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An Ethiopian odyssey by plane and four-wheel drive
Perceptions by Gerry Warner
As some of you may recall from last week, I was attending a Rotary meeting in Spokane when an ophthalmologist, conducting annual eye surgery clinics in Ethiopia, asked me if I wanted to go as a volunteer. I initially didn’t jump at the offer because I’d never been near the equator and I was deathly afraid of tropical heat and humidity not to mention the bugs, critters and malaria.
However, I also knew that much of Ethiopia was made up of a high plateau bisected by majestic African mountains. I love mountains!
So I asked Dr. Guzek one question. “What’s the altitude of this little village?”
“Six thousand feet,” he replied. “Count me in,” I responded, knowing that at that altitude the tropical heat would be bearable.
That’s what found me a month ago on a United Emirates jet with eight other volunteers heading to Dubai for a pit stop on the way to Dembi Dolo, a small, tropical village tucked away in the Ethiopian highlands near the Sudanese border. Our overnight stop in Dubai was long enough to catch a glimpse of the famous Burj Dubai, at 2,717 feet and 163 stories, the tallest building in the world, a lot taller, needless to say, than the giant Wanza trees at Dembi Dolo. But I couldn’t look at that great steel spire in the sky without thinking of the Tower of Babel. Not much time to think, however, because the next day we flew to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to spend another night before taking yet another flight, albeit a shorter one, to Gambella, a small African city of about 40,000, on the banks of the Baro River, a city as it turned out that we would get to know far better than we ever thought or wanted. But that was to come in the future.
From the air, Addis as it’s usually referred to, is quite impressive. It’s a city of close to three million and often referred to as the “political capital of Africa” because of all the foreign embassies and its long association with the United Nations and other foreign agencies. But on the ground, it appeared somewhat different, at least to my foreign Western eyes.
We spent the night at the Don Bosco Guest House, named for John (Don) Bosco, a poor Italian shepherd boy who became a priest and eventually a saint for the tireless work he did to protect and educate street youth in Italy and abroad in the late 18th Century and founder of the Salesians of Don Bosco, a charitable Catholic religious order.
Outside the walls of the guest house it could be easily seen that Bosco’s work was far from over as the dirt streets were alive with friendly, but obviously poor children, whose greeting often consisted of the well-enunciated English phrase of “hello, give me money.” We were admonished not to do this and most of us gave out small gifts instead. But the experience served as a stark but pragmatic introduction to a developing country that’s lifting itself up by the boot straps but still has a long way to go. There were also some paved streets and bustling shops with new multi-storey apartment buildings looming over them. However, a closer look revealed that many of the new concrete high-rises were unfinished and unoccupied and the majority of people lived in crowded shanties with tin roofs.
While still dark the next morning, I was woken up by the mournful wail of a call to prayer being blasted by a loud speaker from a nearby mosque. But there was also an ornate, domed, Ethiopian Orthodox church just across the street from us in a country of many faiths and a long Christian tradition that includes being the possible site of the Garden of Eden according to some Biblical scholars. Whatever the case, it all felt very exotic as we crowded into a four-wheel Land Cruiser to head to the airport for a one-hour flight to Gambella, near the storied headwaters of the White Nile where we added our own story only two weeks later.
At Gambella the nine of us crowded into another Toyota Land Cruiser to begin the bumpy four-hour ride to Dembi Dolo and more adventures which we’ll hear about in part three of this series.
– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and Cranbrook City Councillor. He recently volunteered at a Rotary eye camp in Ethiopia.
