In the Danger Zone (13 page)

'Because we are only allowed to deal in food. A goat isn't food.'

'Yes it is.'

'No it isn't.'

'Yes it is.'

'No it isn't.'

'In what way is a goat not food?'

'It's just not. Have you got any more questions, because I really should be getting on?'

I detest this man. The people around here need tools, cattle, irrigation, education and infrastructure for storage of food, animal feed and water, and they need access to markets where they can sell their produce. Africa has received $1 trillion in aid in the past 50 years. Perhaps if more of that had been spent on long-term projects (like goats?), the world wouldn't have to continue to pour good money after bad to keep people dangling at the end of the aid string. Whether the WFP can't do these things here in Ethiopia, or it is doing them and I just haven't seen it, I may never know.

Moyale

We visit another village of VW Beetle huts to speak to a woman we met yesterday who said we could stay overnight in her village. Abedia is out collecting water when we arrive, so we go to find her at the water hole with some of her kids. She's stunningly beautiful – in fact Ethiopians are probably the most beautiful people I've ever met: tall with fine features, kind eyes and an aura of poise and dignity. The children are invariably absurdly cute, with beautiful eyes and enormous smiles. I shouldn't get sentimental about this – you don't have to be gorgeous to deserve sympathy – but hey, all kids make me weak at the knees.

I expect to see a bucket being dropped into a large hole to pull out water, but we find a small ditch a few feet deep, at the bottom of which is a tiny, muddy, sandy puddle. This is the main water supply for the village, and Abedia scoops the water into a couple of containers. Only 35 per cent of Ethiopia's rural population has access to safe water, and this slurry most certainly isn't it.

Abedia came to Moyale last year to escape fighting between her tribe, the Guji, and the Gabra Ormo tribe over water and land. The situation is worsening for Ethiopia's 6 million cattle-raising pastoralists, especially in the eastern lowlands where a shortage of grazing land and floodplain land for cultivation has caused a great deal of tribal conflict. Abedia says that it starts with cattle rustling, and quickly escalates to violence. 'I walked for seven days to reach this village after my house was burnt down. It happened when they looted our cattle and killed our people. It wouldn't have been so bad if they looted the cattle and spared our lives. But they took our property and killed us too. Life is unbearably cruel. We have lost all our cattle and camels, and we survive by selling firewood.'

At the height of a drought last year 90,000 people were displaced during tribal conflict in southern Ethiopia and in cross-border conflict with Kenyans. Abedia and her brother-in-law, Ibrahim, don't know if they'll be able to return home, so they are stuck here, landless and reliant on aid like everyone else.

We have put up some small tents next to Abedia's hut to stay in overnight, but as the night draws in we get a call from one of the WFP drivers who says that there have been reports of gunfire and rockets being launched nearby. This place is pretty dangerous for Westerners right now, and our car will mark us out as a perfect robbery or kidnap and ransom target. He says we shouldn't stay here for the night. I ponder the situation but can't quite make up my mind what we should do – I'm eager to stay here in the village and find out more. Then Dawit (best guide in Africa) tells us to be quiet and listen. It's the unmistakable howl of a hyena. Abedia says, 'Hyenas attack people where they sleep. Leopards can attack people fetching water, and snakes bite people. There are so many problems that God is the only guardian we trust.'

We pack up our flimsy tents and say fond farewells to Abedia before heading to the nearby town. I hope she's going to be OK.

A Little Cup of Blood

We head further south. On the way, I spot someone selling bundles of qat, a local stimulant. I stop and buy some and try a little. It's extraordinarily bitter, so the seller's friend offers me some sugar to eat with it. It's still not particularly pleasant. Dawit explains to me that all the local truck-drivers chew it so they can stay awake to drive through the night. The only downside is that the vehicles crash rather a lot, which is why they are known locally as 'al-Qaeda trucks' for their suicidal devastation. Seeing as I won't be driving, I tuck into the bundle to see what happens, but within five minutes my hands become unbearably itchy, followed by my legs and feet. I'm having some kind of violent adverse reaction to whatever the stimulant compound is. Oh Christ, this is agony! I want to rip my skin off. I sit on my hands, but then my legs get itchy. I press them against each other but it doesn't do any good. It isn't helped by the fact that everyone else in the car finds this side-splittingly funny.

