All the clichés come to mind when standing on the edge of the crater on top of the Erta Ale volcano: being on top of the world, taking the trip of a lifetime, seeing the inside of the Earth, etc… the emotion is so strong in that privileged moment that we remain speechless.

The Erta Ale volcano at night

Already, the walk up to the crater in the dark makes an impression. Using a torch light, we were guided by a local Afar guide who showed us the way up to the volcano in the feeble moonlight. The path was sinuous and rocky in some parts because we were actually walking on old hardened lava but couldn’t see it at the time. A camel was following us to carry all the belongings we would need for the night there on top, as well food and water. Along the way, we came across a couple of camels following another group also climbing up for the night. After walking for about three hours, as we reached the peak, we had an emotional moment when we suddenly saw a red light glowing through a cloud of smoke, it was the Erta Ale volcano in the distance. Another strong impression. We took another turn and the light disappeared, but a few minutes later, we recognised the camp with its circular roof-less stone shelters and the group of armed soldiers there to guard against likely terrorist attacks (a serious one in which five tourists were killed, occured a year before in January 2012). We were going to continue on the track, past the camp, when instead, our guide took us down a steep and rocky path which completely confused me. I realised looking all around with my torch, that we had gone inside an old crater which we had to cross to reach the live volcano. The experience was surreal, I had lost any sense of bearings and felt I was living a scene out of a book. A few minutes later, we were on the edge of the live crater, the highlight of any trip to the Danakil. Like the many people who made the trip before, I couldn’t believe I was so close to a live volcano!

the lava at work at Erta Ale

The lava was in continuous movement like a thick boiling soup and would suddenly crack into a fire line or unexpectedly erupt into a firework that would last for a few minutes. In front of such an amazing sight, many pictures come to mind. The picture of hell as imagined by ancient writers and storytellers with the mouth of the volcano swallowing anyone venturing too close, or maybe a witch’s caldron into which victims would disappear forever unnoticed. We were so fascinated that we sat there for hours watching it. However strange it was next a volcano, we only left when we started to feel too cold to stay put. The wind was so piercing and freezing that we decided to go back to the camp to get more clothes. However to our biggest surprise, the camel hadn’t made to the top but stubbornly stopped half way up, refusing to move an inch further. So we were left to shiver for at least another hour, while we sent another camel down to collect our bags. Between all the shelters, we chose an open air one away from the rest of the camp and fell asleep watching the stars again, finally tucked warmly into our sleeping bags.

The live Erta Ale crater at dawn

At dawn the next morning as we woke up, I realised how close we were to the edge of the old crater; a false move walking blindly during the night could have been fatal. We quickly gathered our stuff and loaded our camel before going back to the live crater to see it during daylight. It was a different sight: after the spectacular fireworks of the previous evening, we could now see the lava at work and observe the volcano. It was just as fascinating, even more so as we could better see the crater rim and surrounding landscape. Erta Ale has a number of craters but only one is currently active. As we walked back, we came across another impressive site: one of the dormant craters. In the middle of it, a tall lava chimney had formed from which smokey gases were still emanating. Another eery and surreal site.

the now extinct crater at Erta Ale

Unfortunately, as we got back to the sleeping camp in full daylight, another less pleasant site became too apparent: all the plastic bottles and rubbish left on the ground by previous visitors. A disgrace! I am always shocked to see that people dispose of waste as if nature was an unlimited dumping ground. In Addis, plastic bottles have a sale value (a couple of birr each), so people recycle them, but in Afar, it doesn’t seem to be the case and plastic bottles are forever polluting the edge of the volcano. With this unfortunate sight in mind, we took our walk back down to the rocky and sandy plain at the base of Erta ale.

Used plastic bottles dumped on the ground at Erta Ale

Our last stop on our trip was the Afdera salt lake, about three hours south of Erta Ale.  After days of sand and dust, I was looking forward to a nice swim in the lake, which I was told was like the Dead Sea, so salty that we would float. The programme was enticing: a swim in the lake or nearby hotspring and dinner al fresco. The reality was otherwise: Lake Afdera was covered by so much foam that I didn’t dare to swim. The hot spring was a tiny pond feeding into the lake, but so close to the road that it wasn’t a relaxing place to bathe (in fact the water was far too hot considering the outside temperature of about 35°).  As a matter of fact, the area around Lake Afdera is developing quickly due to the industrial salt production and manmade salt plains, so fast that the urban infrastructure cannot follow and the local town, which is a temporary home for the salt workers, comes across as a huge dump with piles of rubbish lining up into the main street. Not a nice place to spend the last night of our amazing trip, which is a shame as it had the right potential! We ended up staying by the lakeside, trying to have dinner while getting rid of the many flies annoying us, and sleeping early to be able to leave the place as quickly as possible to take the long drive back to Mekele (in the rain surprisingly!). The plan was successful as we got to Mekele in the early afternoon and had enough time to take a walk around this pleasant Tigrean capital before flying back to Addis the next morning.

the shore of lake Afdera in the Danakil depression

I have been relatively silent in the last few weeks, as I felt I didn’t have much to write about. As a matter of fact, I was preoccupied with domestic issues I didn’t think were worth sharing. But, if I want this blog to be an honest account of my life in Addis, I need the share the mundane as well as the more exotic.

We had problems with theft in our house, or more like “items strangely disappearing”.  It started with a couple of casual travel bags (not of a great value but very practical when travelling around Ethiopia), then an iPod, followed by a camera and more recently three pairs of hiking boots. We didn’t notice immediately that those items were gone, only when we wanted to use them. I asked our staff several times about it, but they said they didn’t know anything. When talking about it with our friends and colleagues, I realised that it is a common problem here and a common answer. All material goods such as bags, shoes, clothes or electronics are extremely valuable because they are very expensive or cannot be found. I remember laughing at first when I saw that every single cupboard and wardrobe in our house had a lock on the door, now I understand why, and of course, I started locking everything that has a value to me. Difficult to feel at home in those circumstances. On one hand, we are expected to generously give employment while living here, but on the other hand, we have to lock up our possessions, even the most basic one, because of recurrent risk of theft. As one of my readers pointed out, it sounds a bit Marie-Antoinesque, but that is the reality we are confronted with. We are the “rich expats” living very comfortably (with a house and a car), and the people working for us can just about make it on their salary (and foreigners are known to pay their staff twice as much as local employers). Of course I can understand why they may be tempted when they see so many material goods around, but on the human level I need to feel that my home is my shelter. I need to feel that we can relax and not watch and check everything every day. When we mentioned the problem to our Ethiopian landlord, he suggested to have our staff body- searched when they leave the house at the end of the day. Personally, I can’t descend to that level of mistrust, nor do I want to impose such humiliation on people working for me.

