Giving and giving back. (Or, how I escaped from jail on my last day in Ethiopia.)

Yeah, I did feed a hyena.

I'm finally back in the United States after a month of getting to know Ethiopia and the people Concordia Humana will be working with to build the well in Harar. I first met the group of University of Cincinnati students in Addis Ababa about ten days ago, and with them from there I explored Addis Ababa, drove twelve hours to Harar, put a wooden stick wrapped in camel meat in my mouth and fed it to a wild hyena, stood in the back of a Toyota pickup truck on a dirt road in a search for the endangered (and equally elusive, even in a nature preserve) African elephant, got a mild bout of food poisoning, was a passenger in a car accident that left me in jail and then hitchhiked back across Ethiopia to make my flight, whereupon I slept in front of the only warm place in the airport (a Burger King, in fact) during a twelve-hour layover in Saudi Arabia, and finally, after a fourteen-hour flight to New York, encountered snow delays that kept me a little while longer from my home in Cincinnati.

I did not have very much time to write a blog post.

First, I'll talk about the adventure of scoping out the well in the village of Harar, and second, I'll talk about the adventure of getting back to the US.

The road out to Qerensa Dereba.

The drive to Harar laid bare the conditions under which millions of rural Ethiopians live, and in a way, why we're doing what we're doing. For hundreds of kilometers, our white van wandered through the crags of a shattered volcanic boulder field with only the hardiest of cacti eking out of the dry cracks of the earth. As the plants struggled, so did the people; giant yellow water tanks were sometimes the villagers' only source of water, and the tanks had to be shipped in from far away. During our dawn-to-dusk drive, we saw exactly one major source of water: a lake located, frankly, in a low-lying area in the middle of nowhere. Other people relied on modern transportation or their own two feet to get the scarce water.

The long walk to the well through chat and sorghum fields.

The well as it is today: deep inside a field, and far
from the main road where everyone lives.

So when we arrived last Thursday at the Qerensa Dereba school, I had a few observations. First, and most importantly, the well that already exists there had approximately the same problem that getting water from a river has: it was far away from the people that used it, so that while it provided clean water that a river does not, it took a long time to get it. And additionally, anyone that wanted water from this well would have to hand-pump it him or herself. Second, I noted the tenacity with which human beings seek an education. In an environment where kids fetch water from a pump and stood looking curiously on at some of the first foreigners they'd ever seen, their parents still built a school with the same mud walls and tin roofs from which they built their homes. There were paintings of the inner workings of the human heart and reproductive systems in the Oromo language on the outside walls of the five buildings which surrounded a small empty courtyard, and the desks were wooden benches on a dirt floor in front of a long-since-new chalkboard.

But, by God, they were going to get the best education they could.

Qerensa Dereba, the school where we're building the well.

Which is really what this is all about. These kids crave to satisfy the basic human impulse of curiosity, and spending inordinate amounts of time fetching water to satisfy another basic human impulse of thirst. It isn't right to have to trade off one for the other.

A classroom in Qerensa Dereba.

So I'm now back here in the United States, having met the players in this endeavor, from the engineers to the local university officials, who will work with Concordia Humana to build a solar-powered well that provides clean and time-saving water. Clean for the health of the body, time-saving for the health of the economy. The fundraising challenge for the drilling and construction begins on Monday, December 23 at Whole Foods in Mason, Ohio, where we'll be wrapping presents, distributing flyers, and taking donations. (But most importantly, taking donations!)

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And so now we should get to the second half of this post, which is how I got out of jail and back across the country to make my flight home with a mere five hours to spare. The driver from the tour company that the University of Cincinnati had hired agreed to drive only me back to Addis Ababa in the large van that had taken everyone to Harar. So in a van made for 10 people, it was just me and the driver named Aragawi, who was about the sweetest old man you'd ever meet. We left Harar at the crack of dawn, and I fell asleep in the back of the van.

I woke up two hours later to screeching tires and a body in the middle of the street.

Aragawi, who was also a fairly cautious driver, had struck a man of about 25 while driving through a village. (Since I was asleep, I have no idea whose fault it was.) A crowd quickly gathered around the car, yanked open the sliding door, dumped the guy on the seat, and demanded that we go to the nearest medical clinic. The man was spitting out blood, had a gash on his forehead, and was fading in and out of consciousness. I did my best to dress his wounds with my Johnson & Johnson first aid kit, donning blue rubber gloves, putting gauze and Neosporin on his forehead wound, and wiping the blood off his face. We got him to a clinic, a nurse put a shot of what was presumably morphine into his butt, and he passed out. Aragawi, a usually cheery and quiet man, was on the verge of tears, and I did my best to comfort him.