Eventually the sensation fades, but slowly, so bloody slowly. Perhaps I wasn't built for qat, which is a shame because I was quite looking forward to it.

Eventually we reach Yalebo, a community of the Borena tribe who've herded cattle around here for 2,000 years. There's a main central village with a few mud and concrete huts, but most people live in little satellite hamlets further into the hills. They are the closest thing I've ever seen to the traditional African village as shown in the pages of
National Geographic,
and they are built specifically for pastoralists. A circular fence of thorns the size of a football pitch protects each group of about 20 small, round mud-and-thatch huts from hyenas. There's a large entrance-cum-holding pen for cattle, and another for people. Like the other ethnic villages I've visited, it's idyllic, yet brutally poor. There's no cultivated land nearby, and people have practically no possessions whatsoever in their huts.

We meet Dora who has five cows and a few goats. He had twice as many until the last drought ripped through his herd. He lives a precarious existence, constantly on the verge of hunger and disaster and vulnerable to the cycle of floods and droughts. In recent years, he's noticed the cycle getting worse. The one thing that kept him alive when all his animals died is a small patch where he plants maize (a grain that's relatively easy to store).

Last year saw the worst drought in a decade across their lands and it's estimated that at least two-thirds of the Borena's cattle died.

'Are you able to store food to last through droughts?' I ask him.

Yes, if you have oxen and it rains, you can produce enough and even keep some grain for the next year and beyond. If you don't have oxen and you have to plough by hand, you are not able to produce enough, even for one season – at best it will last you six or seven months.'

'And what about food aid?'

'When the drought destroyed our cattle, they gave us a little amount of food for two months. Things like lentils and a mixture of food that we didn't even know what it was, but we ate it.'

Even when the Borena are really hungry, they don't kill weak cattle as they believe it curses the land. And they don't eat cattle that have died, as they think the meat will be bad. However, they have developed a practice of drinking the blood of their live animals to provide extra nutrition, and Dora is keen for me to try it. He brings one of his goats, ties its neck with a strap to create pressure and pierces the vein in the neck with a shallow arrow shot. I hold the cup to the goat's neck. After the initial flinch at the arrow, the goat seems strangely calm as it gives up half a cup of blood that trickles out. It's quite a gruesome way to get a meal, but skills like this are essential when you're so often on the verge of desperation.

When the strap is untied, the blood stops and the relieved goat wanders off. The blood is stirred to prevent it from clotting, then I take out the clotted matter and drink the liquid. It's a bizarre sensation drinking the fresh, warm blood of an animal I can see chewing grass next to me. It doesn't really taste of anything at first, but then I can sense a simultaneous sweetness and saltiness, like when you taste your own blood. It's quite nice, although I'd prefer it less warm.

I meet Golicha and Hule, another couple who used to have over a hundred cattle. Now they have just five cows and five goats to support a family of 12. I help Hule strip corn nibs from some cobs she's bought, enough to fill a small bowl. This is all there is for supper tonight.

'There are times when we don't get anything. It badly affects the growth of the children; it makes them skinny. I get headaches and I don't have healthy teeth so I find it hard to chew this.'

I ask why, when there is so much pressure on the land to provide for so few people, do people have such big families

'Family is a gift of God. We didn't have the knowledge to plan our family, so we just went on having children.'

The reality is that this is an economic necessity, and Hule is hoping that their ten kids will bring in money and help to look after them in their old age, as she did for her parents.

I look at the bowl of food. It's extraordinary – this is half a bowl of corn to feed the seven people who will be here tonight (the other children are away from the village). It's a tiny amount of food, a tiny amount of calories.

I am still trying to get to the bottom of why the deprivation here continues. Golicha explains that during droughts, 'Ignorance is the main problem. If we had the necessary knowledge, we wouldn't have lost our property like that and become helpless. Since we didn't have knowledge we just lay next to our cattle and watched them perish.' His talk of tragedy and hunger is made all the more intense because he's been caning qat and his pupils are vast. He looks pretty scary – intense yet vacant at the same time. It's a weird combination.

