some things are not. Looking on the positive, things seem to be headed in the right direction. On the other hand, it’s hard to meet these farmers personally and not feel that they are getting a raw deal. Not only is bone crushing poverty prevalent, but the hoops they have to jump through just to (maybe) get inputs are pretty nuts. Their optimism and positive attitudes despite all this is inspirational.