As we were driving out to go fetch the man's father, the police commander, who looked something like an Ethiopian version of one of the cops in The Godfather, stopped our car and hopped in the front seat. A few minutes later, I was sitting with Aragawi under arrest outside of a communal jail cell made of fenceposts and barbed wire in a town called Kobo. Nobody spoke a word of English, not even a little, and I'd given the police commander 25 of my 40 dollars to help cover "medical expenses." I'm not sure that's what it went toward, but I have no proof otherwise.

Shitaye, the woman who owns the guest house I was staying at in Addis Ababa, was my first phone call. I quickly explained the situation to her - that I'd been sort of blanket-arrested with my driver and that I had a plane to catch in 27 hours in an airport that was a day's drive away. When I passed the phone to the guard, she spoke what little Oromo she knew to tell a man with an AK-47 that if I was held in that barbed wire jail cell, that Ethiopia would never, ever see tourists again. "Think of the consequences of what you're doing," she said. That of course probably isn't quite true, but I owe Shitaye one hell of a favor for inflating my personal importance to the point of being released by a guy with the power to kill me if I'd tried to leave on my own.

So a short bajaj (tuk-tuk, rickshaw, three-wheeled go-kart, call it what you want) ride later, and I was at the bus station in Kobo, which was a shack-booth on the street that sold tea, and also apparently bus tickets. A bus pulled up, I paid extra to sit backwards on the gearbox since there were no extra seats. At this point, I'd slowly migrated my passport and other important documents to my winter coat for security's sake, and was wearing said coat in hot desert weather. But, the bus was here and I was free!

This is where the second bus broke down. The
view in the other direction was approximately
the same.

Except, obviously, the bus broke down in the middle of nowhere. Having no idea how to fix a bus with a broken clutch (and also never having even driven a stick-shift anything) I still desperately offered to try to help fix the bus. "No, no," the driver said, "just sit back, relax, and chew chat." Chat, of course, is half-meter sticks covered in leaves that contain a stimulant chemical. Everyone on the bus except the driver, including the guy that spoke good enough English to understand my story and had given me the equivalent of 5 dollars (not at all insignificant) to help get back across the country, was high on chat. They offered me some, but I politely refused, deciding rightfully that this was not the time for a psycho-chemical experiment.

After ninety minutes of waiting around in the waning afternoon sun, my dam of desperation broke and I got out of the clunked bus, stood on the side of the road with my luggage, and waved my arms at passing cars. The first man who stopped was named Mengistu (not to be confused at all with the genocidal dictator of the 1970s and 80s). I explained my situation as quickly and as clearly as I could (I believe I said, "This bus is broken and my first driver is in jail") and without further questions, he told me to get into the car with him and his two friends. I piled my luggage in the back, and we were on our way.

This is the moral of the story. Every morning, I'd wake up and recite an old Jesuit prayer that I'd learned at my Catholic high school. It goes like this:

Lord, teach me to be generous

Teach me to serve you as you deserve

To give and not to count the cost,

To fight and not to heed the wounds,

To toil and not to seek for rest,

To labor and not to ask for any reward

Save that of knowing that I am doing your will.

It's these values that brought me to Ethiopia in the first place to use my time and talents to effect change in the world that I believe to be good. But Mengistu may literally have saved my life and not only asked for nothing in return, but refused any kind of payment whatsoever when I even tried to buy him the meals that he was buying for me. He owned a construction company and was probably about as rich as a middle class American, but he bent over backwards to turn of the most stressful days of my entire life completely around. That night, we drove 300 kilometers to a city called Adama, and then he picked me up from a hotel early the next morning to drive me the rest of the way to Addis Ababa. I arrived in Addis Ababa in time to have breakfast and a coffee, and then breathed a sigh of relief as I boarded the plane first to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and then finally to JFK the next day.

The generosity of Ethiopians, despite how much less they have than Americans on average, is unparalleled, and even on my last day, Mengistu taught me a lesson about the power of giving. It's something I'll remember for the rest of my life, and certainly as I work with Claire, Peter, Patrick, and Matt from Concordia Humana as we try to raise the money it takes to complete the well in Harar.

And finally, many thanks to all of you for following me through my journey through Ethiopia - there will be many more updates from our fundraisers here in America, and certainly when I return to Harar to begin the process of building the well we've set out to raise money for. Happy Holidays, and check back here in the coming weeks!

