A dull week of admin and marking comes to an end. On Sunday we are hopefully heading off to go trekking in Bale Mountains for a week.

One of our lifelines is The Guardian Weekly newspaper which is posted to us from the UK. It’s a collection of articles from the UK issues of The Guardian and The Observer newspapers along with selected articles from other major newspapers e.g. Le Monde, The Washington Post, etc. In a recent issue I noticed a small article about many people in Ethiopia being killed in the floods in Dire Dawa and in the Omo Valley (which has also been reported on the BBC World Service), and that the Ethiopian government had requested disaster funds from other countries to help. The flooding in Dire Dawa (near the major city of Harar) was bad and killed many people, but I’ve met many people here, Ethiopians and well-travelled ferenjis, who claim that few people if any died in the Omo Valley. The people of the Omo Valley are nomads who understand the river well and simply move when it floods. Nobody here who is familiar with the region believes anyone died in the flooding. However, the government seems to be very quick to request money to help the “victims”, which is interesting…

I’ve talked with a few Ethiopians now who, if they feel safe enough, are willing to be very honest about their views on the government. There is general dissatisfaction and contempt for how the government is becoming less and less democratic. The government seems to be applying a divide-and-rule policy of emphasising ethnic groups (helped by a federal structure along ethnic lines) and the differences between them. A few people have claimed that the government has no real interest in improving literacy or becoming more democratic, as educated people are more likely to question and raise objections. Key positions in local government, colleges and big institutions are often filled by party loyalists who are not necessarily experienced or qualified. One person has said that the only way Ethiopia will change for the better is if there is an uprising to force out the government while another described the government as more unpopular than even during the time of Mengistu and the Derg Regime, and this from people who I would not describe as stereotypical revolutionaries. It’s hard to know how widespread these views are, although the reluctance of most people to voice any critical opinions about the government I think reveals a lot. I’m certainly a lot less naïve about these issues than I used to be. Talk to people here about Bob Geldof, Live Aid, etc and they tend to be politely amused or openly scornful. Periodic famine in certain parts of Ethiopia is a fact of life due to a combination of unpredictable weather, over-population, inefficient farming practices and governments willing to exploit famine to achieve political ends. I wonder what the effect would have been if the many people who gave money during the time of Live Aid, instead volunteered their time and skills directly to the government or to NGOs like VSO. I’ve met Ethiopians here who were involved in the disaster relief efforts during the famine in the early 1980s, who while recognising that people were starving to death, also knew that it was totally avoidable and felt that their people were being turned into beggars by well-meaning foreign intervention.