Tasting a Slice of Street Life in Addis
The first to come in is a lanky young man who is bordering on being underfed; he will not look me in the eye. He sits there on the chair and listens to the interpreter repeat my questions, answering without much emotion. He is jobless and goes out to look for work day in day out, he says.
He does not get a job every day and when he is unlucky he has to sleep on a certain street in town. On a good day after work, he pays two Ethiopian birr, an equivalent of US $0.20, a night in a communal room where more than 20 men pack their bodies.
I am in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, seated in a small office with white-washed walls plastered with thousands of kids' faces, interviewing some young men. The purpose? To pick the one with the meatiest story, follow him up, spend a night and a day with him and try get perhaps the roughest idea of how it is to live on less than a dollar a day in this city.
Now Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. According to 2007 statistics by the World Bank, 44 percent of the population of people in the country live below poverty line.
But it is not that Ethiopia is doing so worse off in the region, it is just one of the poor countries in the sub-Saharan region – a part of the world where more than 121 million people live on less than 50 cents of a dollar a day, according to International Food Policy Research Institute.
HOPE Enterprises, a non-governmental organization in the Ethiopian capital dedicated to feeding the poor and the homeless in the eastern African capital has done a terrific job choosing three young men from hundreds of the people they feed breakfast and lunch every week day. All the three have very remarkable stories.
The second one is equally skinny and has a similar story: single, he earns 10 birr (one U.S. dollar) on a good day and shares the same house with the first for two birr a night. When he does not get a job, he spends the night on the streets.
The streets of Addis Ababa are populated by young people like these two. The UN reported last year that some 150,000 children live on the streets in Ethiopia, about 60,000 of them in the capital. However, other sources estimate that the problem may be far more serious, with nearly 600,000 street children country-wide and over 100,000 in Addis Ababa alone.
When the third young man comes in, he is completely different from the first two: His name is Said. About 6 feet tall, well muscled. He has big roving eyes and a huge and wide chin. Had he introduced himself as a boxer, it would have been equally befitting his physique.
He is a construction worker, earns 15 birr (1.5 US dollars) a day and uses that to support himself and his wife. He is 21-year old, married to a 19-year-old woman. He spends his nights on a street corner with his wife. They have some blankets to spare and would be glad to have me in their home for a night, he says in a booming baritone and with extravagant gestures to hammer home his invitation. Would I like to join them this evening? Yes, of course, I say. The lure of his story is irresistible. I choose on him.
Equbay Gebreegizabher, the social worker at HOPE, informs the other two that a choice has been made. I will meet Said same place at 6 p.m. in the evening and then we would proceed to his home on the streets. Deal closed, I return to my house in Addis feeling quite accomplished but also quite apprehensive of spending a night on the streets under the cover of polythene bag with a man and his wife I hardly know anything about.
Equbay, has tried to talk me out of it. But I tell him that is what I am looking for: to put myself in their shoes even if for some hours.
Thoughts about doing this story formed up when talking and reporting on water issues from Ethiopia with my colleagues of The Common Language Project. It occurred to us that there was need for us to immerse ourselves into the day to day life of the people of Ethiopia whom we were reporting about. How better to plunge ourselves into the lives of these people than to spend a day and if possible, a night with them – sleep where they sleep, eat what they eat, and go to work with them.
At 6 o'clock, I show up at HOPE. Said is not here yet. I stand outside the door waiting for him. Meselu Fantahun, the secretary and office manager sees me from her office and comes out for a chat. She surveys my dressing from head to toe looking to determine whether I am ready for a night on the streets and then wonders: "How much money do you have with you?" I rummage my pockets and count 80 birr, $8 equivalent.
"I suggest you carry not more than 30 birr with you, she says in a loud whisper. "Put 10 in one pocket, 10 in the other, the rest in your sock, and leave the rest with me."
She proceeds to strip me down most of my valuables: my camera, my wallet, some of the money. There is no way she is going to allow me in the streets with all those valuables, she maintains.
Said and the other guys on the streets are hungry, angry and frustrated people, she says. They do not give a damn about my story and my journalistic endeavors.
"They can do anything to you and they have nothing to lose," Meselu says. She looks at my snickers and wonders how I could wear such "nice shoes to the streets?"
"It is too dangerous," Meselu says adding to my anxiety. "It is great to follow up a story but you should not be foolish."
The evening wears on, it is 6:40 p.m. and Said is not here yet. In the current circumstances I find myself wishing he doesn't show up.
I hesitantly give my valuables to Meselu. I divide up 30 birr in my three pockets and against her advice shove 50 birr down my sock and into my shoe. "Make sure you sleep in that shoe, Meselu warns as she surveys my actions and the foolish grin on my face.
"If you remove them chances are you will walk home bare-footed," she says.
"I care about you," Meselu chatters on. " I do not know why God made me meet you, may be he wanted me to pass a message to you that should not spend your night on that dangerous street," she says much like a prophetess.
"The spirit has a way of guiding people…he was right in making me wait here to guide you." I want to tell her to stop her chat but there is no way to stop this animated woman. But deep down, this woman has impressed me with her passion to help me out.
"Do I still want to go?" she wonders.
