Israel-Gaza

I can't claim to understand Israel/Palestine in any great depth. All I know is that such a massive imbalance of power isn't amenable to any kind of justice that I value. I came across this couple in London this afternoon making a quiet, but I think rather powerful stand for something they believe in. Even if I didn't agree, I'd still respect them for putting themselves out there.

Food, culture and other stuff

Six months and I've scarcely learned any Amharic beyond simple pleasantries. Fair, it's a tough language and I work almost entirely with English speakers, so if I can order food and a couple of beers then I'm getting along alright ("hulet biya afellegalu"). Surprisingly, in between occasional games of Petanque and some cheap classes, I've improved my French a great deal more. At least they speak it in more than one country, he said, trying not to sound disdainful. 

Typical of a lapsed fat kid, I have learned quite a lot about food and some of the most enjoyable food you can find in Dire Dawa is on the street. It's a mix of traditional Ethiopian, middle-eastern, and one dish which seems to be cobbled together simply to get the best taste from the cheapest ingredients. My phrasing belies the fact that this - enkulal ba dinich/አንኩላል ባ  ድኒች  - tastes incredible. 

Enkulal ba dinich

Literally 'eggs with potato', this slightly odd combination of eggs, potato, lentils, kidney beans, chillies, onions, a little oil and lime juice is really delicious. Served with crusty bread and sweet spiced tea, you'll damn well have your carbs on board for 10 birr/$0.50 for a big plate of it.

It's pretty humble stuff, but these little street-stalls provide a nice place for locals to catch up and relax as they come back to life in the evenings, having sweltered through another 37-degree afternoon. Something about eating the way locals do adds to the self-congratulatory sense of authenticity. You may be able to get a really nice steak with vegetables for $3.50, but sitting in an air-conditioned hotel does sometimes feel a little hollow. The air conditioning helps, obviously, but on the street you'll quickly forget about the heat which in the evenings is generally quite pleasant. It's hard to reconcile the weirdly artificial feeling of sitting in an air-conditioned lobby eating steak when just outside the gates are children barefoot in rags living on the street, where often the closest thing they have to parents is the older girls who maintain some kind of order. 

The street stalls in Legahare, part of the Muslim district, are compelling and a great place to people watch. It's not only in the architecture that you realise that Islam is one of the main cultural bridges that brings such a vast diversity to east Africa. The architecture is a mix of French, Turkish, standard East African and Yemeni Arab. With just a short while here you'll be able to pick out several distinct languages spoken simultaneously, often within the same conversation - Amharic with it's distinct ejectives, Somali and Arabic with the deep glottals, the lively rhythm of Oromifa* and the solitary French phrase often yelled at white folks; "Bonjour! Ca-va?".

Part of it could be down to the nearby city of Harar. Supposedly the fourth holiest city in Islam, it once formed the centre of a powerful regional kingdom in it's own right, and still draws Muslim pilgrims and tourists of all kinds into the region. It's basically the only thing worth seeing for miles around, but very much worth seeing. 

Baklava/Baqlawa.

The middle-eastern influence abounds in the excellent Baklava they serve here. It's like a dessert lasagne of sorts - layers upon layers of filo pastry stuffed with crumbled peanuts and pistachios, soaked in syrup or honey. All down the Muslim district, shops like al-Hashimi sweets ply Baklava, plum cakes and excellent dates, much to the delight of the city's few dentists. I brush at least twice a day, I've heard what the dentists are like.

Fuul

A really tasty breakfast for $0.50 has to be fuul, a spicy bean stew cooked over charcoal. Again, you can find this almost anywhere and they serve it with surprisingly good soft white bread. They fry boiled fava bean mush in oil with a lot of berbere, a mix of different hot spices. When it's done, they top it with chopped chillies and red onion. See it off with some ludicrously sweet tea and you're well set until lunch. Locals are often a little taken aback on seeing a westerner eating at such a modest place. They look as though to ask why you would eat there and not have your cook make it for you at home, or to eat in the 'fancy' hotel. Well, I don't have a cook and the hotels leave that hollow feeling whilst charging three times as much, so that's that. 

