Day 4 - Afar and beyond.

We never did get back to sleep – the braying donkeys and crowing cocks ensured there would be no more sleep that night so Nanci and I sat on the side of our little grass hut until the camp and surrounding village woke and the kids started to gather to wonder at their strange guests.

Again it was going to be a long travel day. Our destination was the holy city in the north called Lallibela. But before leaving the area we wanted to visit the site of a second water weir / diversion project that was currently under construction.

So we packed our things, ate a breakfast of injera, scrambled eggs and goat, said our goodbyes and headed out onto the dusty dry desert.

Some ten or so kilometers from the camp we suddenly came upon the most wondrous hives of activity. Under the direction of SSD, some two hundred Afar, having temporarily diverted the river, were building (without any machinery what-so-ever) a massive weir to divert water to an irrigation ditch that would eventually water several more thousands of acres of land.

It’s hard to describe what this looked like, and the pictures don’t do it justice. Men, women and children, digging, hauling, mixing, pounding, crushing, piling, dragging… It looked like a chaos of activity but sure enough, a sophisticated structure was forming. I was a little confused at first why such a large structure was being built for such a tiny river, but apparently when the rains come, this humble stream becomes a frightful force. The structure itself is designed to withstand the particularly powerful floods that come every 50 years.

Again, the tribe organizes itself to send roughly half its people to the worksite – the work is paid for in food (6 kilos of grain per person, per day – provided by Canadian Foodgrains Bank) while the remainder of the tribe cares for the animals. So the very real need for food today and food security for tomorrow is combined to meet both needs. It’s brilliant. Once the irrigation project is complete, SSD will provide training in sustainable farming techniques and Canadian Foodgrains Bank will continue to provide food for the workers until such time as neither are needed.

The energy of this work site was awesome and exhilarating. We had planned to only stop for a quick visit and ended up staying for several hours.

Irrigation ditch leading away from the river.

Leaving the desert we came to a washed out bridge in the road and had to cross the now dry river bed about a hundred meters upstream. This bridge had been destroyed by a flash flood only two weeks earlier. This gives you an idea of the volatility of the environment here.

I think I mentioned in a previous post that the reason the Afar people have to adopt agriculture (rather than rely solely on their traditional pastoralist way of life) is that climate change has dramatically increased the frequency of drought in a region that is already rather dry and barely able to provide food to sustain it’s inhabitants. Having been back now from Ethiopia for several weeks, what has most dramatically impacted me is the conviction that our contribution to climate change is one of the most pressing moral issues of our day. We, especially in the Church, are horrified at loss of life and well being as a result of sexually promiscuous lifestyles, but we are not yet horrified by our own environmentally promiscuous lifestyle that is arguably destroying more lives than the former.

I read a paper recently by Walter Brueggemann , a tremendous contemporary theologian, who argues that the persistence of hunger in a world entirely capable of producing enough food for all, in the end, is an issue of fidelity; a fidelity that issues from a three-way covenant between God, the earth, and its people. For our part, our covenant is to a love-fueled justice –one that is binding not in the remote, legal sense, but rather in the familial sense. In other words, I don’t share a table with my wife and children because I am legally bound to do so, or because of an intellectual consent to an external notion of egalitarian justice. I share a table because I adore them. I’m just happy to be there with them. Charity is not a result of do-goodism, it is the offspring of cherishing, that is… love. But love puts claims on both the lover and the beloved. And I can’t authentically proclaim my love and continue to willfully live in a way that brings harm to those I cherish.

I guess I am beginning to understand that charity is not simply giving from “my” excess to another’s pitiful need. At the supper table, I don’t think myself generous when my children load their plates with food. We don’t do that kind of math at all. We eat, we laugh, we tell stories as we subtly, mutually (unconsciously) negotiate our life together. True charity is about coming to the table, with all God’s children and celebrating responsibly and joyfully the gift of creation that is God’s good gift to all. It’s a very different way of thinking about possessions and entitlement and all the assumptions that make the capitalist world go ‘round.

Sorry…. I’m rambling.

We left the Afar around noon and drove the rest of the day arriving early evening in Lallibela. Again, the landscape was powerful, the people beautiful and the ride was worth every bumpy, joint-jarring moment:

Those are my sunglasses!

Back to the story… The Afar Region / Day 3

Leaving Weldiya

We again rose early in the morning so we could get to the Afar region before noon. For several hours, the journey continued much the same as it had the day before except that we left the main road and began to travel into what felt increasingly remote. The spectacular relief of mountains and valleys continued to astonish us. At one point we stopped to view one of the few lakes we would see – but quickly were engaged by a family who lived roadside. There was something uniquely lovely about these folks and our short encounter, trying to communicate, laughing at our mutual clumsiness, taking pictures, sharing names etc, is still one of my favorite memories of the trip.