"Yes," I say.
"You must realize that you are taking full responsibility of yourself," she warns.
"Yes I do, I do," I say without much thought.
Usually I am not a worrier, but this lady is freaking me out so bad. When her efforts to discourage me from carrying on with the story fail, she says she will come with me to see the spot where I will sleep, "just in case something happens." That is fine by me, I say. Said is yet to come, I might get off the hook in this one, I keep thinking.
6:50 p.m. Said shows up! He is wearing a muscle t-shirt and a matching pair of pants. He says he had forgotten all about our meet up "but now we can go." My story is on. We leave. Meselu comes with us.
We go up the hill on Churchill Road take a left mid-way up the hill, take another quick left and enter into an expansive back-street compound.
This is where the romance I wrote about, on arriving back in Africa after years in the U.S., ends and the reality begins.
A bloated heap of sand from a construction site here in the backstreet throws its obese tummy loosely pushing dozens of paper shacks against a concrete wall.
We walk down the thin tongue of land between the shacks and the sand. The rickety paper houses keep getting worse and every time I keep hoping we have arrived at Said's house. Not quite yet.
Finally just before we come to the end of the line of structures, we come upon a structure leaning precariously towards the concrete wall. It is about three meters wide by four meters long, and propped on some feeble sticks about a meter and a half or so above the ground.
"Welcome home," Said declares, pointing at the structure. "Thank you," I mumble feebly as I begin to do the math on how I am going to spend the night here together with a man and his wife.
With a dim-lit cigarette lighter, Said lights up the place where we will spend the night. His wife is not yet home he explains. We will join her later for dinner in downtown Addis, if I will not wish to retire early. "Of course not," I quip "I'd rather I keep you company."
Then a shocker: If I find the place too small, Said offers, he can go spend the night with a neighbor and I can share the available space in the house with his wife. "What a fool," I wonder. What kind of man leaves another to spend a night with his wife in a small space of three by four meters? "Thanks for your kindness," I tell him, "but I think this space will be enough for the three of us."
And just after we agree on the modalities of how we are going to spend our night something rather strange happens. One by one, the residents of the neighboring shacks start trickling down to Said's house. And within no time a spirited argument ensues between them and Said. All this time the talk is in Amharic, so I have not the slightest idea what is happening.
Said points the men to Meselu, who seems all shaky and afraid. The argument heats up with the dozen or so men now shouting at Meselu, now pointing at me. We are more than 30 minutes into the heated argument but the men's fury doesn't seem to die down. I can't bear it any more; the thought of having to put Meselu through so much trouble is extremely disconcerting. I decide to talk.
Can she, Meselu, tell me what all the fuss is about? I ask. "Yes, but could you be a little more patient?" she wonders. Well I calm down and decide to give their "dialogue" more time.
After about 15 more minutes, Meselu turns to me and explains: "They say they cannot allow you to spend the night here. Anything can happen to you," she explains.
"They do not want your blood in their hands. The only way they can have you here is if you went to the police station and got a police letter to show they know you are here. If people in the neighboring shacks were to harm you, they do not want to be blamed, "Meselu explains.
"Do I still want to do the story?" Meselu asks.
"Yes," I say.
"So are you willing to see the police?" Meselu asked.
Tall order for me: I had been reporting from Ethiopia for close to two months, a time in which I tried as much as I could to avoid the police. The Ethiopian authorities are not friends to journalists, colleagues who had reported from there earlier had warned me. "Keep off when you can," they had said.
Would I go to the police? I wondered. But with that being my only chance to get my story, I decide I will.
As we walked away from shacks out of the back streets and into streets with dimming lights, I thought about what I was trying to do. I thought about the worst that could happen to me here on the streets.
They would say on my funeral: "Pushed the envelop a little too far, followed a story to his grave." As these thoughts race through my mind, Meselu turns to me and asks whether I have my passport with me…just in case something happened in the night after getting permission to spend the night out from the police.
Though I do not say it, I take this to mean she is talking about documents to help with the possible repatriation my body. I did not have my passport with me, but I assured Meselu that she did not have to worry about ferrying my body home.
We arrive at the police station -- half a dozen or so iron sheet structures. We are led into one of the structures where the officer on duty is seated on a bed in front of a table leaning backward.
Meselu explains to the officer my needs. The officer responds by saying that I would only get help from the police if I got an official letter from the government. We are aware of reporters who come here to write political stories, he belches.
We leave the police station with no much hope. My a-dollar-a-night story is botched.
But if I were thinking this would be the end, I was wrong.
Said invites me for dinner "now that you are not going to stay the night."
The dinner, he, however, warns is leftovers scraped away from plates after clients are done eating by various hotels in town.
Well, I had promised to join them for dinner, so there is no way to escape this. Still, Meselu comes with me.
We walk up a hill and into a backstreet where 40 youth are waiting for the meal. You'd have thought that after having grown up in Africa all my life, I'd know a thing or two about this kind of extreme poverty. Nope, nothing had prepared me for what I was going to find here. It was, for me, a call to the realization that there are many rungs to being poor. I came here expecting to find poor people but nevertheless people who could somehow feed themselves, retire to a warm place at the end of the night. That millions of people around the world cannot meet these basic needs is extremely worrying. If you have a roof over your head and some clean food to eat, then you certainly are not poor. I will never again call myself poor.