Not so widely available in Dire Dawa is breakfast fetira. Fried unleavened bread that crumbles slightly. The fetira guy cooks it up over a vigorous fire in an old oil drum while you wait. Mix it up with honey and fresh yoghurt and you aren't going to miss cornflakes too much. Especially since a box costs nearly $10. Dinner fetira is all over the place though. At dinnertime they cook it with egg, onions, tomato and pepper, chopped to bits with a cleaver and in an unexpected move, usually topped with banana and ketchup. I take the banana separately, thanks. 

Suitably enough, considering that Ethiopia is perhaps most famous across the world for famine and much less so for it's food, is the fact that all of this is as nothing compared to that which Ethiopia is almost as famous for. That's the coffee. Buna seems to be what makes Ethiopians tick and in my six months here so far, I don't think I've once been more than five minutes from a cup. Again, you can go to the cafes if you want, and be served a sour, brutally strong attempt at an espresso that leaves black marks on your lips and fingers, or you can drop by one of the little stalls lining most streets and be served the smooth coffee typical of Ethiopia. The beans are roasted fresh throughout the day over charcoal, onto which the buna ladies sprinkle incense. It's served in a tiny china cup, normally filled half with sugar before you get it, so if you're not into incredibly sweet coffee, make sure you say so. The locals around you will be bemused when you ask for "tinnish sekwar/sekwar yelleu" (a little sugar/no sugar), but the coffee still tastes great. Again the spirit of authenticity, set and setting, probably propels this along a bit - often you'll be perched on a little stool of goat skin stretched across a wooden frame, whilst the air fills with the warm smell of roasting coffee and the sweet pungency of incense. The fact that the coffee you're drinking was probably grown not an hour's drive away helps too. 

The beans are roasted fresh throughout the day over charcoal, onto which the buna ladies sprinkle incense. It's served in a tiny china cup, normally filed half with sugar before you get it, so if you're not into incredibly sweet coffee, make sure you say so. The locals around you will be bemused, when you ask for "tinnish sekwar/sekwar yelleu" (a little sugar/no sugar), but the coffee still tastes great. Again the spirit of authenticity, set and setting, probably propels this along a bit - often you'll be perched on a little stool of goat skin stretched across a wooden frame. The fact that the coffee you're drinking was probably grown not an hour's drive away helps too. 

An honourable mention must go to the samosas. For 1 birr/5 cents, it's a tasty snack between lunch and dinner, usually filled with lentils or potato and a fair bit of chilli. You carry them in re-purposed old newspaper, which considering that I've eaten from Turkish, Georgian, American and British newspapers, might indicate the regard most Ethiopians have for their press. This could be down to the government's questionable policies to the media, or that mere fact that literacy is around 43%. Bombalino, ubiquitous deep-friend pastry doughnuts are also served for breakfast. They're ok, though not even a patch on fuul.

The street stalls do, of course, serve injera, dishes based on the divisive Ethiopian sour pancake. I'll skirt over this because unless you're here on a very tight budget, you're much better trying injera in a proper restaurant. It's a weird enough taste and texture for westerners without skimping and going for the cheap stuff which normally uses lots of wheat in place of the more expensive teff flour which usually leaves it drier. I'll cover injera in more depth some other time.

*Oromifa can often be quite easy to read. The phrase "Rift Valley University" written in Oromifa is "Yooniiversitii Riiftii Vaali"

Community action day.

One of my underlings is blogging the team's experiences, and it's well worth a look. No point in me re-writing this stuff after all.

Here it is.

Andy.

Growth, development and containment

Containment

In my last post, I described the disconnect between development and growth, and how that is reflected in the world's economic order between the developed, or 'growing' world, and the 'developing' world. 

Though I take a critical view, 'sustainable development' per se is not a bad thing, but the picture that emerges from this disconnect is that, often, development becomes a strategy of containment or mitigation. In practice, what we call 'development' in a charity context is often to mitigate the negative effects of economic development.