One of the disappointments of being foreign, and wealthily so, is the inevitable divide or barrier that such a chasm creates. I often felt sad that with most roadside encounters, interest in us was largely material. And who can blame them? These are some of the poorest people in the world. But deep imbalances of wealth make it almost impossible to be genuinely interested in each other as people - and that, perhaps, is the greatest poverty of all.

With this family, however, there seemed to be something genuinely mutual and joyful about just hanging out on the road for the half hour or so we stayed. For those few minutes I was quite conscious of being, well… happy. And I honestly think they felt the same.

We continued to wind our way through the terrain until we finally came to the Afar Desert which is one of the lowest regions in all of Africa.

Roughly 1/7^th the size of Manitoba, the Afar region hosts 1.6 million people (mostly nomadic pastoralists) and some 10 million sheep, goats, cattle and camels. It is an extremely arid region, flat and hot with sparse vegetation. This is the area where Lucy was found, one of the oldest human fossil remains (3.2 million years) ever discovered.

The Afar people live nomadically in villages of dismantable grass huts – basically large upside-down baskets covered in grass. They boast they can pack up a whole village in less than a day to move to a new region. Moves are precipitated by depletion of foraging for livestock, or by outbreaks of malaria. Recently, however, their traditional way of life has been threatened by climate change; already a hostile environment with droughts typically coming every 15-20 years, now the droughts come every 5-8 years making the land incapable of sustaining its inhabitants. For the Afar people to survive, they need to take up the challenge of agriculture, something relatively new to them.

Several years ago, a group of young Ethiopian agronomists and engineers set up an organization (Support for Sustainable Development) and base camp in the Afar and began to help the indigenous people transition from a strictly pastoralist nomadic existence to a more settled agriculturalist way of life. I think it’s pretty hard for us to imagine how profound and difficult this transition might be. But now, in our own context, global warming is forcing us to accept that our way of life is also unsustainable as well. We haven’t quite felt the absolute pinch of this yet, but there is no longer any doubt that our survival is going to depend on a courageous and radical rethinking of the very assumptions that fuel (pardon the pun) our culture and economy.

For the Afar, one of the first structural developments needed was irrigation. As the land has never been farmed, soil fertility is high – just add water, and the place explodes with green. Elizabeth is a young Ethiopian woman from Addis Ababa. She has a degree in agriculture but

her gift has been the ability to mobilize a people to build a water weir and five kilometers of irrigation ditch using a food-for-work program (sponsored by Canadian Foodgrains Bank). Elizabeth organized a massive effort that has resulted, without modern machinery, in a desert becoming a garden effecting the food security needs of thousands of indigenous people. Not only is this a green revolution, but a social one as well. At the onset of the project, the Afar people (read: the men) claimed that the project would never work if led by a woman. Two years later, not only has the desert yielded needed food as a result of her determination, but now women sit at councils with men in a society that has never known such a thing. This is the stuff of miracles.

Elizabeth and I on water weir.
Irrigation ditch leading away from water weir. This was all dug by hand.

Same ditch a few kilometers later.

The actual farming/gardening projects have been led by this man (I can’t remember his name.) He too is an agronomist from Addis who is teaching basic sustainable farming techniques (crop rotation and composting) ensuring soil fertility without resorting to inorganic inputs (fertilizers) which contribute to a whole host of problematic assumptions and practices. This is responsible, organic, sustainable agriculture – food secured in covenant fidelity to the land. I found myself struggling to hold back tears as we walked through the acres and acres of bounty. Showing me hot peppers!

Plowing newly realized farmland.

Later that evening, the community gathered to share with us some of their traditional dance and song. This was extremely moving on so many levels. It was hard to believe that we were so privileged to witness such things. I sang as well – it was the first time any of them had experienced ‘western’ music. I’m not sure how much they liked it, but evidently they found me somewhat interesting. At one point an elder stuffed a small amount of money in my shirt pocket. Apparently this was a symbol of approval. I found out later there was some stress about me being a Christian among Muslims, but although I was unaware of the underlying tension, I fortunately didn’t say anything alienating. In the end, it was a mutual encounter that we all enjoyed immeasurably.

Kids watching me play and sing.

Teenage girls pose for Nanci

After darkness settled, we sat out under the stars on grass mats. One woman roasted and ground coffee for us (a traditional ceremony we would enjoy many times during our trip) as we debriefed the day before turning in for the night.

Our sleeping quarters - affectionately referred to as The Hilton

At about four in the morning, Nanci and I were both awake listening to the animal sounds, both familiar and unfamiliar. We walked out into the night air and stood for some time under the still gaze of heaven’s stars. I felt strangely like a ghost briefly privileged to witness something ancient and deeply good. I half expected to see Abraham standing beside us, unaware of our presence, in humble awe, silently receiving God’s favour. It was a holy moment. We stayed out to greet the dawn.