Two Weeks in Southern Ethiopia

I spent two weeks in southern Ethiopia, mostly in the South Omo Valley. I’ve been run off my feet for the past 4 weeks, never spending longer than 2 nights in the one location, so it’s been difficult to find time to write this post. Luckily, I had a long day (yesterday – I tend to write the start of the blog post last) of flying from Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) to Freetown (Sierra Leone) via Lome, Accra and Monrovia, so the time finally presented itself.

Tribes of the South Omo Valley

1. The Dorze Village (near Arba Minch)

The Dorze tribe migrated from the South of Ethiopia further north to the Arba Minch area. Their houses are supposedly shaped like elephants (inspired by elephants back in the day before they were hunted to extinction in Ethiopia). Here are some good examples of Dorze houses:

I personally think that they look much more like woolly mammoths than elephants

Rocking combination of joggers, fleece and cheetah pelt

A depiction of a real Dorze warrior. This is supposed to be a hippopotamus tooth on his head, but personally I think that the artist was having a laugh when he painted it like this

We spent one day and one night at the Dorze village and I had a great time there. Our local guide, Mekkonan, showed us his house and walked us around the village. We learnt about how the subsistence economy in Dorze revolves around a crop called the “false banana”. This crop looks extremely similar to a real banana, however it is a plant (not a tree) and does not produce fruit. The leaves of the false banana can be used to make food, liquor, twine, roofing material and probably many other things that I cannot remember.

Mekonnen explaining the false banana

The evening was capped off by a singing and dancing evening around the fire. This was an interesting evening because in Dorze tradition the men demonstrate their masculinity (ie, eligibility for marriage) by jumping through the campfire. I chose not to jump through the fire because I am happy to keep my non-masculine pre-fire jumping status (and also not to have all of my body hair singed).

Here are some photos:

The high jump variation of the fire jump was introduced at the end of the ceremony. As a former high school athlete who specialised in jumping events I was very impressed by the skills of these men.

The evening involved much singing and dancing. It was really fun until I had an asthma attack.

2. Konso

There were two interesting things happening in Konso: first, the mummification of deceased kings; second, the attitude of the current king to social progress and globalisation.

From what I’ve seen whilst travelling, it seems to me like a large portion, if not all, moderate to heavy physical labour is performed by women (household chores are extremely labour intensive when you need to fetch all of your water from a pump well, carry it, and then pound or grind the life out of anything that you wish to cook). In contrast, men seem to do the majority of the drinking and 99.9% of people who I saw in local bars were men (excluding female tourists).

When a Konso chief dies his body is kept in a mummification hut for 9 years (9 YEARS!) before finally being buried in a forest under a totem pole. During this time, one must not mention or even insinuate that the king has passed (this seems to be a common thing in sub-Saharan African tribes, as I have been told several times by various guides over the past month that the correct way to refer to the king’s passing is to say that he has gone travelling). This tradition is really taken to the extreme in Konso; when a king dies they relatives living in the compound even bring food to the mummification hut so as not to attract rumours of his death (yes, it has occurred to me that the fact the king is living full time, and dining, in a mummification hut is a pretty big clue that he has died!).

Totem poles in the forest. Bad photo but you get the general idea.

A mummification hut is definitely a curious place for a king to hang out for 9 consecutive years if he’s still alive.

The second interesting thing about Konso was the king/chief of the tribe. My group and I visited the royal compound and had the opportunity to ask him some questions. From his answers to these questions it became clear that he was not a fan of globalisation and cultural exchange. To him, external influences, be they the internet, healthcare, education or even mobile phones, posed a great threat to his culture and traditions and he saw it as his role to protect his people from these corrupting influences.

My thoughts on this: in my view culture is not static and immovable. Cultures evolve and adapt, normally for the better. Whilst I respect the rights of people to maintain their traditional customs and identities, in my view this right is limited and sensible changes should occur. I will flesh out my views shortly (in my section on the Hamer tribe), but in short I think, after visiting a collection of remote tribal communities over the past month, that there are some incredibly damaging cultural traditions being practiced in many places and that often the preservation of tradition is used as a front for subjugating sections of the population (typically females). Those who hold firm views to the effect that the culture should be preserved at all costs (ie, that education is a threat to culture) are typically those who benefit from the status quo.

The Konso village was a beautiful place with an unfortunately high prevalence of Kwashiorkor (based on my general observations whilst there and not on any reliable data)

3. The Mursi Tribe

After the Konso tribe we headed into the South Omo Valley. The first tribe that we visited there was the Mursi Tribe, best known for the lip plates worn by the women.

Women leave out their lip plates for the majority of the time, but wear them when the tourists come to visit with their cameras and their money.