When tribes have been dispossessed of their truly sustainable lives, and pulled into developed urban chaos where poverty and wealth exist in ways that never did before, they need this form of ‘sustainable’ development. There is little reason why, having lived the same kind of life for countless centuries, they might need anything else.

Let me be clear that I am not trying to romanticise tribal life. These are hard people, living hard lives. I do not at all begrudge them access to facilities and institutions if they want them. My issue is with the practised belief that they must want these things, whether they realise it or not. 

Post tribal

I’ve seen streets of typical post-tribal African towns. Empty sachets of sugar cane spirits flake and crumble in the red dust. Old men, still in their traditional shuka cloaks sit beneath a tree drinking all day, receiving handouts from the local NGO. Meanwhile a group of well-intentioned young people build a water pipeline for them – a great way to fix a formerly itinerant community. I’ve seen it. I’ve done it(1).

Hard folks, hard lives.

The tribe in this example, the Hadzabe, are one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa. Since the end of traditional empire-based colonialism, when Africa coalesced (more or less) into nation states, the government of Tanzania has been trying to 'fix' these communities, with fairly minimal success. In 1961, a town was built for one of the communities. They moved in and, following their custom, moved on with the game. The government made several more fruitless attempts and gave up until 2007, when they tried an opposite approach, attempting to lease massive tracts of their traditional hunting grounds as a safari reserve for a company based in the UAE(2). After a huge international outcry, the Tanzanians reneged on the deal(3).

Education is an informative example when we look at the interaction of the modern with the traditional. Within Hadza hunter gatherer communities, many young people elect not to go to school, despite it being in some way available. Many young people in these communities are aware of school and what they can get from it, but do not see the ‘gain’ that we presume. Most development workers, myself included, have harnessed huge gains from education – usually up to post-graduate level. We are not even faintly comparing like with like. Exercises of power like formal education are normally viewed as benign at worst, but can play a part in erasing distinctive identities by forcing people to operate within a larger culture than their own.

                                       

To attempt to join a global modernised society would severely disempower members of this kind of community, according to their cultural views of power. The ability to track game, to survive for days on end in the wilderness, to navigate, to fletch arrows, to make and use a bow. This is their empowerment. The only empowerment that we can hope to provide is a strange, warped kind that operates within our metropolitan, modernised sphere of experience and this form of empowerment can only become relevant when this kind of world begins to encroach upon the social and physical environment of these tribes. That is fine in theory, except that this kind of progress works at a different rate than a human life. In the social spaces in which tribal communities live, the difference between the wealthiest and the poorest members is negligible. In a town, a fat man without the first idea of how to catch a Dikdik*, but who knows how to sell a car, might be immeasurably wealthier than the average Hadza*. It is no wonder that when faced with rapid social and physical alienation, that rates of alcoholism, drug-addiction and suicide in post-tribal communities are staggeringly higher than in metropolitan communities. 

(*a small, incredibly fast antelope. Slightly bigger than a hare.)

(*I mean immeasurably – they don’t use money for day-to-day activities)

Another thing to make clear, these folk aren't afraid of the wider world, they welcome strangers, sharing food and fire. The Hadzabe don't even mind if you break their cultural norms (within reason - I would often run around the countryside tops off. They thought it was strange, but didn't much care). They want to enact their lives in a manner of their choosing. Instead, global society seeks to put them into the prison we have built for ourselves.

As I had a lot of trouble last night starting a fire - with matches and charcoal - I remembered seeing a man starting a fire in less than a minute using two sticks, a handful of grass and a piece of cow dung.

Tbc.

Sources

1. My old blog

2. Briefing note on the threat to the Hadzabe people of the Yaida Valley, Karatu District, United Republic of Tanzania
3. Survival International - Hadza Tribe celebrates first land titles 

Growth or Development? (1)

For a long while, I’ve been cruising charity and development organisations’ websites, looking for jobs, ideas, and general awareness of issues in developing countries. Doing this, you’ll notice that they all talk about ‘sustainable development’. Development is itself a more slippery term than you’d like to think, adding ‘sustainable’ does little to make it much more specific. What I find more interesting, though, is the fact that we only really talk about sustainable development as something other countries do.

