Invited To Ethiopia

About a month before Christmas 06 I got a call from Heather Plett at the Canadian Foodgrains Bank asking if we would be able to travel to Ethiopia in January 07 to visit some of the work the Foodgrains Bank was doing there. The proposal was that we'd be accompanied by a film crew who would document our discovering and learning resulting in a short documentary to send to churches across Canada later in the year.

Neither Nanci or I have been to Africa and as the timing seemed right we were very happy to say yes to the trip which will begin in a couple of days: January 5 - 17 / 07.

Immediately I got on line and started learning about Ethiopia of which I knew nothing.

Ethiopia is a country about twice the land mass of my own province Manitoba but with over twice the population of Canada. (75 million as compared to Canada's 33 million) We are so used to vast empty space that this seems staggering to me. Although it is predominantly an agriculture-based economy, Ethiopia currently has a structural food deficit of four to six million people (during a good rain year of which there have been only seven in the last 24 years). Alarmingly, at her present growth, Ethiopia's population will more than double by 2050. Food insecurity is a staggering threat to these people.

If you don't know where Ethiopia is, you'll find her in the Horn of Africa landlocked between Sudan on the West, Eritrea and Djibouti on the North , Somalia to the East and Kenya to the South. Her history is fascinating. Ethiopia is, I think, the oldest independent civilization in the world and boasts the Queen of Sheba no less, the son of Israel's King Solomon, and claims to be the place of origin for the coffee tree. It is still considered to be predominantly Orthodox Christian but now almost equally Muslim. Her last Emperor, before a brutal struggle and emergence as a fragile democracy (1980s), was the complex Hailee Selassie whom is revered most highly in Rastafarianism (ya mon).

I've read a couple of facinating books in preparation for the trip. First is The Abyssinian by Jean-Christophe Rufin (Doctors Without Boarders). The Abyssinian is a novel that takes place in 1699. Louis XIV of France sends an embassy to the most mysterious of oriental sovereigns, the Negus, or King, of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). The novel gives an overall and fascinating orientation to the rich history of Ethiopia.

The other book, Notes From a Hyena's Belly by Nega Mezlekia is a contemporary (true tale) of a young boy growing up in last turbulent years of Hailee Selassie's reign. Rich in folk-lore and heart-renting in detail, Notes gets under the skin of the media's Africa and invites you into her own telling of the story. This was a great read!

It's bed-time. More later.