Back in our own country,  the social gap is not as wide, as most people have access to a house, a car, electronic goods, decent clothes and above all free education, but here the social difference goes beyond. In some ways, we are still in a “masters and servants” kind of situation whereby the masters have power over their “servants”.  According to the advice we were given, we will have to confront our staff and ask them to tell us who stole the goods if they want to keep their job. If they don’t say anything, we may have to fire them on the spot (with the three month salary compensation prescribed by the law). The topic of domestic theft generates lively discussions here in Addis. I heard many accounts that they team up and cover for each others,  and divide the money from the sale of stolen goods. To try to get to the truth, which we won’t anyway, we’ll have to treat them like school children, such as: “if nobody tells us who did it, you will all be punished,”……..not a position I feel comfortable with, not a situation of social equity and very much a Marie-Antoinette scenario, made worse by the huge cultural difference we have. For us,  the whole situation is completely artificial: our own social position in a country and culture that is not ours.

Of course, I can consider myself very lucky because I am living in much better conditions and I don’t have to constantly worry about feeding my family when money runs out before the end of the month. However, where I feel extremely lucky though is to have been born and raised in Europe towards the end of the 20th century, where coming from a very average family, I had an almost free access to the best education. That is pure luck, had I been born here, my life would have been different.

There’s nothing like a trip outside the city to lift up one’s spirit again. This time, we went East to Dire Dawa and Harar, the famed walled city, home of the poet Arthur Rimbaud in the last ten years of his life. Take any anglophone travel guide and Dire Dawa is mentioned as an uninteresting and sleepy town, worth stopping in only to use its airport or reach Harar.  However, for anybody living in Addis, Dire Dawa is a refreshing change with its tree lined avenues, walking pavements and attractive old houses.

street of Dire Dawa

Dire Dawa is probably the most European of all Ethiopian cities, with its distinctive urban planning of parallel and perpendicular streets crossing the three main avenues which converge to the train station. It is the kind of city where  it is possible to walk about just for the pleasure of it -a rare occurrence in Addis- and that may be why I find it so pleasant. Dire Dawa came into existence at the beginning of the 20th century when the French were building the legendary train line linking Addis to the port of Djibouti which for nearly a century, was a life line through Ethiopia. The emperor Menelik II who commissioned the line in the 1890s wanted the train to go through the old trading city of Harar, but it was technically too complicated because of its position in high altitude. So Dire Dawa was born and many of the Europeans who participated in the construction of the line moved to the new city.

Place de la gare in Dire Dawa

For the French in particular, Dire Dawa is full of historical references. Not only this new city was a major stop on the train line half way between Addis and Djibouti, but it was also the heartbeat of the Chemin de Fer Franco-Ethiopien, the company running the train line which after Djibouti’s independence from France became the Chemin de Fer Djibouto-Ethiopien. In Dire Dawa, the train company employed and supported generations of workers who were taught to run and maintain the engine and the track. One of the conditions to get a job there was to speak fluent French, which was taught at the Alliance Française de Dire Daoua. The Alliance, which became an institution in the city, has remained a vibrant cultural and social centre even though the train stopped running in 2009 and there’s less of a reason to learn French today.  The day we visited it (late on a saturday afternoon), the wide courtyard was packed with locals (mostly men) watching a football match. The sight was quite entertaining: on the outdoor theatre stage, they had installed two old fashion TV boxes to be able to simultanuously watch two different games. The football fans could hardly follow the game on the tiny TV screens, but that didn’t stop them from enjoying it!

Because it was a busy saturday afternoon, I didn’t have the chance to meet Mr Josef, the president of the Alliance and probably the most famous resident of Dire Dawa. I however met an old train worker just outside the now closed train station; he addressed me in perfect French, telling me that he was forced to retire when the train stopped running. He was hoping that it would restart soon but had his doubts about it. If it does, it may be too late for him to work there again considering his age. He gave me the sad feeling that Dire Dawa had lost part of its soul when the train station closed. The great entertainment of having new visitors and new faces in and out of the city every other day is somewhat gone now. The line is currently being refurbished mainly with EU and Chinese funds.  A brand new track will be built and modern engines will replace the old struggling one which used to take three days to complete the 785 kms journey. A knowledge of French will no longer be necessary and a whole generation of train workers who gave their life to the train company will be redundant.

For more information on the train line, a very good book was recently published by French photographer Hugues Fontaine, “un train en Afrique”, www.huguesfontaine.com

Running is the national sport in Ethiopia as can testify the many gold medals Ethiopian runners won at the Olympic games or World championships. Running is one of the few sports which can be practiced without specific equipment or expensive gear, so understandably, it is very popular in a country which has limited resources to invest into sport infrastructure.

Getting ready to run the Women First 5kms in Addis

Today, the 2013 Choice Women First run took place in Addis, which as expected attracted huge crowds. The run is organised by the Great Ethiopian Run organisation which started a few years ago with the  annual 10 kms run usually held in November. For the first time ever, I participated in the race and was surprised by the jovial and friendly atmosphere. Many women joined just for the fun of it, they did not take the run too seriously, they were not wearing high-tech sport shoes (some of them even ran in a skirt and sandals), they just came to express their solidarity to women’s cause. Especially that the message promoted this year would have resonated with a great number of women around the World. They were:

“Family Planning with Choice” – Dkt Ethiopia
“Narrow the Gap Meet the Goals: Empower Women to Make a Difference” – United Nations Ethiopia
“Because I am a Girl” – the NGO Plan International Ethiopia

Gracefully wearing the Ethiopian flag colours…

The famous Ethiopian champion Haile Gebre Selassie was there too to give his support to women, which he celebrated in his opening address to the cheers of the huge feminine crowd listening to him. Other sponsors such as Irish Aid and other Non-Governmental Organisations supported the run. All in all, it was a friendly solidarity event two days after the celebration of International Women Day.