In the west, we talk about ‘growth’, our euphemism for development. When you look more closely at these two superficially synonymous terms, you start to see a disconnect in parallel with the disconnect between our two worlds.

We adopt a different term because our political masters don’t want to suggest - by using the term ‘development’ for their own nations - that they are in any way underdeveloped – we are, after all, the developed world. 

We just grow.

I’ve never heard anything about ‘sustainable growth’. Of course not – no one in government will dare suggest that growth is anything other than ‘sustainable’ because growth is the holy grail of capitalist economics. During the financial crisis, growth became one of the biggest metrics by which we judged a politician’s success or failure. To introduce this small qualification is to question the basis of the West’s economic trajectory over the past century. 

But poor countries need ‘sustainable development’. We qualify the nature that their development must adopt. The term has different facets of meaning, encompassing use of natural resources and the preservation of the environment, and the necessary sense that the development is not being imposed, but simply helped along – ‘sense of ownership’ being a stereotypical key phrase.  All of these facets come together into a system that circumscribes certain kinds of development and promotes others at the discretion of powerful NGOs, IGOs and donor governments.

To do ‘sustainable development’ in the first-world capitalist system is a contradiction in terms – our development is not sustainable. In the long term, it only consumes. We create things certainly, wealth, huge buildings, marvellous technologies – but only through consumption of primary resources. To be sure, we can recycle, when we can be bothered, but there’s no recycling oil. The linchpin of nearly all the development the western world has undergone in the last hundred years.

Many of our unsustainable activities are outsourced from the Growing World to the Developing World. The domestic and industrial waste we can’t easily deal with – we export it. Think PCBs, for example. The food we can’t manage to grow ourselves – we just buy up land in Africa, pushing up prices and depriving those whose land this has been for thousands of years, whilst lining the pockets of crony regimes, landowners and the military. In short, we harness powerful people in these countries for our own ends, they enable this outsourcing and become fantastically rich.

With all this in mind, it isn’t surprising that most of those working in the NGO world are fairly left-wing. But is this a natural response of a system, or the cop-opting of idealistic lefties by the dark forces of capitalism? 

Minus two degrees Celsius.

Most of my experience of Africa comes from the mass media – until recently my image was pretty uniform – Muslims in the north with some Christians, Christians in the south with some Muslims. Everywhere was a potential warzone just waiting to erupt, probably because everyone was starving and living in huts built from sticks and stones. My assumption was that people’s attitude to westerners – Mzungu, Faranji – would be ambivalent at best. Bloody occupiers, eh?

Whether deliberate or not, the media and often some charities constantly reproduce this image of a continent of people living in isolation, ignorance and want. We often forget that ‘Africa’ consists of sixty-three countries (only 54 legally recognised), hundreds of languages and ethnicities, many of whom are extremely outward looking. Most of Africa is out of sight to westerners, and therefore out of mind. Cool animals on documentaries notwithstanding.

Not once during my time in Tanzania did anyone other than I broach the subject of colonialism, likewise Ethiopia.

Ethiopia is unique amongst all the countries of Africa in that not once has it been successfully colonised. For most of the first half of the twentieth century, the Italians gave it a shot, but never really managed it. Towards the end of the Second World War, the British booted them out.

This has shaped the national psyche in a way unlike any of sub-Saharan Africa. Most nation states south of the Sahara were formed along fairly arbitrary colonial lines, throwing disparate tribes together to varying degrees of success – compare the majoritarian tradition of government in Kenya to the almost contrived pluralism of neighbouring Tanzania. A river here, a mountain ridge there and you’ve got a border. Ethiopia, on the other hand, has existed in some form, centred around the Entoto mountains, since at least the first century AD. The Empire that Ethiopia became was a major world power – they traded and had diplomatic relations with Europe, Persia, Arabia, India etc etc. They were, in essence the first and for a long time, the only unitary state in the whole region.

