Life in a Rural Village in Ethiopia
By Andrea M. Karkowski
In many ways, Ethiopia is the land that time forgot… On May 1, 2006, Dr. Andy Carlson (political science) and I boarded a plane in the United States and when it landed in Ethiopia the year was 1998 – really. In Ethiopia, the millennium and its Y2K computer glitches were still a year and a half away, the date September 11, 2001 was nearly three and a half years into the future, and the year 2006 a full eight years into the future. What happened to those eight years? I’ll tell you in a moment.
In Ethiopia, this warping of time does not end with the calendar. Seven time zones to the east of Ohio, we set out watches back only an hour to get onto Ethiopian time. The new day in Ethiopia, what we call midnight and in military time is zero-hundred hours, begins at 6:00 AM (according to a European clock) in the Ethiopian time zone. This shift of six hours is more disconcerting than losing eight years, primarily because we use clock time much more frequently than we use calendar time. According to the Ethiopian clock, sunrise is at midnight, breakfast at 1:00 AM, lunch when the sun is directly overhead occurs at 6:00 AM, dinner at 1:00 PM, and we went to sleep well before 6:00 PM. Confusing? You bet!
Our purpose for being in Ethiopia challenged our understanding of time even further. Through a grant from Capital University’s Cultural Enrichment Program, we were there to conduct a behavioral health workshop with a school in a rural village called Kossoye, which is north of Gondar in the Ethiopian highlands. With over 800 homes, Kossoye village has a small clinic, a school with 1200 students, no running water, no electricity, and only five latrines. Andy and his father, a physician, have been doing research in the village for 40 years. In that time, they have witnessed levels of malnutrition climb to an astounding 50% of children and women. Men eat first in their culture and whatever remains is given to the women and children. The number of children who are stunted is quickly approaching the number of children with normal growth rates. While in much of the world nutrition rates are improving, in the Kossoye village the opposite is happening.
The situation becomes more dire with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Ethiopia. Obtaining accurate data of HIV/AIDS prevalence is difficult in a country where the stigma associated with the disease is so profound that people are not willing to be tested and the government cannot afford widespread testing programs. One estimate of the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate for adults in Ethiopia is 5%. My concern was with the young women who would leave Kossoye village and move to a large city, like Gondar or Addis Ababa, in search of a better life. These young women are at high risk for contracting HIV because the only opportunities available to them in the city involve the exchange of sex for food, housing, education, and protection.
In order to address these two problems, nutrition and HIV/AIDS, Andy and I held a workshop for the school teachers in Kossoye village. We talked about the problems and strategies for lessening the problems. The teachers created plays about how to improve nutrition and manage the move from the rural village to a large city so that the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS is reduced. On one sunny morning all of the children in the school, Andy, his father, several healthcare workers from Gondar, and I gathered outside in the school yard (the school has no auditorium). We watched the teachers perform the plays and we listened to two students read poems that they wrote about the two topics. The acting was first rate, filled with drama, passion, and humor. The storylines were complex and demonstrated how each issue was situated in the intricate web of culture, economics, and history. The event that day, being far removed from their usual routine, was memorable for the students.
To further emphasize the importance of nutrition, over the course of two weeks Andy dug and planted bio-intensive gardens at the school and the homes of the local priest and science teacher. The Ethiopian diet is meat-based, vegetables are considered fasting food, only to be eaten when religious holidays prohibit eating meat. To complicate the issue even further, most families in the rural villages are planting eucalyptus trees, a cash crop in Ethiopia, instead of vegetables. Unfortunately, the eucalyptus trees are drying up the few wells that the village has, and the cash that the trees bring in is not enough to sustain the village. Andy’s goal was to raise the status of vegetables by having community leaders demonstrate the value of vegetables. He also wanted to show the farmers how they could make the best use of their land by planting bio-intensive vegetable gardens in the valleys of the hilly terrain where water is best conserved while planting the eucalyptus trees at the top of the hills and away from the wells. Andy plans to return May 2007 to check the progress of the gardens.
There is still much work to be done in the village. Andy’s father is trying to increase the number of latrines in the village in order to reduce the incidence of trachoma, a disease that can lead to blindness. The flies that cause trachoma attack the human eye and grow only in human feces, which given the lack of latrines is prevalent on the landscape. The flies will not grow in latrines. Andy’s father has framed this as a women’s issue. Without private toilet facilities, women are prohibited from relieving themselves during the day. Andy’s father hopes to have the women encourage their husbands to build latrines. These latrines would provide a place for women to relieve themselves during the day while decreasing the incidence of trachoma and blindness in their children.
Clearly, the problems in Ethiopia are richly complex and related to cultural, economic, and historic factors, just as Ethiopia’s unique perspective on time is related to culture, economics, and history. So how is it possible that Ethiopia is eight years behind most of the rest of the world? In the late 1500’s, when many countries adopted the Gregorian calendar, which provided a year with 12 unequally spaced months and in which 10 days in October were lost, Ethiopia remained on the Julian calendar. The Ethiopian calendar has been moving at a slower pace ever since. Kassahoun, a young Ethiopian tour guide in Bahir Dar, told Andy and me that he had a solution to Ethiopia’s economic problems. Kassahoun said that Ethiopia could sell all of Ethiopia’s extra time to wealthy people in the west – Europe and the United States. He claimed that harried business men and women would gladly pay for more time. He would auction off Ethiopia’s time to the highest bidder, bring Ethiopia out of debt, and help Ethiopia catchup to the rest of the world. Were it possible, I am sure people would pay dearly for an extra day, an extra week, or an extra month. And, maybe then Ethiopia would no longer be a land that time forgot.