Before Dire Dawa and the train line were built, Harar was a major trading centre on the Eastern route between the Red Sea and the Abyssinian high-plateau. It was and still is a major Muslim city in the Horn of Africa and the fourth in importance after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. Harar is full of history and for this reason, has attracted generations of travellers, writers, artists and poets. Its most famous resident was Arthur Rimbaud who lived there intermittently between 1880 and 1891. He travelled to Africa at the age of 26 after he took the decision to stop writing and move into trading as an alternative career. He wanted to leave behind the pettiness of provincial France and the emotional pain caused by his affair with the other great French poet Paul Verlaine. Harar was still a mysterious and exotic place where very few foreigners had been.

The Shoa Gate in Harar

Until 1875, when the Egyptians took possession of Harar, the city was entirely closed to non-Muslims. The first foreigner who had entered the city was the British explorer and writer, Richard Burton, who fooled his way disguised as a rich Muslim merchant in 1855. He wrote his travel accounts in “First footsteps in East Africa- An exploration of Harar.” As the city opened up, many foreign companies jumped on the opportunity to establish new trading posts. Rimbaud was employed by the French merchant Alfred Bardley to manage his Harar office. However, his first stay in the city was interrupted by the political troubles which erupted and which pushed the Egyptian authorities to evacuate the city in 1884. For a while, the power fell back to the Emir, with Emir Abdullah who tried again to expel foreigners from the city. Such decision wasn’t to please Menelik, the then King of Shoa, who reacted by sending troups to fight the Emir. They were headed by his best general and closest ally, Ras Makkonen, who following his victory was appointed governor of the city of Harar, where a few years later in 1892, his son Tafari, the futur emperor Haile Selassie, was born.

Tafari Makkonen’s house in Harar, recently restored and turned museum

Rimbaud left Harar in 1884 to return a couple of years later to set up his own company. He engaged into all sorts of commerce including trading arms with his famous expedition to Ankober to sell weapons to Menelik who was fighting enemies to the throne on the northern front. On his return to Harar, Rimbaud described the city as being a foul-smelling open sewage, on the verge of famine and plague. The new Governor, who soon became his friend, managed to turn the situation around restoring sanitation in the city and rehabilitating Harar as a major trading centre. At the end of the 1880s, after he had victoriously fought all his enemies, Menelik became the emperor of Ethiopia as Menelik II and peace returned.

Rimbaud’s museum in Harar

During his time there, Rimbaud may have worked as a merchant, but today he is remembered as the great poet he was. A museum, known as the Rimbaud house, opened a few years ago on the very site where he may have lived. The house was built after his time, but the setting inside the old city walls can still give us an idea of his life there. Inside, a permanent exhibition display old photographs of Harar and people in Harar, some of them taken by the poet himself who had taken a great interest in this new technology. His tragic life and premature death from an illness that left him amputated of one leg is also recounted in the museum. Next to Rimbaud’s house is the house where Tafari Makkonen, son of the governor, grew up.  It has recently been restored and now houses a museum of artefacts from Harar and Harari culture, including jewellery, weapons, coins, dresses, as well as tapes of old people’s interviews. The collection is privately owned and belongs to a man called Abdallah Sherif, a passionate collector, who spent his life preserving Harar’s cultural heritage.

to be continued…

I spent two days wandering around Harar, enjoying its bustling atmosphere and unique culture. I quickly realised  why I liked the city so much: I could walk around at leisure, something we can rarely do here, and absorb its past. For once, I felt I was in an old city with a history as an urban centre. Most Ethiopian cities are recent creation in terms of urban organisation and development and therefore lack an old centre where we can get a feel of the past. Harar may be one of the few exceptions as it dates back to the 16th century as a city in its own right. Gondar has its history too as capital of the country, but life there centred around the magnificent Royal Enclosure which today is the only remain of its remote past. For the European I am, walking through a city to discover its hidden secrets is part of the pleasure of travelling.

A typical street in Harar

Today Harar is divided into two parts: the old city – known as the Jegol – within the walls built in the 16th century by Emir Nur and the new town built by the Italians when they occupied the country in the 1930s. The city began to flourish when Emir Nur, who is widely considered as its founding father, won over his Christian rival, the emperor Galawdewos. But as he thought he had established peace, he soon had to face a new enemy: the Oromo people who started to settle in the heart of Ethiopia. As a reaction, he built the protective wall encircling the Jegol to stop any form of invasion and closed the city to invaders as well as peaceful visitors. Harar was to remain closed to non-Muslims until 1875 when the Egyptians took control of it.

During the time of the Emirs from the 16th century to the Egyptian domination, Harar became an important Muslim centre as can still testify the 90 or so mosques within its walls. It also thrived as a commercial centre being located on the strategic route from the Sea to the Highlands. The unique Harari culture is present every where in the Old City: in the various markets, the traditional white houses, the colorful clothes, the old hospital and the narrow streets and alleyways where visitors can so easily get lost.

