Its all Real...

Its Sunday Evening, and I'm sitting in front of TV switching channels. I stop on the BBC channel to hear a language and see a face I am now quite familiar with - Amharic and an thin, shriveled, hunger stricken Ethiopian. I put the remote down and watched. The programme was about the big famine in Ethiopia in 1985... only 20yrs ago. I guess I was too young to understand then.... but now, watching this programme of people dying of hunger, babies only skin and bones, I realized that Ethiopia is still passing through this... and I'm actually seeing this every time I step out of the massive iron gates of the hotel, those same children and people I am an now seeing on TV, a reportage that was filmed 20yrs ago.

There was also an interview with a woman who was with the Red Cross, and tried her best to save as many as possible, but the medical supplies and food they had was very little so she couldn't help everyone..... She says that she that millions of people crowded outside her camp but she couldn't help all, so she used to pick out the people she would help and send the others to their 'death camp', it broke my heart when she said that she used to pick out, sometimes the most healthy looking and not so malnourished as those would have more of a chance to survive, and the others would have died anyway.

Colonel Mengistu, did not do anything, he in fact tried to create more famine, cause he thought that would be the best way to keep the rebels away, and thus stop them fighting the civil war, in the meantime, tides of hungry Ethiopians walk around Ethiopia, looking for food and trying to avoid the war. The Ethiopian government didn't want to feed those people, it wanted to get rid of them, and deprive all the rebels of support, thus making the whole country suffer, at that time.... and still suffering the consequences today.

The last part of the programme was an interview with an middle aged man, who was passing through all this as a young man, spending years walking from one village to another, with his family trying to find food.... , he lost his family, and sought aid, he got the aid and survived... now he is sitting in the streets of Addis begging for money and surviving day by day..... he says - 'lives were not worth saving'.

The programme ends with an interview with Bob Geldorf, who at that time, started up Band Aid, a group of musicians singing to collect money for Ethiopia... their first hit being 'Feed the world, let them know its Christmas time', a song we still hear today during Christmas time.....

My mother was right when she said 'eat up the people in Ethiopia are dying of hunger'.

I can actually see the change in myself. I cannot throw away food anymore.... Today I cooked some Pasta Bolognese, went outside, and gave it to the family always sitting outside the gates of the hotel. It was heart warming to see the children grabbing little fist full of pasta and stuffing their little mouths with the food, though it also felt bad cause there were another people around me who also wanted food.... but I'd have to cook for a week non-stop if I had to cook for all the hungry people in that street!

On a lighter note.....

What else did I do this weekend??

- Met another Maltese dude.... this guy is a priest who works with a youth center in Malta and came to Ethiopia cause he was interested in Frank's project. This guy also turns out to know my family very well, well not my direct family, but knows my Aunt and her family, and knows my Uncle who is a priest doing missionary work in Pakistan.

- Help Sjoerd get a life...... Sjoerd managed to get a house finally, though the house was not equipped with a bed.... so we gathered the Ethiopians I know and headed off to the Merkato.
We walked from one mattress shop to another, then one carpenter to another to get a frame. until finally we got the right bed at the right price... still a faranji price... but on budget.

The next step was finding a way how to get this bed to the villa... so we hoped into a four by four taxi, piled the mattress on the top of the roof, and the dismantled bed at the back of the Jeep and headed off to the villa, which Sjoerd was sharing with a German IT guy working in the UN.

The adventure was not yet over!!!! This was no simple Ikea bed with instructions.... it was an Ethiopian bed!!! So you could guess that it took a Maltese, a Dutch and a German quite a while to figure out which part matches with which and which screw goes in which hole!!!

Sjoerd and the German IT Guy trying to figure out which screw goes in which hole

German IT guy gave up!! Sjoerd still wants his bed!

The bed was finally done!! Sjoerd was happy and we were hungry...

So we headed off to a nice German restaurant and then for beers in this really cool Lounge Bar in the heart of a big office building, yet again discovering another Addis hidden treasure ..............