“Hello, Money”

Biking out of Bahir Dar in search of the source of the Blue Nile and Haile Selassie’s palace, little boys with outstretched hands command “birr!” A funny thing to say, it seems, in the tropical heat. Funny, but for the fact that they are begging for a few cents - birr is the Ethiopian currency. The more fluent English speakers simply say, “hello, money” as we ride past. Ethiopia has got to be one of the poorest places on Earth. The number of people begging is astounding, even being somewhat desensitized by living in Kenya. Children and grandparents alike walk the streets in rags hanging from their bony, diseased bodies, with missing limbs and blindness not the exception but the rule. In traffic, your car becomes a magnet of swarming desperation. And the government seems more concerned with disregarding the results of the most recent election than tending to the plight of its people. It’s a sad and common story, repeated across this continent.

Two days before, we arrived in Addis Ababa to see our friends Eric and Ledina. Addis is a sprawling African metropolis with about 7 million inhabitants, most of them extremely poor. The contrast with Nairobi is substantial, although on the surface the aesthetics of mud, crumbing concrete, and diesel pollution are similar. Nairobi is a much more verdant city, with urban forests and tropical vegetation filling open spaces. But what Addis lacks in vegetation, it more than makes up for in friendliness and culture. The food is simple, yet sophisticated - the contrast of spongy, sour injera covered with dollops of delicately spiced vegetables and meats is perfect. Then there is the security. Nairobi feels like a locked-down fortress by comparison to Addis, where you can travel around at all hours without the fear of being held up or carjacked. The lack of guns in Addis makes all the difference, allowing people to walk freely amidst open-air shops along the sidewalked streets. Nairobians, on the other hand, are speeding from gated compound to gated compound, sometimes in conveys.

This is not to say that Ethiopia is a more functional society than Kenya. If anything, the opposite is true, to which the nation’s single ATM can attest. Shopping for stamps for my Dad, the postal worker wanted $10 for each envelope containing between one to four stamps. When I asked what she would take for 10 envelopes, she replied $100. Why no discount, I protested, and she replied, somewhat taken aback, that if she sold me that much of her collection, she’d have fewer stamps leftover. (Sorry, Dad, but I just couldn’t succumb to her demands.) This reminded me of a story our friend Aaron told of a trip to Addis where he was attempting to purchase 40 printers for his NGO, First Voice Africa. The electronics store owner demanded $50 over the sticker price for each printer because the quantity Aaron requested would have greatly diminished the man’s stock. Rather than thinking about increasing revenues through increased volume of sales, the man was stuck on the notion that a full inventory is more valuable than a full sales ledger. Maybe this kind of “rat pack” mentality is a natural result of a long memory of massive deprivation.