“machina street” in the heart of old Harar where tailors have their business

We stayed in one of the two guest houses in town ran by two Harari sisters who rent out rooms in their respective family houses. Staying there was part of the Harari experience. The decoration and organisation within the house was the same as it ever was with the richly decorated walls in the main family room, which was open to guests outside prayer time. Next to the main living quarter, we were introduced to the wedding room, a small and cosy bedroom where the newly wed daughter of the house was required to spend the first six days following her wedding. During that time, the new spouses were getting initiated to the intimacy of marriage. A small window allowed the other family members to pass food, drink as well as expert advice on how to behave in the bedroom. Such tradition is no longer in use as marriages are no longer arranged in Harar, and the bedroom is now used to store mattresses or as a guest room when needed. Being able to stay in a traditional house was nevertheless an exotic experience.

wall decoration inside a traditional house in Old Harar

Harar is also known for its coffee, one of the best in Ethiopia, as well as Khat, the indigenous plant people chew, which is considered a soft drug but is legal in Ethiopia. We saw piles of the plant in the market in Harar, as well as many people, young and very old, with green teeth and lips, an obvious indication that they were chewing Khat. The trade of Khat has become so prominent in recent years that local farmers prefer to cultivate Khat instead of coffee, even if the latter remains a strong export commodity.

old man chewing khat in Harar

Writing about Harar without mentioning Mr Yusef, the hyena man, wouldn’t give justice to the man who has built a sound business feeding the local hyenas at night. A number of books talk about an ancient tradition in the city to feed hyenas to protect its inhabitants from possible assaults. Whether this is true or not, every night, Mr Yusef is waiting for them just outside the old walls with a bucket full of raw meat. The show is well organised, the taxis and Bajaj (the local name for a tuktuk) leave their lights on for visitors to see better in the dark (at a price), and the hyenas turn up as expected to get their dinner. Mr Yusef encourages visitors, especially children, to help him feed them by putting a piece of meat at the end of a long stick. The next day, we coincidentally met Mr Yusef in town with his family. He looked very distinguished and they were all very well dressed. We were later told that he also owns a very successful farming business, so he is a personnality in town…thanks to the notorious animals that hyenas are.

Feeding the hyenas at night outside Harar’s walls

With the numerous Irish Diaspora scattered in the four corners of the World, the celebration of St Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, on the 17th of March, has become a global event. Naturally, it is also celebrated in Addis with the annual Irish Ball, a social event so popular in the city that tickets are sold out as soon as they go on sale.

The Irish colours

So about 10 days ago (i’m late writing this post!), on the eve of St Patrick’s day, everybody gathered again at the Sheraton hotel, one of the social centres for the Addis’s expat community, to celebrate Ireland to the tune of an Irish band flown in for the occasion and with Guinness beer flowing generously. Unlike the Beaujolais Nouveau evening which is the not-to-be-missed event for the people who count in Addis, the Irish Ball is mainly an expat affair. It is after all a charity event which helps support a number of Non-Governmental Organisations operating in Ethiopia, the same organisations who employ most of the expats who were at the Ball. This year, part of the proceeds went to Our Father’s kitchen, an NGO setup to provide nutritious meals to children suffering from HIV and help them assimilate better the anti-retro viral drugs (ARV) needed to better control the virus.

Living up to its reputation of a fun evening, people were again getting out of their way to secure a ticket for themselves, and with more than 600 participants this year, the ballroom of the Sheraton hotel was pretty full, maybe a bit too full as I felt this year, the momentum was lost a little too early into the night.

As I am getting to know Addis and its people better, I was struck by how dynamic and entrepreneurial Ethiopian women are. Some of the most successful medium size niche businesses in the capital are run by women; women who at some point of their life courageously took the risk to venture into something new.

Selamawit Alene in her gallery, the St George’s gallery in Addis

Selamawit  and Saba Alene are the two sisters running St George’s gallery, probably the most prestigious gallery of Ethiopian art and antique furniture in the country. Their gallery has become even more of an institution since Bill Clinton visited it a few years ago. The Alene sisters started their business against all odds in the early 1990s. At the time, Ethiopia was coming out of more than fifteen difficult years under the Socialist Derg regime, which pushed a whole generation to emigrate to the US and Europe in search of a better life. Fresh out of college, the two sisters wanted to follow their passion for antique furniture and art, which was still considered as superfluous then. “People viewed paintings and decorative pieces as frivolous objects they didn’t need,” said Selamawit. They started anyway by restoring old furniture pieces which sold well, and a few years later they developed their own line based on traditional Ethiopian style. Today, their line of furniture has become very popular, even more so since the recent restriction on sales of antique furniture to protect Ethiopia’s heritage. Last year, they went a step further by opening their first international gallery in the US to meet the increasing demand from customers there. Saba is currently based there to personally run the new gallery while Selamawit stays in Addis.

Their Addis gallery, set in an old 1930s house near the Sheraton hotel, is a very pleasant place which feels more like a home than a store. Each room is beautifully arranged with distinctive furniture and colourful walls covered with paintings from young Ethiopian artists as well as more traditional art and artefacts. I regularly visit it, having from time to time coffee with Selamawit who is becoming a friend of mine; we recently discovered that our respective daughters are in the same class at the French Lycée and are also becoming friends. She told me that they are now looking for a second location to exhibit contemporary art but finding a place in Addis with ample wall space is proving extremely difficult. All the old houses and villas are being demolished at a fast pace to make way for non descript high-rise glass and concrete buildings.

St George’s gallery website 

Inspired by the Alene sisters, Hiruth Gougsa set up her own business making handbags made in Ethiopia, which she sells in her attractive ethnic store in the Bole area. For her, St George’s gallery is a model of a concept store in Ethiopia, which she looks up to.

Hiruth Gougsa and her creations

Hiruth is part of a generation of Ethiopians who spent a long time abroad before coming back to settle. She worked for large companies in the UK for a number of years until she decided that she wanted to have her own business and move back. She started by running a catering company, which she still owns but no longer manages, and after some time she went for her passion for handbags and clothes. Since she took the jump in 2006, her label, MELA, has become a reference in Addis for handbags and accessories. Her bags, made from top quality Ethiopian leather, are colourful and creative and tend to follow the international designers’ style. Compared to the many other bag makers, her products are made with taste and finished well. The leather industry and craft is an important source of income in Ethiopia, however, often the finished products are not made with great care which is a shame for the high quality leather used.

A couple of years ago, Hiruth opened a second store in the Old Airport area, a residential area favoured by the international expat crowd, mainly because she was hoping to diversify into traditional Ethiopian furniture. However, she recently gave it up because of the high rent. This is one of the difficulties of running a business in Addis: landlords get carried away when they see that a business or shop is doing well and tend to ask exagerated rental rates, which businesses cannot sustain. As a result, we see many empty shops in newly built premises. Hiruth recently told me that she is looking to move out of her store in Bole because of a plan to build a high-rise tower next to it, which would seriously affect her, at least during construction. She said she is suffering enough from the road work on the new Bole road which is temporarily preventing access to her shop. She has nevertheless managed to keep her customers mainly because very few people produce bags of the same style and quality.

