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.