First encounter with Ethiopia
The trip to Addis Abeba. I had never been to Africa before and did not know what to expect.
Giordana showed us around for 4 days. Addis Ababa is completely different to what I thought and expected.
It is a modern city, with a great deal of new building and development.
The roads are full of old rundown cars that have no exhaust catalysts. The traffic is intense but not very noisy. Everyone drives very slow and accidents don’t happen very often, it even appears a very rare thing over here. Due to the large amount of old cars there is a lot of smog, it really attacks your airways.
We started our visit in one of the poorest areas of the city. From the car you see the multitudes of barracks where the people live. These areas have little or no space because all the sheds are built right next to each other. The roads are just dirt, full of rocks and holes. The houses are very small (3*3 meters ), they sometimes have electricity but rarely have running water or a decent sewer system let alone a toilet or shower in the house. The women wash the clothes in front of the house or try to cook the traditional Injeera (if the have food to cook). The men hang around or try selling something in their little shops. The kids are waiting……and waiting……. No toys around, not even a ball to play with.
Visiting the slums
We went inside one of these houses. Basically one room, the bathroom is outside and it is just a hole in the road that is shared with other houses and families. The room has a couple of beds, two chairs, a small cupboard where a gaslight for cooking was placed. In a 20 square metre “house” 6 people live and if they are lucky maybe one of them is working. A small kid smiles at us and is wondering who we are and what we are doing. This was a very common experience. Kids smiling at us, sometimes even laughing and pointing us out. We are Ferengi (foreigners) and we are white.
Everyone is very kind, they invite us into their homes, they are smiling, although they have nothing. Somehow you feel a kind of happiness, quietness in the air, no rush or desperation. Giordana explains, that the Christian orthodox religion has a very big impact in everyday life. They are happy with what God gives them. They would never steal, or attack someone else for money. Indeed, I have to say, I did not feel one minute of danger in those four days, even we were going around on our own.
People here are very polite, they want and need to say thank you and please.
We continue our trip, sometimes in the middle of the slums we see high walls which hide more luxurious houses. Those are the houses of the rich people. The gap here is huge. There are also very rich Ethiopians; they are the minority but they have a very good life.
After a delicious lunch in Gordana’s Restaurant Sheba we pass by a friend of hers living in one of those nice houses.
We saw a lot of humanitarian organisations over here, it would be easy to recognize them. Newest car and better dressed people.
Visiting a private school
In the afternoon we went to visit one of the best schools in Addis Abeba.
The schools here are from grade 1 to grade 8. Normally till grade 4 the kids study in Amharic(the local language), from grade 4 they start to study in English. We are told that the children from this school have the highest grades in the country. A lot of these kids have the possibility to go to a good high school and attend university. The average size of the class has about 25-30 children.
The director of the school is a very nice lady who organises everything perfectly.
I never saw such a clean school; not even here in Holland. After few questions to the owner I realized that the care for the cleaning and the assistance to the children might seem a bit exaggerated. In every class they have 3 people, 1 teacher, 2 assistants.
The bathrooms are cleaned every hour.
The school consists of about 1000 students. The costs of keeping the school running are very high and she told us she would need to raise the tuition fee to be able to survive.
The school was founded about ten year ago. She built the school from nothing. The government gave her the ground and she took a loan to build it. This is a very good school. The tuition fee including transportation costs and other costs are about €650 per child. Currently the school is helping about 50 kids who are attending the school for free. If we wanted to send some of our kids here to give them an even better chance, the director would give a discount. This immediately put an idea in our heads. We could take 3 or 4 very promising kids and send them to this school to give them the best chance possible.