I met Mitslal Kifleyesus-Matschie for the first time last year in the café at the Hilton. At the time, she was moving back permanently to Ethiopia after many years living in Germany. At that meeting, she very openly talked to me about her personal life, her separation from her husband, a prominent German politician and father of her two children. She also told me about ECOPIA, the company she had set up five years before to make organic preserved food and cosmetics, and which she was planning to develop. Now, a year and a half later, I see her products on sale in all the supermarkets in Addis, and ECOPIA has become a name in the local market.

Mistlat with her Ecopia guava jam

Mitslal belongs to the same generation as Hiruth Gougsa and the Alene sisters, and like them she was educated in Ethiopia, however, her initial job in the defense sector took her abroad. After a number of years, she decided it was time to come back to Ethiopia and work differently for her country and her people. She initially set up ECOPIA in Germany with a view of working more with Ethiopia, but now the company is fully based in Addis. Her business’s core principle is to work with communities of farmers in rural Ethiopia. Among its most popular products, ECOPIA sells organic fruit jam, soap bars and cosmetics using natural ingredients available locally thanks to Ethiopia’s amazingly rich biodiversity.

Her company provides extensive training to the farming communities they work with, emphasizing a lot on the quality of the products. She helps farmers with everything, such as when is the best time of the day to pick fruit to get the maximum amount of sugar in the fruit, how to best preserve and package them. “The farmers understand very fast, because for them having sweeter fruit means buying less sugar to add and hence saving money. By the end of the process they are happy and the customers are happy too with a better tasting jam free of chemicals,” Mistlal said. In her view, the time invested in training is paying off with the quality of the products and the improved livelihoods. Up to now, ECOPIA has trained about 3000 farmers and extension workers all over the country. According to a government’s assessment, it is the company who gives the most knowledge to farmers outside Addis, bringing knowledge and techniques into the villages. All their products can be traced back to their origin. Mitslal also feels it is time to take the company to the next stage and diversify into other areas such as ecotourism. Her plan is to develop good-quality accommodation in rural areas to make sure local communities can also benefit from the on-going development in tourism. “There’s a need for more accommodation in Ethiopia, so we would like to see rural communities truly benefit from it too,” she said.

Everybody in Addis is wearing soleRebels shoes or sandals, the fair trade shoes developed a few years ago by young woman entrepreneur Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu. At just 32, she is collecting young entrepreneurs’ awards for the first ever footwear company to be Fair Trade certified which she set up in 2005.

Bethlehem and her soleRebels shoes

From very modest beginnings in the neighborhood where she grew up in Addis Ababa, she has built up a successful brand and is now exporting worldwide through major retailers, as well as selling online. Her initial idea was to bring jobs to her community, Zenabwork, a small village in Addis, where her family and neighbours were struggling to make ends meet. She wanted to harness the community’s artisan skills and channel them into a sustainable, global, fair trade footwear business. For her, shoes were an obvious choice because she could use local skills and material 100% produced in Ethiopia. Her idea was to recreate the traditional “selate” shoes made from recycled car tyres, but update the style to make a fashionable, yet alternative product. She says it was the shoes the rebels wore when fighting the invading forces; they kept Ethiopia as the only African country not to have been colonised. Unlike the generation just before her, Bethlehem never felt the need to leave her country. She was still a child when the repressive Derg regime fell in 1991, and therefore was less affected by it.Twenty years previously, in the 1970s, a whole generation of Ethiopian left in search of a better life in Europe or America. Today, they are referred to as the Ethiopian Diaspora.

Now a few years later, Bethlehem has succeeded in her shoe venture by combining attractive Ethiopian artisan skills with the age-old recycling tradition that exists in the country. The soles are genuinely made from recycled car tyres, while the body of the shoe is made from pure Ethiopian leather or Abyssinian hemp woven by her own artisans. She pays a lot of attention to the quality of the manufacturing process. All her artisans are trained directly in-house, they make each pair by hand, one at a time, making it a truly zero carbon production process. Being a true entrepreneur, she won’t stop here. She has plans to increase her workforce by one thousand full time employees in the next couple of years, from a current figure of 100 staff, who can already produce about 300 pairs of shoes or 500 pairs of sandals per day. She also wants her workers to be well paid so they can truly improve their livelihood. She says she pays them about three times the industrial average. Recently, she started diversifying into casual clothes using the cotton and hemp woven by her workers, and opened a second boutique in Addis just next to her shoe store in the Adam’s Pavilion shopping mall.

Amakeletch Teferi is another woman entrepreneur who runs a successful business in Addis.  Initially trained as an agronomist, she set up the chain of café-bakeries La Parisienne a with her family 15 years ago. It all started when she realised that her mother was crossing the whole city at peak time to buy the bread she liked, so Amakeletch suggested to her to set up a bakery nearby. At the time, her brother was working in France so he learnt to bake bread and make croissants the French way, and on his return they opened their first shop. It was also one of the first European-style bakery in Addis. “That’s how it all started,” she said.

Her other siblings joined in at a later stage and today the family owns four shops and is planning to open a fifth one in town. They sell everything from fresh baguette to croissants and other continental pastries. Amaki (as she is known in her friends and family circle) and her siblings went to school at the French Lycée in Addis so they were very familiar with France. Amaki herself is a true “Parisienne”, she is married to a French man and often travels to France. She may be one of the busiest women in Addis, being involved in many different social circles, but she still finds the energy to do more. She is currently building a brand new resort-hotel in Adama (also known as Nazret), a smaller but busy town about two hours east of Addis on the road to Dire Dawa. For her, Adama is a childhood place where she used to go to with her family during the rainy season in July and August. That’s where people from Addis went to escape the city because of the lower altitude and warmer climate. She says there is a need for a vacation type of hotel in that area where people can go to relax and have a good time. She is planning to build a swimming-pool, an artificial lake and a stable for horse-riding. In fact, the name of her hotel, La Residence, suggests just that: a place to feel at home away from the hustle and bustle of sprawling Addis Ababa.

