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Update 5 - late July 2005

FUN FROM THE FIELD 3: TRAVELLING IN TIGRAY
Tigray seems to be in perpetual motion when traveling. Last week our ‘team’ left Mekelle to travel to Adigrat, Adua and Axum, three of the major towns in Tigray. In a four wheel drive - I have to overcome my aversion to traveling in four wheel drives as I always tend to associate them with aid work and foreigners who seem to spend most of their time floating around in such vehicles while the nationals plod around on foot or less streamlined vehicles. However in a country such as Tigray it is difficult to travel ‘off the beaten track’ unless one is in such a vehicle.

There are always people walking on the sides of the road and often all over the road. When you think about it - what is a road for but to travel on; people, donkeys, sheep, goats, horses and carts, the odd camel or two and those fierce looking cattle with HUGE horns. There are times when I am glad that I am in a vehicle- boy I wouldn’t like to be on the end of one of those horns. Of course they are usually being shepherded along by a small mite, girl or boy, of about five or six years swishing a stick and giving an occasional yell or two. They don’t seem to be worried about he horns!!!!

Vehicles usually grind to a halt when a herd of sheep or cattle are meandering across the road - they seem to have right of way - which seems pretty sensible to me as they probably represent the livelihood of a family or two. The animals seem to be so accustomed to vehicles that a honk of a horn is treated with total disdain and they keep to their customary pace.

Wow what a surprise I got when we left Mekelle. There is this highway - bituminised - two lanes, with lines in the middle and at the sides - with traffic signs (which I am sure nobody takes any notice of). A far cry from the ‘roads’ we traveled on during those days back during the conflict time. There are even straight stretches now which of course is tempting to put ones foot down - perhaps it is fortunate that the roads are so heavily populated with people and animals - may stop some traffic accidents.

Most of our journey was ‘up hill and down dale’. The highway from Mekelle to Adigrat weaves itself around the hillsides. Trucks and trailers (most of them look like the left-overs from our convoy trucks we used to transport food, medical supplies etc during the conflict).They grind their way up the hills. Quite modern buses also enable easy access for traveling between towns if one can afford the cost of the fare. They always seemed to be full, so people trying to get a passage along the way usually miss out.

The magic for me was to see a GREEN Tigray. It was astounding. Most of my recollections were of dry, barren rocky terrains and hill-sides. It had been raining so the grass alongside the road was green, crops had been planted and where beginning to sprout and the terraced hills were alive with trees and bushes. One has to visualize miles and miles and miles of terraced terrain. This is one of the major community efforts to stop erosion. There are millions of stones in Tigray so massive community projects are organized and everybody becomes involved in building walls, down the hill-sides, in gullies along the road-side etc. Many villages now have community enclosures to encourage undergrowth. We passed many rural people carrying baskets of seedlings, obtained from tree nurseries, no doubt to plant on their own or community plots of land.

As every minute piece of land is sown it is a constant job for the children to keep the animals off the crops. They graze along the sides of the road and on more inaccessible rocky outcrops. Ploughing is still done with a single plough share, mostly now made of metal, and drawn by a single oxen. It is a timeless scene. Barley and tef is being sown and crops of maize were already quite high.

Choofing through the small towns along the way meant a slight reduction in speed and weaving in and out of animals, people, buses, carts and kids often dashing out to wave or trying to race the vehicle. Slightly un-nerving. I hasten to add that Ephrim, our driver, was superb. He is the driver for the Head of ORSA so we were given the best possible person.

The trip from Adigrat to Adua and Axum was quite awesome. The scenery is quite spectacular- some of the highest mountains in Tigray with high plateaus, and gullies that seem to stretch down for miles. Again there was an abundance of ‘greenery’. Hundreds of acacias and of course eucalypts dot the countryside (introduce into Ethiopia about a hundred years ago.

Extensive terracing has been done to control erosion and conserve water

To say that the road was steep and full of bends is a slight understatement. But the scenery was worth the rather inconvenience of a dirt road (next on the list to be bituminized!!) The day we left Adigrat to go to Axum was bright and sunny and one could see for miles-craggy hills looming up with an odd church or two perched on the summit. Tigray is famous for its rock churches- I am not quite sure how one gets to the top. In my ‘younger’ days I did climb to one church - which took about three hours to be met by the Priest who said women were not allowed inside!!! However I did see some of it (I am not sure if it was the mini-tantrum I threw or a contribution to the coffers that made him change his mind).

On our way back the sun had gone and it was raining quite heavily and the road was rather slippery. On the highest stretches the fog had set in so it was difficult to see more than a couple of metres ahead. One tried not to look down at the sides of the road where sheer drops seem to disappear into the never-never. We only passed one truck that had slipped into the side of the mountain and with the horn honking as we rounded the ‘s’ bends and the moving to one side of the road to let an approaching vehicle pass we eventually came out of the fog. We were all pleased I think and Ephrim put the radio on and we started singing - well making a noise anyway.

The people walking along the roads in Tigray are mainly rural folk, often referred to as ‘peasant’ farmers. The women are often dressed in the traditional Tigrayan dress (photos later).The male members of the family carry a stick across their shoulders - the older men to assist with walking when necessary and the younger men and boys to shoosh animals or whatever. The men will use donkeys to carry their loads on metal panniers. The women however carry everything on the backs!!!! ; babies and young children; huge loads of sticks and twigs, clay water pots of water or jerry-cans, sacks of food and so on. Girls start these tasks from the early age of four-five years and carry-on until they die. I have seen women of all ages nearly bent double slogging up hillsides / mountainsides with these loads for mile after mile. How they do it is quite beyond my comprehension. Doing this work on meager food intake must have implications for the general health status, pregnancies etc. Besides the carrying the women also spend hours, grinding grain, helping in the fields, cooking, and looking after the family. Believe me, life sure is not easy. I once spent some weeks working with women in Tigray examining alternative methods of grinding and cooking and I was then filled with admiration for their strength and capacity and my admiration for their resilience has certainly been re-affirmed again.

Hand grinding using stone grinders

Babies and youngsters up to the age of about two years are ‘cacooned’ on the backs of their mothers or younger sisters or female relatives, swathed in the white …It’s great to see those great big brown eyes peeping out at you. Really gorgeous. If a rural person is fortunate enough he or she may have an umbrella-to help to keep the rain off in winter and the sun in summer. Again if one has enough money, plastic sandals and thongs can be worn or else one goes barefoot. As most of the poorer rural households have only one ‘set’ of clothes, two at the most, I often wonder how they manage when they are caught in the sudden downpours of rain and need to ‘dryout’. It certainly must account for the increase in chest ailments during the ‘rainy’ season.

The kids in the rural areas usually go barefoot and are often dressed in ‘raggady’ shorts, dresses, and shirts and are mostly seen running around, playing, laughing. The universal game of ‘hopscotch’ is a favorite. Often played on the edge of the road, sometimes on top of a hill with a precipice about a metre away. My heart is in my mouth when I see them but it is of no concern whatsoever to the players. Familiarity.!! They sure develop independence at an early age.

More later. Until then. Cheers
HP