"Never, ever again."

Today, I paid a visit to the Red Terror Martyrs' Memorial Museum in Addis Ababa. It's a small museum of six rooms with a handful of artifacts and blown-up photographs captioned by cut sheets of printer paper, and as such is a humble but powerful homage to those who were illegally executed under the Communist junta (called the Derg) following Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1974.

Caption on the statue: "Never, ever again."

The story is this: Haile Selassie faced growing opposition from the Ethiopian people over property rights and other issues. A Communist military junta led by Major Mengistu Haile Mariam rode the wave of dissent and was able to depose the emperor. The Emperor was last publicly seen getting into a car in 1975, and was given a proper funeral after the discovery of his remains in 2000.

In addition to Haile Selassie's death, a printed and stamped document from the Provisional Military Administrative Council of the Derg in a display case at the museum orders the following three things:
1. The detention of 54 of Haile Selassie's advisors.
2. A mass grave to be dug for 54 people.
3. The execution, by firing squad, of the 54 detainees.

In addition to the 54 executed detainees and Haile Selassie, approximately 500,000 political dissidents were murdered in the 13 years following.

Five-hundred thousand.

In Addis Ababa, a city easily walked across in an afternoon, there were no less than 25 secret torture and execution facilities, many of which still stand (unused) today. They look like regular houses and office buildings.

There is a room full of human skulls in the museum.

Mengistu, the man responsible for the room full of human skulls and approximately 500 other mass graves, is still alive today. He resides under the protection of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

To the left is a photograph of some of those killed. Out of respect for their remains, I elected to photograph this, and not the bones themselves.

The country has grown, changed, and healed from the Red Terror since the end of the Ethiopian Civil War that ended Mengistu's leadership in 1991. During the Derg, Revolutionary Square in Addis Ababa was routinely flooded with onlookers of ostentatious military parades.

Today, Revolutionary Square is called Meskal Square, and is flooded not with tanks but with taxis, lined not with military banners but with billboards for soft drinks and airlines, and attended not by fearful government supporters but by runners zigzagging the terraced stands. And at the far end of Meskal Square sits the Red Terror Museum as a reminder of the dark days that cost Ethiopia millions of lives through starvation and execution, as well as seventeen years of stunted economic growth whose effects can still be seen today.

What are we thankful for?

After all the Thanksgiving and Black Friday posts I've been seeing around the internet thrown against a backdrop of the neighborhood I'm staying in in Addis Ababa, I thought it would be interesting to see what a handful of Ethiopians were thankful for.

A woman with two children who participated in the interview.

I selected three individuals from poor and middle class status (homeless and shop owners) while walking through the Piazza district and had a translator ask them what they were thankful for. While some had little to say, others said all they had. Overall, it really left me thinking about all of the things that I have in my life to be thankful for: three meals a day, a roof over my head, family and friends all over the world, the financial ability to return to the United States whenever I want, and a laptop to be able to write this blog post.

The responses are in Amharic first, and the translated (and somewhat difficult to hear, therefore subtitled) responses come next. Watch the facial expressions and body language, then hear their words in English.

Here's what I found.

Each respondent gave explicit permission to be recorded. Though the interview was not predicated on any compensation, each respondent was paid a small amount of money after the interview as a goodwill gesture for their time.

A late post about the future of solar.

On Wednesday, I met with Prof. Shim Admassie from Addis Ababa University, who told me about the different ways his lab was trying to work on the problem of making solar panels easier to produce and cheaper.

But first, I'll tell you why this blog post is getting posted five days after the fact, and how it relates to the project.

On Thursday, I decided to take a bit of a detour from my guest house and its kitchen to try some of the local cuisine. As I was quickly finding out, taxis were costing me USD 5-7 per way, and part of my adventure was to get to where I wanted to go for lunch with a minibus. Minibuses, also called line taxis, also called "blue donkeys," are big, sky blue Toyota vans that are plastered with window decals of Jesus, belch out black smoke, and drive 18-20 people along a set route for between five and twenty-five cents USD per rider. It's the thing to do once you've decided that you've graduated from being totally ferengi (gringo).

So riding the blue donkey down the surprisingly smooth Chinese-subsidized pavement, I came across a restaurant similar in name to the one I wanted, shrugged my shoulders, and decided I'd eat there. Who knows, maybe it'd be a gem, right? I sat down, ordered lamb tibs and a bottle of water, and waited for lunch to come.

When lunch did come, I poured my bottled water into a freshly washed glass that was even still a little wet from the dishwasher. Wet with tap water.