Back into my golden cage after a temporary escape to NYC. Hard to come back after two weeks of freedom. To my surprise, what I enjoyed the most there wasn’t the endless shopping or the abundance of art galleries and museums, it was the rediscovered freedom of being able to walk around the city by myself (and my girls). No driver to follow every single of my steps, no complicated domestic issue or relationship to manage, just freedom and oxygen!

NYC

Having said that, I wasn’t able to completely escape Ethiopia. On one of the evenings, I was invited to the graduation party of one of my Ethiopian friend’s nephews. He stayed with his aunt while studying in New York. For a moment, I got confused not knowing where I was anymore! At the party, held in a church hall in the Chelsea district, we had injera with the full range of fasting and non-fasting dishes just like in Addis. Seen from the US, Ethiopia feels far away. I could begin to understand the feeling of displacement people from any diaspora can sometimes experience. They have to adapt and merge into their new daily reality in the host country, but they still keep their country of origin inside their mind and heart. However, the picture they have is somewhat distorted by the workings of memory and becomes gradually more removed from the contemporary reality.

The largest Ethiopian diaspora is not in NYC but Washington DC, as I was able to see a few days later. The figures are relatively vague, ranging between 100,000 and 250,000 residents for Washington alone, compared to around 20,000 for NYC. America is the prime destination for Ethiopians who want to go abroad to live or to study. The wealthy Ethiopians in Addis tend to spend a few months a year in the USA. In one of the episodes, the Simpson family famously end up in an Ethiopian restaurant in Washington, having no idea how to eat injera!  Even without looking at the statistics, the Ethiopian presence in DC is quite obvious, particularly in jobs such as cab drivers, bar attendants or waiters. Both waiters in one the National Gallery’s cafés were Ethiopian; they were quite shocked when I said thank you in Amharic to them. They face immediately lit up, they couldn’t stop chatting, asking us about Addis, and sending regards to the whole city! It reminded me that more than anything Ethiopia is about its people.

There are days I really have no inspiration to write so limited my life in Addis feels. If I didn’t constantly make an effort to get out to expose myself to the city, facing the stress of the erratic traffic, my life would be reduced to a triangle of places: home, school and the Hilton swimming-pool (maybe four places if I include the Alliance ethio-française, and that’s it!). Especially now that we’ve visited all the places we had planned to visit this school year, I feel a bit of a void: nothing to discover, nothing fun to keep my mind occupied, no cinema or other cultural distraction to take my mind away, only the very monotonous daily routine of the expat life in Addis. I need to specify that I am not allowed to take employment while living in Ethiopia. It is stamped on my residence card.

To add to it, I had once again to deal with domestic staff issues. One of the maids I let go a few months ago after we encountered problems of theft in our house, asked me her job back. I was in a bit of  a dilemma as I still believed she wasn’t responsible but because I didn’t know who was to blame, everybody working inside the house (mainly the maids) had to go — that’s the way it works here. Unfortunately, we found out later that one of the guards was the culprit, so he consequently lost his job. Only one member of staff stayed with us: the babysitter because she was on maternity leave when it happened and couldn’t have been involved. She has been back at work since and got one of her friends to help her. As it turned out, the arrangement didn’t work out for me in terms of efficiency at work and communication (the new maid only spoke amharic which was difficult for me to manage). So when the former maid, Alem, asked for her job back, I was yet again in a dilemma: she is very competent and organised in her job and speaks reasonable english so I was happy to take her back, but in order to give her back her job, I had to ask the newcomer to leave. What I didn’t know but learnt then was that she had left her job to come to my house, so more to the dilemma! On the advice of an Ethiopian friend who helped me with the translation, we had a big staff meeting where everybody could give their opinion on what had happened and decide if it was fair that Alem had lost her job. As it happened, they liked the idea of an open meeting where they could discuss their respective issues. They all agreed that she should get her job back. I also took into account the fact that she has four children as well as other members of her family to support. In Ethiopia, it is a big stigma to be fired from a job, even with a payout as was the case here. They care as much about their reputation as the money received. The whole community knows about it, the person can be ostracised and never find another job because of community pressure and talk. I didn’t realise that at the time, I came to understand it in the course of our meeting.

I did find this constant shuffling of people and energy in the house emotionally tiring. I still find it difficult to adapt to the reality of my social status here. By moving from Europe to Africa, we jump social class overnight, becoming the local equivalent of a wealthy uptown family with a myriad of domestic helpers, driver, gardener and so on….but we don’t know how to fit into this new status because we haven’t grown with it…..or maybe it is just me, feeling really uncomfortable with it; it could also be that I focus too much on it, because my horizon is so limited here, no matter how hard I try. With all the restrictions I have, I am still trying to figure out a way of turning this experience into an opportunity. Not easy.

I don’t need to mention that Addis Abeba was in the news this weekend with the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the African Union, the pan-African organisation based in the Ethiopian capital. Seen from this end, we were advised not to move around the city (and literally stay at home) because of traffic disruptions and road blockades due to the arrival of a number of Heads of State from the five continents. To every one’s surprise, the city was not as chaotic as expected and traffic flowed with relative ease. Some roads may have been closed from time to time, but on the whole it was relatively well organised.

Items for sale as expats move on to a new life in a new country

Most of the expats carried on with their life as usual, the current priority being to sell as many items as possible before moving on to a new life in a new country. As I was last year, I was shocked again to see what kind of items people are prepared to sell: kids toys, second hand shoes, puzzles, books, even food, in a country where there is a shortage of many of these things. I still can’t understand why people living a materially comfortable life here cannot give their toys, kids shoes, clothes and so on. What is the benefit of selling toys for less than US$ 5?  Even if the proceeds of the sale end up going to charity, what is the benefit of going through minor transactions of the kind when the items could simply be given? This is an aspect I haven’t yet understood of the expat way, and which I find quite shameful. Why not give what we don’t want anymore to the many children who desperately need shoes and clothes, the children who never play with toys because it is a luxury here?