Upon arriving at the Mursi village we put away our cameras (something that I believe is always the best way to start when visiting people) and headed to the river near the village to splash ourselves with water (it was hot, sweaty and dirty). Whilst I love photography and cherish the photos that I have taken, I believe that sometimes the camera is literally a barrier between the traveller and the subject of the photo. This moment at the river was one where that barrier was broken down. As this was our first encounter with a truly “exotic” (I really hate this word but can’t think of anything more appropriate/less loaded) tribe we were kind of standing there initially just looking at them. Luckily, they were looking back at us with the same look of polite befuddlement, and the awkwardness was broken down when they started noticing that we too had body modifications. Thus, the exchange became less about us staring at a group of humans as if they were zoo animals and more about two groups of different cultural backgrounds trying to understand each other. The ladies of the Mursi tribe were fascinated by our piercings, and my favourite moment from this riverside encounter was when one of the ladies noticed my belly button piercing (Dad – if you ever read this, sorry that you just found out that I had this done!). I ended up with a group of ladies surrounding me all wanting to touch this piercing, trying to figure out where it entered into and out of my flesh. When I wiggled it around many of them gasped in horror, shocked by this thing that must have looked like mutilation to them.

I took a photo of this lady because I thought that she had a natural beauty about her. I liked the fact that she had chosen not to have a lip plate, as breaking away from societal beauty norms takes some courage, especially in a society where marriage prospects are somewhat dictated by these standards. I also chose her because I think that it’s a mistake to only choose to photograph those who are most “different” from yourself. It encourages a spectacle and discourages engagement.

I’m not much of a cultural relativist (as any reader will easily be able to garnish from this post) as I think that some things are such fundamental parts of human rights and dignity that they transcend cultural borders and should ultimately apply to all people. However, I do believe that certain behaviours and standards are strongly culturally defined. Beauty, particularly female beauty is something that I believe is highly culturally specific and my experience down by the river highlighted this to me. There are certain parts of “African beauty” (apologies for the absolutism) that I admire: the idolisation of a healthy body weight, and the amount of pride that people put into presenting their clothing and hair in the best possible way. These things are positive aspects of a culture that I would like to contrast with my own culture, which is one of starvation, plastic surgery and expensive beauty treatments sold to women who are brainwashed into believing that complying with these standards will bring them greater happiness. Of course, and this should be obvious to anybody who has ever spoken to me about this topic, I am one of the biggest suckers for this beauty myth (my new year’s resolution for 2014 was to learn to love and look after my body rather than constantly finding new things about it to despise) but I guess at least I’m aware of the way that culture brainwashes us all when it comes to things like beauty.

This lady approached me as she’d noticed my conch piercing (Dad – this is the one that you hate in the middle of my ear), which she pointed to before giving me the thumbs up. I then pointed to her nose piercing and gave her the thumbs up. She (obviously) does not have her lip stretched. Her choice to follow the beauty trends of tourists rather than her own tribe intrigues me. I wonder whether this is a purely aesthetic choice, or whether it symbolises a desire to identify more with another group.

Following our trip to the river and my revelation that I am the western equivalent of a big lip-plated Mursi woman, we visited the local village with our cameras. The dynamic completely changed when our cameras were involved. Upon arriving at the village (a 5 minute walk from our campsite) we were told the price for photos (adult 5 birr, child 3 birr, infant 2 birr) and then our guide organised a line up of people who stood there (like a bunch of prostitutes at a brothel) whilst the 5 people in my group plus our guide got all up in their grill trying to take nice portraits (hint: there is no way that you are going to get a nice portrait in this sort of setting) before we divided ourselves up to go and individually seek out people for portraits.

You are definitely not going to get a good photo when another person in your group is whistling and clucking at people in the line up so that they will look at his camera. 

It turns out that you don’t really need to seek people out for portraits, rather you end up trying to fight them off as everybody is so desperate to have their portrait taken (or, rather, more accurately, to collect some cash for having their portrait taken). In the Mursi village some strategies employed to encourage us to take portraits were grabbing, slapping, pulling, and, my favourite, poking (my friend Veronica) up the bum with a giant stick. I honestly don’t know many people who would have found this pleasurable, and unfortunately this was just the first of many similar village visits.

I appreciate the honesty in this child’s expression. I suspect that everybody collecting money for photos secretly feels the same way about the whole ritual.

One thing that I noticed in the Mursi village was that every adult male was holding an AK-47 (huge gun). As somebody from a country where nobody (**with the exception of a small minority of people with licences to own guns for agricultural purposes) owns a gun, I found this quite intimidating, especially as there were several moments in the village where a friendly exchange would suddenly turn very unfriendly (for example if somebody decided that you should pay them more than the agreed price, or if they were not satisfied with the quality of the birr that you gave them). I took one photo here of a man holding a gun and the expression on his face is one of absolute cockiness. Standing next to him is a child with a cheeky and innocent looking grin on his face. Here is the photo:

It occurred to me afterwards, especially after learning that an AK-47 is now a standard part of a bride’s dowry (along with 30-odd head of cattle) that the money I had paid to take photos that afternoon was contributing to the armaments of these villages. I learned that the guns are all smuggled in from nearby Sudan, so effectively my tourist dollar had helped to fund the international trade in illicit weapons.