There is hierarchy here: the seniors wait, the juniors go for the food. The juniors will have to work for the food cleaning up the restaurants before getting the leftovers. By the virtue of the fact that I am Said's guest I will eat without working. So we wait for the food.
Meanwhile, Said introduces us to his friends. I do not get to meet Said's wife, she is out with other women on another part of town. But Said volunteers more information her. He met her on the streets, she had quarreled with her family and she ran into the streets. Said took her in, and a few months later "we exchanged rings," Said says pointing to the shiny golden ring on his hand, " and decided to be man and wife."
Said says he loves her so much. After many years on the streets without family, his wife is his only hope. Said has been on the streets for ten years. He arrived in Addis from the northen Ethiopia after disagreeing with his step family after he became truant. To this date, his family does not know where he lives. "I guess they think I am dead," he says
Does he miss them, I wonder. "I really miss them he says," he says bowing his head "If I were to get money, I go back to visit. Now I can't go, I do not want to go back there just like I left, poor. I would want to look good."
Said regrets the fact that he dropped out of school. "If I were to do it all over again, I would stay in school and get education," he says contorting his brow. "Life in the streets is hard, the police keep arresting, putting us into jail." Over the last ten years, Said has been arrested more than 50 times, he says.
One of his friends walks to us interrupting our talk when he hears that I am Kenyan. "Unlike Said," he says, he can speak to me without an interpreter. He has gone to school and can converse in English, he quips.
It is a comment that sends Said flying with fury. His left jaw twitches and juts before he pounces on his friend, raining blows I only thought were a reserve of the movies.
Nobody can stop Said, all the other young people here seem afraid of him. But Meselu steps in urging Said to leave his friend alone. The victim is crying in agony. Had he been hit with a bullet to his face, his crying would not have sounded more alarming.
Finally, Meselu manages to stop Said, and Said's assaulted friend leaves not to return. I try to think about why Said fought his friend. But I do not need to think hard to know that what ticked off Said is a feeling of being disrespected. The world has never offered him respect, or a chance to feel in power. It is only is this small corner of the street that he can command respect and leadership. Now to have someone come to deny him that little respect right here in his backyard must have felt really painful.
This is life on the streets proper, it dawns on me. The fight gets me so worried about what would have happened to me had I gotten a chance to spend the night with Said. That I would not have been able to communicate with him through out the night because I could not speak Amharic and he could no speak English was extremely worrying.
As these thoughts race through my mind, the food arrives. It is in two black polythene bags, carried by two young boys 13 or 14 years of age. Said beckons us to follow one of the package.
We walk to some vacated street, where we sit around the polythene to divide the food. Said tears the sides of the polythene bags and lays the bag flat open on the ground for the more than ten men and women here to share.
I look at the contents, a mixture of Injera, bread, vegetables, meat, soup and God knows what else. As I glance at the contents, the other dinner attendants are having their fill.
Said throws me a searching look and tells me to get eating. I dip my hand into the communal serving and get out with a piece of bread and a slice of blackened "something."
I start chewing on the bread. Then Said looks at what I picked and thrusts his hand into the food, deeps his hand into the food and adds his scoop onto mine. Some brown liquid, broth I guess, seep through my fingers to the soil.
It is nauseating; I am going to throw up. But I have to keep eating; all the eyes of the group are on me. It would be very shameful for I who had promised to join them for dinner not to eat with them. So I eat, chewing on my wet bread before starting on the black stuff, which I will never tell its contents.
Ten long minutes and excruciating nausea later, we are done eating. Said congratulates me on a job well done. I thank him for the food and hospitality.
It is now 10 p.m. The ceremony is over. We decide to part ways. And because Said's neighbors will not allow me to spend the night at his house, we agree with Said that I should come back in the morning and spend the day with him at the construction site.
After bidding goodbye to Meselu and thanking her profusely, I leave for my house in Addis Ababa to rest and wait to see how my tummy would handle the dinner I had just taken. I arrive in the house slightly disappointed for not getting the story but immensely thankful for surviving the night.
I retire to bed a little disturbed thinking about why I had to intrude into these people's lives. Was it really worth? Maybe, maybe not. It added nothing to Said's life. But I am comforted by the theory of narration, which submits that telling a story is usually a first step towards intervention. Maybe telling this story would compel people to do something about street kids in Addis.
In the morning, Said does not show up for our meeting as agreed. I will never know why he did. I can only guess that having spent much of the evening with me and for no apparent material gain on his part, he found no reason to return for a second day of much ado about nothing.
Nevertheless I am very thankful, grateful to him for allowing me to taste a slice of his life. I will never know how it would all have turned out had he chosen to feed me the full serving.
Now a friend asks whether given chance I would do this again. Well, I seriously do not know as of now. What I do know though is that I regret the fact that I never made to spend the night with Said and his family. I still think Said and I have some unfinished business. I hope I will have an opportunity to catch up with him, revisit his story, someday.
© 2008 The Common Language Project
