Addis Ababa

We are walking down the street in the centre of Addis. People smile, nobody stares, Ossian gets a kiss and then another from passersby. Women walk by in traditional white dresses and shawls, majestic hair braids, passing young girls in skinny jeans and big hairdos.

Rubbish fills the gutters, piled up on the sides of the dirt roads, trodden into the muddy ground. A light rain falls, severed goats heads lie in the dirty puddles, leftover from the end of fasting celebrations over the easter weekend. This was one of the first countries in the world to adopt christianity as the official religion, and orthodox christianity remains the dominant religion.

Donkeys and emancipated horses pull wooden carts, a heard of goats walks through the traffic. Blue and white Lada taxis, remnants of Ethiopia’s communist era, drive by in varying degrees of dilapidation.

There are beggars, old women, children, a naked man curled into the fetus position, whole families begging. Buildings of corrugated iron sit beside four star hotels and palaces, Ethiopia had one of the oldest monarchies in the world.

Now here is an open space, the debris of doors and windows pressed into the dirt. We are told there used to be houses here, a whole community flattened to make way for a new road. There has been no compensation, and people are picking through the debris, looking for anything they can salvage.

We stop for lunch in one of the many pizzerias, the influence of five years of Italian occupation, the closest Ethiopia has come to being colonized. Next door there is an ice-cream parlor.

A group of men in overalls stand on the pavement welding seats into a parked car, arabic-sounding pop music playing from the doorway behind them. “Salama” the people greet us, “peace be with you’”.