That afternoon, our campsite was filled with people from the local village. Most of these people were simply curious about us (I attracted many strange stares when I sprayed steroid spray up my nostrils, a morning ritual of mine to keep my sinuses open since my surgery last year) or desperate to make some more money off photos. Our guide asked one of the local men to tell people to leave our campsite to give us some peace and space to prepare dinner (we were outnumbered about 5 to 1 by tribal people so their presence really was overwhelming). Unfortunately, the man who he asked to do this decided that this service was worth quite a bit of money, along with several empty plastic mineral water bottles (a tradable and highly polluting commodity in Southern Ethiopia) as well as an opportunity for him to sit there on his own and gawk at us. Whilst I never felt actually threatened by this man, there is something somewhat off putting about having a man armed with an AK-47 sitting next to your camp kitchen demanding money. Initially, our guide told him to leave and said that he was trespassing on our camping territory (something that did not go down well at all since our campsite was actually in his tribal land, so the notion that we could pay money to kick him out of his own land for the night was, understandably, highly offensive to this man). Luckily some other village men intervened and the man lost face and was forced to calm down and then apologise to us and say that he was not a violent man (we all accepted this apology with our best fake smiles and he didn’t trouble us after that).

That night I slept terribly. Our guide had hired a few men to sit outside of our tents as armed guards for the night. They spent the whole night sitting right outside of my tent talking, loudly. In the morning we discovered that the guide had approached them about this in the middle of the night and they said that they were talking about how the money that we were paying to the village (a very substantial amount it turns out) was not being equitably divided amongst the village, and they feared that they would not be suitably remunerated for their efforts as guards that night. I’m unsure how this situation was resolved, but the tension in the air was palpable when we left the village the following morning. It seemed to me like the more that money became a factor the less we were able to form meaningful connections with the people we were visiting.

4. The Karo Tribe

To my best recollection the next tribe that we visited was the Karo tribe. The particular village that we visited was up on a hill overlooking the bend of a river, a beautiful location. Here’s a photo of the location:

This visit was in many ways similar to that at the Mursi village, however at the Karo village we were not even told the first thing about the people we were visiting and it was very clear that the ONLY purpose of this visit was for us to take safari-style photos for a fee. To me, this is not a good way to travel, and my experience at this village was on the whole not a good experience. I had a few nice moments at the village, mostly when I approached people who were not begging for photos but rather going about their regular business and asked them if they would mind having their photos taken. Here are some photos that I took using this strategy:

This is my absolute favourite photo from Ethiopia (out of my photos).

These ladies looked shocked when I walked up to them but somewhat relieved when it was just for a photo and not to have my own hair styled.

The three girls in the group opted to have our faces painted. I am extremely unphotogenic and thought that my paint made me look like I had acne so stupidly refused to have my own photo taken. Here’s my friend Veronica having her face painted.

An anecdote that feeds into something that I am going to say about responsible tourism: the bra incident. When we arrived at the village we noticed that one of the young ladies was wearing a bra and walking around like the coolest girl at school. Clearly, a tourist had donated her bra to this young girl. One of this girl’s friends approached me and started pulling on my bra and saying “you give this to me” in broken English. I said “no” and then she started shoving her boobs in my face to show me how droopy she thought they were and how much she needed my bra (which was way too large for her, at least I like to think it was!). Again I said no, but she wouldn’t leave me alone and ended up following me back to the 4x4 as I was leaving the village, along the way constantly grabbing at my bra and trying to literally pull it off me, despite the fact that I was being very firm with her. To whoever first introduced bras to this village: thanks a bunch!

In the South Omo Valley, women only breast feed with the one breast. This way, the breast gets stretched and it is easy for infants to grab and stretch around to wherever they are standing if they fancy a suckle.

5. The Hamer People

A large portion of our time in the South Omo Valley was spent visiting the Hamer people at Key Afar market, Dimeka market, and two villages for a bull jumping preparation party and for an actual bull jumping ceremony.