For my carelessness, I spent the next day sleeping off a night of vomiting.

Of course, my family and I had a good laugh about it over Skype the next day, and I decided to just drink from the bottle from here on out. But what about people that drink from a river?

And here we have the problem that Prof. Admassie is trying to solve: develop better solar products to do things like pump clean water out of the ground. At present, the materials to produce a solar panel approximately break even with the money it saves through energy production, and the Ethiopian import tariff for manufactured goods (i.e., a solar panel) of 240% makes solar rather cost-ineffective. (Concordia Humana is working to reduce costs by having our panels manufactured in-country, and we've also learned that outages in the electric grid, to which solar panels are not tied, can damage a water pump. For our purposes, solar is the best option.)

Prof. Admassie at left, two graduate students
in laboratories at Addis Ababa University.

A few of the problems Prof. Admassie's department is trying to tackle include the ability to print solar cells using organic ink from a desktop-sized printing unit as well as reducing the cost of organic-material solar cells so that they can be more widely and cheaply produced than the present-day inorganic cells.

For PowerUp Ethiopia, this all comes back to how we can be even better in the future. We're building inorganic solar panels now because the need is there now and Prof. Admassie's technology is 5-10 years off. But what about the future? How can we use better, cheaper materials to deliver a more cost-effective product? The answer may very well be in his labs.

And for both Concordia Humana's work and Prof. Admassie's work, the best is yet to come.

A little business, a little fun.

This weekend has been my first major exploration of the stunning Ethiopian countryside outside of Addis Ababa, and the first meeting with officials from two universities that are working hard to find funding for the construction of a well in the village of Harar.

Left to right: Prof. Abi Taddesse, Prof. Girma Gonfa,
Danny Sexton (Concordia Humana), Prof. Getachew Argaw.

Let's talk business first. I met with Dire Dawa University President Girma Gonfa and his colleagues Getachew Argaw and Abi Taddesse from Haramaya University to get more details about the type of work that Concordia Humana is looking to fund. I met with these three gentlemen at the Jupiter International Hotel in Addis Ababa, and I found out that they had driven eight hours each way to meet with me for thirty minutes and tell me their story. Stunned by this as I was, I started digging into the details of what they've done so far. In the past two years, this group of men has coordinated with the University of Cincinnati to build solar panels to light homes at night and refrigerate vaccines. Those projects are finished and running, and their next step is to build a well that will pump clean water to the Qerensa Dereba elementary and high school several hundred meters from the water table.

Okay, but the school stills has water now without the pump. How do they get it? Every day, it is the chore of women and children to carry buckets of water possibly contaminated by animal waste 3 kilometers (that's just under two miles, for the folks in America) each way to and from the closest river. The distance, of course, depends on whether or not the village of Harar is in the rainy season, but the task can take several hours either way. The problem with this, aside from the risk of disease and the obviously backbreaking nature of carrying huge water buckets the distance equivalent to a walk from Union Square to Central Park, is that the need for water is keeping kids out of school and women out of the workforce.

Read that one more time. The need for water is keeping kids out of school and women out of the workforce.

These three men came to me asking for the money to build a solar-powered well that would dig 70 meters (200 feet) into the ground and bring clean water to the school. At a cost of 3000 Ethiopian birr (about US $150) per meter for drilling plus several thousand dollars for the solar units that will reliably power the pumps without the use of a surge and outage-prone electricity grid, we estimated the total cost of this project to be $30,000. Let me reiterate: these men believe so strongly in making this happen that they made a sixteen hour commute to meet me.

So, this is my first plug for donations. You can contribute to this project in any amount to help us reach our goal of $30,000 to build this well. 

Next up: here's the fun I had my first weekend in Ethiopia! Addis Ababa is a fascinating city with a surprisingly wide offering of national cuisines, newly paved roads flooded with sheep from the nearby dirt path cross street, and rickety sky-blue taxis clattering around, some of which are 1980s Toyota Corollas, and others are Soviet muscle cars with big, round headlights and dusty black grills. I'll save my talk of Ethiopian food and culture for a slower news day, as my hike in the mountains around Debre Libanos (about two hours outside of Addis) makes a considerably more interesting story.

The first thing to notice as one exits Addis is the change in air quality. Addis sits at around 2400m (about 8,000 feet) in altitude, and so the headaches produced by anything that causes a headache (especially diesel exhaust) are much more intense. The escape from the city gives one a whole afternoon of a bit of physical exertion that pleases the lungs as much as the eyes.