I go to bed troubled. Mankind's ability to survive is extraordinary. Even in the most inhospitable jungles amidst vicious conflict and frozen tundra people manage to squeeze, tease and nurture food from the ground, air and water. Yet in my darker moments I have begun to wonder if our ability to survive has been the source of such widespread misery. If we weren't so good at surviving, if humans didn't thrive in the grimmest places, fewer people would have to endure so much misery. But the thing is this: there are many aspects of human life that the UN's Human Development Index (the Happiness Index) can't quantify: love, family bonds, faith, hope, patriotism, pride, traditions, sense of home and sheer bloody-minded endurance. And it's these things that can keep people going when everything else in their lives is a stinking heap of shit.

Back to Addis

Crackadoodle DOOOOOOOOOOOO!

What in the name of all that's holy is THAT? I jump out of bed, shouting 'Aaargh!' then swiftly jump back in again when I realize that I am wearing no clothes, and I'm a guest in Golicha and Hule's hut. Guests aren't supposed to behave like that. I find the culprit, sitting proudly on the floor beside my bed. A cockerel whose neck I would have broken if it hadn't been the only livestock left to my kind hosts. It's fine that we are up absurdly early, though, because we have a big day ahead of us – we have to get back to Addis Ababa.

On the way back we are stopped and searched regularly – the authorities are concerned about terrorists trying to capitalize on the millennium celebrations. There's a violent insurgency in the Ogaden region, thousands of Ethiopian troops in Somalia, and tensions rising again with Eritrea over the two countries' disputed border, so the soldiers give us a theatrical but hapless search.

I take a look around the slums of Addis – the capital is said to have the highest percentage of slums of all the capital cities of Africa. About 80 per cent of the city's population are living in them – that's nearly 2.5 million people.

I've met up with a guy called Zelalem who's taking me to see his mum, Mulu. Their home is in the middle of the slums and although Zelalem calls it a nice middle-class area, it's actually a network of muddy tracks that cut between rows of squalid corrugated-iron shacks. Their home is a tiny airless room that fits a bed, a pile of cooking tools and a wall of fantastic old family pictures. Mulu makes a living selling injera and other foods around the city. She's cooking a special chicken stew as a treat for the millennium holiday, an Ethiopian favourite called doro wat. It smells delicious, and despite the fact that it's not quite ready, she lets me try a little. It has the unmistakable flavour of the Ethiopian staple chilli called ber-beri, which sounds like a vicious tropical disease but is actually a very specific, very hot chilli, it tastes great.

Mama Mulu tries to describe the slums for me: 'Life is difficult. We have to work very hard. When I get food I eat, but when there is no food my family spends the night with empty stomachs. In the past, when I was raising my children, I used to buy wheat and maize with 10 bir and that would be enough for a week; now that money wouldn't buy enough food for one day.'

Bizarrely, she remembers the big famines of 1984 as a time of plenty: 'It was better at that time. Then it was accepted that there was famine so aid flowed in. Now there is no aid coming in and people are crushed in silence. Here in the slums the thing that kills us is not famine, but inflation. The prices go up so high but we can never earn more money, so we can't afford to buy food.' Food prices in Addis rose 27 per cent last year, making life extremely difficult.

Street Children

Muuehabto and Atersaw are two of the 150,000 kids living on the streets of Addis. They are 13 and 14 years old, although they look much younger. They never smile.

The boys live with a handful of others in a disused shop doorway beside a busy street, having moved here from the countryside when their families couldn't manage to feed them. They survive by begging and eating handouts or (for the more enterprising ones) selling cigarettes and sweets to buy leftovers from restaurants. Street kids are an embarrassment to the government so they are often forcibly removed. Many were reportedly rounded up in advance of the millennium celebrations, before being dumped out in the countryside. 'The police or sometimes civilians and security guards shout at us when something is stolen and accuse us of collaborating with the thieves. They beat us up. It's forbidden to sleep, play or beg around here. Sometimes officials are expected to pass this way, so they clear the area. They sometimes round us up and dump us in a forest where no one can see us.'