Ethiopia Day 5

We have made several important discoveries about Ethiopia, each of which are shaping our experiences here to date. First they are behind most countries in the development of the internet. There are 351 broadband customers in all of Ethiopia, but this broadband is a stepped down broadband, and many internet applications are reputedly banned or unavailable. The form of dial-up that is more present in internet cafés I'm told can take 5 minutes to send an email. Using the dial-up available through our friends in the construction business is faster than that, but is very buggy, hard to get on, and you often need to hit "send" multiple times in order for an email to go. Thus our ability to be actively involved in our business has been extremely limited, meaning our fourth partner has got a lot to manage on his own. Construction is continuing on a fibre optic ring but there is no official date of completion or when broadband will become more widely available. However, when it does, (probably within the year) there will be significant opportunities for a company like ours who handles all aspects of communications, especially if partnered with a good local company like the one with whom we're already in discussions.

Second, the banking system is also significantly behind so that the only Visa transactions are at a bank for withdrawing cash. Thus we are doing our best to avoid needing to tap that particular reserve putting quite a bit of stress on our cash supply. The third impacted on the second as in we've found that many of the people we meet here, in the words of a Ghanaian friend of mine, "see us as their bank from which they can withdraw money," and so we've found our cash supply getting stressed by "friends" we are meeting, who as it turns out have their own assumptions and plans for us! J

Anyhow enough griping, these are really comments about differences in expectations and functionality, differences I'm adjusting to. However this trip South to Awasa had many highlights, three of which I've included in photos for this blog. Suffice it to say that Greg and I did the tourist thing and very much enjoyed our confrontation with the majesty and beauty that is Africa:

Our guides kept a respectful distance and so this pod of 11 Hippos – two of whom left as we were arriving, tolerated our presence occasionally lifting themselves out of the water or cracking one of their trademark yawns. On this boat trip on Lake Awasa we also saw a kingfisher, cormorants and an eagle all fishing and enjoying their meals.

 

We all very much enjoyed our encounter with this wild Columbus monkey that was coaxed down out of the trees by our guides, and who patiently sat with us eating a peanut at a time from our hands.

 

The storks were huge and not at all shy if there was food around. In fact a human could get stampeded if the fish scraps were thrown out with him in between the birds and the scraps. There were huge numbers of these huge birds: again I am so taken by the virility, the powerful life force that throbs throughout Africa!! This trek we took to Lake Awasa and later to Emporer Haile Selassi's resort, shower and hot springs was a trek through the Rift Valley, an amazing geological, cultural, and natural feast of diversity, all somehow co-existing and thriving, despite our sensationalist news generated opinions of the hazards and difficulty of life in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia by the way is one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations dating its origins back to centuries before Christ. They have a remarkable religious and cultural tolerance sewn into the fabric of their daily life as they have been coexisting as Muslims, Christians and Traditional Religionists for more than 1500 years. More on that as we continue our quest to understand Ethiopia, to understand perhaps our place in Ethiopia, in contributing in some ways to the re-emergence an ancient civilization into the modern world.