I recently attended a conference at the Goethe Institute on 1960s architecture in Addis. Addis may not be known internationally for its architecture, however it has some unique examples of the various architectural styles developed in the 1960s. Walking around Addis, one cannot fail to notice the uniqueness of these buildings, especially at a time when so much is being demolished to make way for new high-rise towers.

The Bidula building near the National Theatre in central Addis. Its architect is unknown

As architectural expert, Professor Knebel (a German academic now teaching at the University of Oman) explained at the conference, in the last decade of emperor Haile Selassié’s rule, the city saw a construction fever through the commissioning of many administrative buildings as well as residential appartements blocks. At the time, the focus was on creating a modern city which had the ambition of becoming the capital of Africa with the newly created Organisation of African Unity (which celebrated its 50th anniversary last week). An international competition was organised to attract international architects to the city and create lasting buildings which would reflect the new international status of the Ethiopian capital.

The movement started in 1959 with the construction of the Africa Hall (1959-1961), one of Addis’s iconic buildings designed by the Italian architect, Arturo Mezzedimi, Haile Selassié’s favourite. Mezzedimi, who had studied with Italian futurist architect Alberto Sartoris in Lausanne, was already working in the Horn of Africa where he got noticed with the indoor swimming-pool he designed in Asmara, Eritrea. Today, his Africa Hall is the seat of the United Nations Economic Commission on Africa, but it first hosted the newly created Pan-African organisation, born in 1963.

The drive to change the face of the Ethiopian capital came in a context of political instability following a failed coup d’Etat against the Emperor in December 1960, which, for some political history experts, foreshadowed the 1974 revolution. Following the attempted coup, Haile Selassié continued to ignore his country’s domestic problems to focus on external affairs, trying to position Addis as the capital city of a united Africa in the new spirit of post-colonisation and pan-africanism.  Ethiopia also joined the non-aligned movement in 1961, which proposed a third way in the bipolar world of the Cold War.

The Finfinne complex on Meskel Square provides a good example of harmoniously mixing horizontal and vertical lines

Other international architects

 1965 was a particularly productive year with some of the city’s landmark buildings opening that year, such as the City Hall, the National Bank, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Hilton Hotel. A number of international architects, to name but a few, came to work in Addis such as Henri Chomette who designed the French Lycee Guebre-Mariam and the permanent seat of the African Union. He was himself a pupil of the 20th century master, Le Corbusier. The Israeli architect, Zalmann Enav from Tel Aviv, an innovative city in terms of architecture, was commissioned to design, among others, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He set up office with the Ethiopian architect, Michael Tedros, who had studied under Louis Kahn, one of the most creative architects of the second half of the 20th century. This group of architects belong to different schools, however, they all applied the same principle of using local materials such as stone and glass mixed with concrete, to find a new expression of the national identity. It is hard to see it today, but some of these buildings were a technical achievement at a time when it was difficult to find good quality concrete in Ethiopia.

The Franco-ethiopian Lycée Guebre-Mariam, a creation of French architect, Henri Chomette

According to Professor Knebel, the architecture of the period reflects an openness to the world in the sense that the city welcomed different schools of architecture and the cultural exchanges were multiple. In his view, what is unique today in Addis Ababa is the fact that, although there are no historical masterpiece, the various architectural styles of the 1960s are all represented into the one place. They embody the complexity and the contradictions in the architecture of the early 1960s.

Note: I wasn’t able to provide pictures of the City Hall, the National Bank or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs because of an interdiction to take pictures of national buildings in Ethiopia. Images can however be found online. 

Last week Ethiopia celebrated the fall of the Derg regime (on 28 May on the international calendar to be precise). The Derg (which means committee in Amharic) was the bloody communist regime led by Mengistu which governed Ethiopia in the late 1970s and 1980s following the coup d’Etat against Emperor Haile Selassie in September 1974. In its 17 years of ruling, Mengistu’s government was responsible for many atrocities against its own people, governing by force, intimidation and mass murder. Instead of bringing progress to the country as it had claimed to do when embracing the communist ideology, it left it in dire economic conditions which many will remember with the recurrent famine of the 1980s.

Some of the many victims of the Derg regime

The Derg or Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army, was officially established in June 1974 by a group of military officers to maintain law and order following a widespread mutiny in the armed forces earlier that year. In the months that follow, the situation deteriorated and instead of putting in place a constitutional monarchy as was initially proposed, the Derg deposed and imprisoned the emperor to seize full power. In September 1974, the Derg renamed itself as the Provisional Military Administrative Council and took control of the government with Mengistu Haile Mariam as its chairman, while eliminating in the process all the members loyal to the former emperor. The Monarchy was officially abolished in May 1975 and Marxism-Leninism proclaimed the ideology of the State. The former emperor died a couple of months later, presumably killed on Mengistu’s order.

a raid to a civilian’s house during the Red Terror

However, a strong opposition was voiced from the onset and the following two years (1975-1977) are remembered as a period of civil conflict and harsh violence on all sides, later described as the Red Terror. During that time, the Derg government unveiled its brutal methods and murderous techniques (some of them learnt from the Stasi in former East Germany) to get rid of unwanted opponents. Wanting to know more about it, I went to visit the Red Terror Memorial, a new memorial/museum which opened in Meskel Square in Addis in 2010, to commemorate the many victims of  the infamous regime. The Memorial is the result of an initiative from former victims and close relatives of the victims who collected archive material, photographs of the deceased and testimonies to create the museum. They give their time to take visitors around and give explanations. Entry is free of charge, but donations are welcome to continue the work. I found it very interesting as well as profoundly touching to see the photographs of the time. Beyond the horror of the crimes committed against humanity, what surprised me was how little the urban landscape of Addis Ababa had changed in 40 years, another evidence of the huge economic set-back brought by the regime.