Essentially, the hike started high on a plateau and snaked around the edge to a view of a massive canyon carved out of the red soil by a waterfall that swept down into a river a squinting distance away. The trail led up to a stone bridge built in the 16th century by the Portuguese, who were trying to protect the interests of Christianity in an area of Ethiopia prone to Muslim influence. Despite the history of the bridge, it was a gorgeous relic of a lost time, and, at the altitude at which it was built, something of a feat of engineering for the time as well.

I'll stop writing about all of this and just post some pictures.

The drive into the mountains.

Woman standing in a field near the canyon at Debre Libanos.

Where the group had lunch (really!)

The Portuguese Bridge at Debre Libanos, with the guide who gave us a short history of the place.

I stood on that rock, I swear.

Waterfalls at the edge of the canyon.

The view straight down. Anyone game for a photo where everyone jumps up in the air?

When I finally got back to Addis Ababa at around 6pm, the Ethiopia-Nigeria World Cup qualifying match was already underway. I caught most of the game at a local bar in the expat district, and was as sad as everyone to see that the Ethiopians lost 2-0, and missed a chance to play in the 2014 World Cup.

More about life in Addis, as well as Wednesday's upcoming meeting with Prof. Shim Admassie from Addis Ababa University coming soon!

What is development?

Our goal is to build solar panels to power water pumps and light homes at night. Why? Because we're told that people spend hours and hours every single day going back and forth from the river to collect water, and they have to do it during daylight hours.

While labor is an important input to any economy, capital can free up labor to do more productive things. In layman's terms, technology does the chores, and gives people the free time to do things like perform paid labor, pursue higher education, or learn a skill.

An excellent explanation of this comes from Hans Rosling's popular TED Talk about his gratitude for the washing machine.

Where's the Starbucks?

The first day of traveling anywhere is the day that I stumble off a red-eye flight early in the morning and try to find an ATM, an internet connection, a cell phone, a hot shower, a bed to sleep in, and a taxi driver to get me there for just an arm, but not a leg. No matter how many stamps are already in my passport, I'm just for a few hours a gringo, freshly unwrapped from the shiny packaging of a 767. A mixture of homesickness, sleeplessness, and hunger drives me to be considerably pushier with the locals for getting my way. "Tomorrow I'll start exploring," I always say on the first day, but it's ironically the clash of the my desire to get comfortable that makes me quickly realize that I'm far outside my comfort zone. And deep down, I go through all of it knowing I didn't fly to Ethiopia for a Frappuccino anyway.

So the following is a short summary of a day's worth of Ethiopian life from an exhausted, demanding American thinking he'd start tomorrow, when he'd really started today.

The first thing I noticed was that I don't stand out here, even though I've yet to come across another white person. I must admit, I expected after my travels in India and Nepal as a tall, blond-haired American male to receive the quarter-endearing, three-quarters-uncomfortable celebrity status for my looks in Ethiopia. To the relief of my sense of rights and privileges earned by skin color, I don't feel like I stand out in any particular way here. Where New Delhi would form a crowd around me like a seed crystal in an oversaturated solution, Addis Ababa treats me like an anonymous, errant particle. Even the guy with the cart of oranges with whom I spent fifteen minutes under a bush during a sudden rainfall didn't deem me a particularly exceptional sales prospect; he was more concerned with keeping the fruit dry.

Which means, thankfully, that I am not special here. I am unconditionally welcome, without reservation, be it fear, uncertainty, or even elevated status.

Though with no special status, there was also no one I could pay to expedite the first-day chores of getting comfortable in my new home for a month. I met the same, full, blunt difficulty as any Ethiopian would have in getting a pre-arranged taxi driver to make me wait for less than eight hours at the baggage carousel at the airport, getting a mobile internet device and a mobile internet subscription under one roof (you can't), and finding a place to do my laundry in a hurry (the bathtub, with a hand-broken cube of Tide over a pile of wet dress shirts).

But among those inconveniences bound to happen on the first day of any trip outside the OECD, the people of Addis Ababa have already proven to be some of the most welcoming and friendly that I've ever met on a personal level; everyone is willing to give directions, share a meal (and drinks!), and go out of their way to make sure that I got what I needed, even if the system wasn't already arranged in a way to make it easy.

It's with that optimism that I begin the monthlong exploration of Ethiopian culture and meetings with officials from the US Embassy, two universities, and various government agencies in Ethiopia in order to establish Concordia Humana's PowerUp Ethiopia project.

And of course, tomorrow's the day to start really exploring.