Food and drink.

Because of all this, Ethiopians have strong and distinctive food – another source of pride, socialising and symbolism. Injera is what it’s all about for these guys. It’s a thoroughly odd kind of bread made from Teff flour (coeliacs take note), it seems to be fermented like sourdough, cooked on a hot plate with a lot of water until it resembles a big flat (2-4mm thick) greyish-brown sponge. This is selling it short. It’s a little bit sour, but as is usually the case with bread, it’s supposed to carry other flavours – texture first. Bayaynet is a typical vegetarian Injera dish (below. If in doubt, say ‘Bayonet’). 

Clockwise from bottom right, cabbage, spiced split peas, chilli and rice, salad, beetroot, more cabbage, sauteed potato, spicy sauce and in the centre, spiced lentils.

It’s probably an acquired taste but heck, I like most everything. Some westerners can’t seem to get into it that much. I reckon most of you would like Injera Tibs. This time, you get a charcoal burner brought to your table, on top, charred strips of beef tossed in spices with chopped onion and chillies.

To come back to the Italians – pizza is ubiquitous – they aren’t much fussed on Italian people, but Ethiopians show a certain flexibility in acknowledging the brilliance of Italian cuisine versus the brutality visited on them by Mussolini’s armies. I haven’t yet eaten somewhere that didn’t serve decent pizza and pasta is almost a traditional food.

Perhaps it’s something to do with a mutual love of coffee that you can get a Macchiato (or Makayato) anywhere. It’s normally served with a spoon of sugar settled at the bottom. Ethiopians usually add two or three more. They’d probably add sugar to their coke if I suggested it.

Rolled up Irish Flag.

Probably my favourite thing to eat/drink is their juice. I do mean eat/drink, because juice (JOOSE!) here is really pulp, you can use a straw if you want* but I use a spoon. The best is Spriss, mango, papaya and avocado pulp layered with a little fresh lime juice on the top. An honourable mention to Ergo. It’s cold yoghurt that, again, you can eat or drink as you like. It’s quite creamy and a little sour, always super fresh and better than any ice cream. For those who’ve been to Turkey, it’s a lot like Ayran. It’s also a little like Tajik Chakka, but actually tastes nice with none of the pungency.

 

Ethiopians reckon they like spicy food, and warn me all the time about that. They don’t know what spicy means. 

*If you want to look like a girl or a child. I had a sudden urge to find out what the lowest temperature ever recorded at the Equator was. Minus two degrees Celsius on Cayembe Volcano in Ecuador. I don’t really want to confront what the highest temperature recorded at the poles. 

A bunch of photos of things.

Just before I came out here, I was generously given a rather nice camera, one that far outstrips my ability. With the help of some local friends I'm starting to understand about 5% of the features of a digital SLR. Here's what I've got.

Weaver birds build their nests in less than a day using bits of grass, string, and most things that are longer than they are wide. This is a female.

Bright gold with purple and red faces, Male  of this species of Weaver birds are much more visible. Various species are found all over Africa and Asia.

Weaver Bird nests.

A view from the hill of the Muslim Quarter of Dire Dawa. Low down, the architecture is very Arabic and Turkic influenced. Minarets everywhere.

And looking up into the poor neighbourhoods, built on an improbable gradient.

Brother and sister. Show the slightest hint of a camera and you've got a plague of kids.

Another sister.

Leading to another sub-village on the outskirts, every resident walks this slab every day, hence it is incredibly polished. I dread to think what it's like when it rains. Unsurprisingly the locals had no trouble at all

The Muslim quarter. That's the mosque you see on the Wikipedia article for Dire Dawa.

A plague. These kids walk  unshod over rough, sharp stones and don't even notice.

Wind blows in dust from the surrounding savannah, so the sunset looks pretty dramatic.

The village on the hill.

The street.

More of the Turkish-Arabic style architecture which has almost everywhere fallen into disrepair. This is the door into someone's house.