Long day's journey into night

We think of Ethiopia as a rural country hamstrung by famine, but as world-class athletes pound the streets of Addis Ababa, the charity Concern Worldwide works around the clock to defeat homelessness and disease

IT IS 5.30am, the city has not woken yet, but already they are running, dozens of athletes racing relentlessly backwards and forwards across the steps of huge amphitheatre in Addis Ababa's main square. The city is 2500 metres above sea level, and Ethiopia's thin mountain air has made the country in the Horn of Africa a goldmine of long distance runners with phenomenal aerobic ability. Within a few hours the steps will become a traffic jam of joggers as thousands of runners pound out their daily practice. Their inspiration is Haile Gabreselassie, world record holder, Olympic champion and national icon who has proved, along with a crop of other top class athletes, what a poor African nation can achieve on the world stage.

When the Ethiopian team returned from last year's Sydney Games with a haul of four gold medals, more than one million people, about a third of the city's population, crammed into the square to congratulate them and join in the celebrations. Gabreselassie's image is everywhere in the city, on stamps, on posters, on the 13 month Julian calendars that the country marks time by. In Addis Ababa a 30- metre high mural of the runner sends a message of hope to the thousands of young people who want to emulate his success. The Amharic script below his picture reads: "It is possible." Most of Addis Ababa's three million population have more modest ambitions than winning gold medals. Having a few silver coins stored away would suit Faregu Sefa, an elderly street trader who has been selling garlic cloves on the pavement close to the grain market for more than 20 years. She is part of a street vendors' co-operative, set up by the charity Concern Worldwide, that allows those at the very bottom of the commercial ladder, mostly women street traders, to save and borrow funds to grow their business.

Today business is good for Sefa. It is still early morning and she has made 10 birr, just less than #1 sterling. "The co-op is good for me," she says. "I have taken a loan of 300 birr and I can use it to buy more produce at a cheaper price."

Sefa's plan, like all businesses, is to maximise profits. The co- op is business development on the smallest scale possible but it fits Concern's conditions of directing aid at the poorest people in the poorest places and, as it's run by the traders themselves, it has become a model for other parts of the city. IT MAY be dawn but local youth workers, funded by Concern, have already been up for hours, making contact with some of the thousands of homeless children whose habits are nocturnal.

This morning they have enticed about 50 of them to a yard with the prospect of meal vouchers. The idea is to win the trust of the children, to get to know them and keep tabs on them until there is funding to expand the project. Concern workers hope they will be able to find hostel accommodation for some, and direct them towards eduction or skills training and eventually employment.

They are a disturbed group, bristling with energy and aggression. At the least excuse the older children will beat up the smaller ones who retaliate with stone-throwing. They look tough but underneath they are as brittle as china dolls. It doesn't take much for the tears to well in their eyes. Josuf Hassed, 15 years old, is 400 miles away from home. His father was a soldier who didn't come back home, his mother was in financial trouble so he came to Addis Ababa looking for work. That was three years ago.

Dershaye Gashaw, in a tattered red nightdress, is just six years old. She and her brother live with their mother beneath some plastic sheets in the street. Her sister died on the streets. Her father is a soldier too but the family have no information about him. Ethiopia's border dispute with Eritrea, the break-away northern neighbour, ended last year with an overwhelming victory for the Ethiopians. The conflict caused a tremendous drain on national resources and meant an end to Western aid for anything but famine relief. With the war over that may change, but what the development agencies fear now is demobilisation. Thousands of troops will head back to home villages after their tour of duty and unleash another tidal wave of Aids infection across the country.

In Africa, Aids is quite properly described as a pandemic. It is estimated that in Addis Ababa one in six of the adult population is HIV positive. One in every 13 people in the country (7.7 per cent) is already infected and the majority of them will not know that they are living with HIV.

More than war, more than famine, Aids has become Africa's killer - a silent crisis that the West vacillates about and many Africans wilfully ignore.

Two-thirds of those who are HIV positive live on the African continent, where half a million children died of Aids in 1998. Aids has slashed the average life expectancy in some African countries to 29 years and it is still a taboo subject within families and in schools.

The fight back against ignorance and prejudice in Ethiopia starts in a small warren of offices in a back street of the capital. Mekdim is one of the few self-help groups - perhaps the only one - for HIV carriers in Ethiopia.

It is the foothold on which Concern Worldwide hopes to build its own drive against Aids in the city. With some key workers funded by the charity, and volunteers, the organisation runs educational support for Aids orphans, rent support for HIV sufferers who cannot pay their own way, and home care for 360 people who are dying slowly from the condition.

Hibret Tessema, a 28-year-old who has been HIV positive for the past seven years, feels that her life was saved by counselling so now she has committed herself to saving others.

When she was a student, her parents forced her into a marriage against her will. It was only after she managed to get a divorce that she fell ill and then worked up the courage to take the test that showed that she was infected.

"When I knew I was HIV positive, I was planning to commit suicide," she says. "I knew I would be ostracised so my plan was to kill myself. Here, I've seen people living positively and peacefully with the virus. Now, I'm helping those who have discovered that they are infected. Most of the time, I teach them to take care of themselves and each other."

In a slum district where Concern funds a housing improvement project, information about Aids is limited to the occasional poster outside a shop. Living conditions in the area, although desperate by western standards, have been dramatically improved through a house building project in which occupants have to supply their own labour and some funds in exchange for the cement, corrugated iron, wood and mud that the simple houses are made from.

Over four years, more than 240 homes have been rebuilt with loans and credits from the Concern-backed project. This year there are 250 applicants for funds, of which 50 will be selected by a committee of local residents.

They are modest dwellings but the new owners are proud of them. Desda Dega (see page 15) has decorated the doorway to her new home with a painted yellow border. Her name means happiness, but she is a widow with five children who makes ends meet by washing clothes for the neighbourhood and preparing injera, the unleavened bread prepared today as it was 1000 years ago.

Most cooking is done in communal kitchens in the neighbourhood and purchased from street stalls that heave under bags of fruit and vegetables of all kinds. Wonderful red onions, the most orange of oranges. The variety and flavour of what is available from the capital's shops is remarkable, upsetting the conventional view of a country in almost permanent food crisis. Even in famine areas, food is always available - if you can afford it. It is the most salutary lesson of Ethiopia; that famine is not simply a lack of food, it is a factor of extreme poverty and poverty itself can be tackled bit by bit, one day at a time

Copyright 2001
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