Awassa
on Joanne Cairns (Ethiopia), 22/Mar/2011 06:55, 34 days ago
The Good Awassa Life The first thing Paul and I did was re-arrange the house. We moved the bedroom to the front of the house where it is cooler and quieter– the day and night guard live at the back and we used to be awoken to the sound of thumping – grinding the coffee beans. All Ethiopian women roast and 'grind' their own coffee. Ethiopian coffee is the best coffee I have ever had and it is a pity that Western companies and policies do not support/allow Ethiopia to roast, package and export its own product. Coffee companies in the west buy raw, green coffee from Ethiopia and then roast, package and sell it themselves. As Western companies will only buy raw coffee they can buy it incredibly cheaply – forcing local people to work incrediblyhard for very little money – but if they stopped selling the beans as a protest Western companies would go elsewhere and many many local villages would simply not survive. Corporate greed keeps poverty alive. It wouldn't take much to support local factories to set up their own production of coffee for export – but no doubt import taxes in western countries would make it too high for them to compete in the coffee market – and no doubt 'experts' would quote a number of other 'issues' which would make this impossible. But the only way Ethiopia is going to get out of the cycle of poverty isnot through AID but having their own healthy economy. But whether the west would really allow this to happen is a different matter. But I digress. I have been reading books like 'Dead Aid' which explain comprehensively and clearly why AID not only does not work – but actually inhibits poor countries from growing and developing – but that is for another time. I think we should start another campaign alongside Drop The Debt Campaign – called Drop the Aid Campaign. Anyway, it still remains that Ethiopian women cannot buy reasonably priced ground coffee in their own country, and so roast their own and 'grind' it using a large pestle and mortar where thy bash the beans. It is incredible how smooth they can make it. They also have special coffee pots where when they pour the coffee in a particular way so you do not get any of the ground beans in your cup. Necessity really is the mother of invention. The kitchen tap was dripping– normal here - but incredible amounts of water are lost due to poor plumbing. We left in the plugs in the double sink over night to catch the water to use it in the morning. Just over night both sinks were full and there was a small lake on the floor. When you consider this was just one kitchen over one night and that all plumbing here is abysmal it is astonishing to think this amount of water waste is happening in most kitchens around the country, and in a land where water is a precious commodity. Washers simply do not exist in Ethiopia, so how they fix leaks is by wrapping a strip of ropemade from hay around the tap. I was struck between admiring their ingenuity and frustrated that the knowledge of having something as simple as a washer does not exist. And this was fixing a leak in a new tap just installed! So we have a new tap – but the same old leak. Ho hum.