I spent last week in Ethiopia for work, traveling with three other congressional staffers and an NGO that raises awareness of global poverty. To be honest, I can't say that Ethiopia was on my short list of destinations prior to going, but it ended up being an amazing trip.Won't bore you with the day-by-day play-by-play, but the general focus was to see the implementation of health and education programs, with activities ranging from meetings with the US embassy and Ethiopian government officials to site visits at hospitals, health outposts, and schools. We spent most of the week in Addis Ababa, the capital, but also made it to Awassa and surrounding rural areas for a couple of days. Here are some random thoughts:
Ethiopia uses the Julian calendar - it is now 2003.
Arrived on Easter Sunday, and on the short drive from the airport to the hotel we drove past 50+ goat and lamb carcasses on the street, which were consumed earlier in the day to end the fast for lent.
Their coffee is terrific, which makes sense since they discovered it. Their beer is not so terrific.
The vast majority of people were extremely friendly and pretty much everyone we met with praised the US government for providing assistance. They certainly have a long way to go, but it was great to see the strides they are making fighting HIV, TB, and malaria.
There is no Ethiopian equivalent of HIPAA. A doctor didn't understand why we didn't want to be in a room with/bother a woman in labor and they had no qualms talking about health issues of various patients right in front of them.
The kids we visited in the rural village of Ramada were extremely cute and loved to follow you around and get their pictures taken.
80 Armenians live in Addis. We met 40 of them at a restaurant one night that had entertainment provided by five Armenian musicians. We nicknamed the dancer in this video "the ambassador."
You can't walk or drive through Addis for five minutes without seeing something related to Manchester United or Arsenal.
In one clinic there were a ton of kids in a crowded building who were sick or waiting to get vaccinated. Someone in our group noticed that several toddlers and little kids were pointing and staring at me. We figured they thought I was a white giant.
Ethiopian food in DC is pretty much the same as in Ethiopia, except in Ethiopia every restaurant also serves pizza and pasta.
I saw the remains of Lucy, the 3.2 million year old australopithecus named after the Beatles song.
Overall we saw some amazing things. Not all of it was fun. It is pretty heartbreaking to visit an orphanage or watch severely malnourished kids line up to receive Plumpy'nut, particularly when you know that at the end of the day you will leave for a hotel room and they will sleep on a dirt floor. But I am very glad I went.