Torture method as displayed in the Red Terror Memorial

Although there was a shimmer of hope at the beginning when the Derg redistributed the land to the farmers and nationalised the industry, it gradually became apparent that the regime was to focus mainly on increasing military equipment supplied by the Soviet Union to fight opponents and separatist guerilla groups in Eritrea and Tigray among others. Such policy culminated in the deadly famine of the mid-1980s which drew the World’s attention to Ethiopia and its Derg regime. In that context, the Derg dissolved itself in 1987 to establish a civilian constitutional government with Mengistu as its head, but the attempted reform came too late. By then, the Soviet Block, who was struggling with its own internal problems, had gradually withdrawn support to such foreign governments. With Soviet funds dwindling, Mengistu’s government was no longer in a position to fight the many guerilla groups, and at the end of January 1991, a coalition of rebel forces, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front launched its highly successful Operation Tewodros to seize the northern cities of Gondar, Bahar Dar and Dessie. Mengistu and his family fled the country via Kenya and have since lived in Zimbabwe where they were granted asylum. The late Meles Zenawi, who governed Ethiopia from 1991 to his untimely death in 2011 was one of the main rebel leaders.

I am currently reading a fascinating biography of the late emperor Haile Selassie by the Italian historian Angelo del Boca, an author who has written extensively about the Horn of Africa and personally met the Emperor in the 1960s (The Negus, Life and Death of the Last King of Kings, Arada Books, 2012). Through his book I begin to understand better modern Ethiopia in the light of the historical developments which shaped the country, in particular the Italian Fascist occupation of the 1930s, the failed coup d’Etat against Haile Selassié in 1960, the creation of Addis as the new capital of the African continent in the 1960s and the revolution of 1974. The Author describes the sequence of events which led to the 1974 revolution and explains how the Emperor in his old age misread his own country’s repeated calls for in-depth reform. He remained the autocratic ruler he had been since the 1920s, even though he was eager to modernize his country and bring it to the international stage, which he successfully did with the creation of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 in Addis. On a domestic level, he chose to ignore the deepening social and political crisis and the ever-increasing economic problems the Ethiopian people were facing.

Haile Selassié’s old palace in the grounds of Addis Ababa’s University

Instead, he continued to grant privileges to his chosen elite, sending promising young students abroad and personally delivering degrees to all graduating students from Addis Ababa University, the University College he himself created. He personally greeted the pupils who obtained their Baccalaureat from the French Lycee Guebre Mariam, the school traditionally attended by the intellectual elite of the country and still a prestigious school today. He genuinely tried to nurture an intellectual elite for his country in the belief that it would be sufficient to set it on track for lasting development.  But the times had changed, socialism was gaining ground as an ideology, something he failed to understand.

Reading the book, I was interested to visit again his old palace located in the grounds of Addis Ababa University. The Palace he built was part of the estate he inherited from his father Ras Makkonen, one of Menelik’s closest advisers and the hero of the Battle of Adwa. He himself gave his estate to the University in the early 1960s. Today, the former palace is the seat of the respected Institute of Ethiopian Studies and its extremely interesting ethnological museum, but it has kept some memories of the Emperor’s haydays. Haile Selassie’s personal bedroom and bathroom (with some personal effects) have remained as they were, and next to it, the Empress Menem’s quarters have been kept as empty rooms. Their respective bathrooms look quite out of date, but at the time it must have been the height of luxury in Ethiopia.

The Emperor’s private bathroom

During the Fascist occupation from 1936 to 1941, after the Emperor had fled to England, the palace was momentarily occupied by the Italian governor and other high-ranking officials. They left a strange monument outside the main gate made of concrete steps crowned by the lion of Judah,  each step supposedly representing a year of Fascist rule in Italy. However, I counted only 14 steps knowing that Mussolini was officially in power from 1922 to 1943, and the Italians were in Ethiopia until 1941, so I remained a bit puzzled by it. The lion of Judah on top was added later to symbolise the end of the Italian occupation.

a legacy of the Fascist years outside Haile Selassié’s palace in Addis

The very pleasant grounds around the Palace are home to the ever growing University of Addis Ababa, which counts a number of Faculties in a number of different buildings scattered around the park. It is also the home of the well-known Kennedy Library, one of the landmark  buildings from the 1960s designed by a group of American architects. It may still be one of the most beautiful and peaceful parks in the city, located at the footsteps of the Entoto hills.

As I am preparing to travel to Europe for the summer and momentarily interrupt writing on this blog, I need to mention a few words about the “true expat life” I lived in the last couple of weeks, going around the various embassies.

Firstly, I had the great privilege of being granted access into the American Embassy, known as the Bunker in some circles because of its high security features. I was invited to a kids birthday party, hence the access. On entry, I was automatically searched and had to give away my mobile phone and camera. Even my five year son commented that “it was like a prison”!  From the outside, the new building made of heavy concrete looks like a high security jail, but once inside, one could be anywhere in the US. The tarmac roads are in perfect condition, the gardens are meticulously cared for, an ATM machine is available and US citizens can enjoy the use of a swimming-pool, a club house, tennis courts and a state-of-the-art kids playground. No need to venture into the city. It is quite a contrast with the wild parks of the French or Italian embassies.

Horse Riding competition at the French embassy in Addis

Embassies are an important feature of life in Addis. Not only do they act as the administrative office and legation of their respective countries, but they also double as a centre for social entertainment for the expats. Horse riding competitions, tennis tournaments or other events are regularly organised inside embassy grounds. The Italian and French Embassies, located at the very footsteps of the Entoto hills in grand compounds with secular trees, are the oldest and probably the most prestigious ones due to their prime location. The Italian Embassy, which used to be the Governor’s private villa during the Italian occupation, was the first legation to be established in Addis, as indicates the diplomatic number plate 01 on official Italian cars. It was followed by the French legation (diplomatic plate 02), the British (03), the American (04) and the Belgian (05). Today, the diplomatic plates go beyond 100, a good indication of the diplomatic capital Addis has become. Still being in a diplomatic car remains a bit of a status symbol in Addis.

Between the Franco-German friendship celebrations at the French embassy, horse riding at the Italian embassy, a birthday party at the US embassy as well as many farewell parties in more embassies, I had my fair share of expat gatherings and I am now ready to regain my anonymous freedom of movement in Europe.