Hamer women

This anxious looking young boy is about to undergo his bull jumping

This is the actual bull jumping

The Hamer people are known for their bull jumping ceremonies. These ceremonies occur when an adolescent boy is entering into adulthood. The ceremony is preceded by weeks of preparation and ceremony. The bull jumping ceremony itself starts (typically) in a dry riverbed where the female relatives of the bull jumper offer themselves up to be whipped. It is believed in their tradition that being whipped at this ceremony is a sign of great love and devotion to their male relatives. Following the whipping (which continues on for several hours) the ceremony is concluded by its namesake, a bull jumping. Eight bulls/cows are violently lined up in a row (more about this later) and the bull jumper gets naked and then has to run and then jump along the row of bulls and repeat this four times to prove his manliness. After this ceremony he is declared ready for marriage and is allowed to look for a bride.

We visited a local market where we were shown around by a 17-year old boy from the community who told us how this typically occurs. He told us that the young men, following the ceremony, will go to the market (produce market, not people market) where they will survey the eligible young women and pick one who takes their fancy. Then they will ask around to discover her name and the address of her parents, who the boy will then approach asking for the lady’s hand in marriage. Whether or not the girl is keen on this proposal is inconsequential, however our guide, a high school student, told us that this tradition is losing favour amongst educated people of his generation (for his part, he had a girlfriend and was keen to have a love marriage with her rather than this more traditional arranged marriage). I personally think that it’s great that arranged marriages are starting to die out. These sorts of things belong in the history books, not in the lives of modern people.

On our final day in the Hamer area we went to see a bull jumping ceremony. This was an optional activity, but something that seems to be on the South Omo Valley bucket list, so I went along to see what it was like. Before we arranged to see this ceremony we were told that we could opt out of the whipping, but when we got there we walked right in on it and before we knew it we’d seen a bunch of women being whipped. Whilst these were consenting adult females, I do not believe that they freely gave consent for this grievous bodily harm to be committed against them. We were told that women who abstained from this custom would be ostracised for this decision. As such, Hamer women have severely scarred backs.

I have thought long and hard about whether I want to share photos such as this one. I don’t want the suffering of some people to be used for other people’s viewing pleasure, nor for voyeurism. Eventually, I decided that I would put a very small collection on my blog (where there is sufficient space to explain their context) and not on facebook. My decision was driven by selfish reasons: it was emotional seeing this occur and sharing what I’ve seen kind of helps me to process it.

What these women were enduring looked incredibly painful. Some of them seriously needed medical attention and all that they had available to them was first aid from each other.

There is no good way to caption a photo showing somebody being whipped. All I want to mention here is that she’s so used to being whipped that she’s standing up straight and not flinching, even as the whip is only a fraction of a second away from breaking her skin.

We then (after a few hours of waiting around whilst the whipping kind of continued in dribs and drabs) watched the actual bull jumping. The most difficult part of the bull jumping seemed to be getting the cattle lined up. This was not helped by the fact that they selected a bunch of calving females to be included in the line-up and then forcefully separated them from their young. Basically, the cattle were each handled by a group of men, some pulling on the tails and others pulling on the horns and mouths of the cattle until they were all lined up. At one point one of them broke loose and came running at the edge of the circle of spectators, right where my friends and I were standing. We were all OK, but it made us realise that the whole thing was actually quite dangerous.

Now for some opinions (of which I have many). I do not think that tourists should be allowed to watch the bull jumping ceremony, especially the whipping sessions. As a tourist I would prefer to observe customs from the standpoint of observing and appreciating ancient and rich cultures, however it is impossible to watch something like this without feeling, at the very least, judgmental. I imagine most people would feel horrified. I wonder how much of the ceremony, especially the whipping, which seemed to be reignited each time a new group of tourists showed up, is preserved for the purpose of attracting tourism (and the tourist dollar). If so, tourism is complicit in horrible violence committed against female bodies. Moreover, there were so many tourists at this ceremony and the vast majority of them acted in a disrespectful and intrusive way. I use the word “disrespectful” with a certain amount of tension: I certainly do not respect cultural traditions that use female bodies as a marking ground for the continuation of their subjugation to their male peers. However, there is a difference between respecting and agreeing with the culture and acting respectfully, and I think that acting respectfully requires tourists to step back and allow the ceremonies to continue without their presence being an intrusion. Most of the tourists at this ceremony were doing exactly the opposite. I will let my photos tell the story of what happened on this occasion at the bull jumping ceremony:

This boy’s facial expression speaks a thousand words

Just to zoom in a bit on part of that photo

A man walking through the middle of the whipping ceremony in order to get close up photos. I would not have felt particularly sympathetic had he been hurt by an errant whip.

6. The Dassenech Tribe

This was the last distinct “tribe” that we visited in the South Omo Valley, and I think that I speak for my entire group when I say that we were completely and utterly burnt out by tribal visits at this point. This visit started with us having to pass through an immigration checkpoint, which was awkward for me as my passport was residing at the Beninese consulate in Addis Ababa (see previous blog entry) so I had to hide out in the car. We then crossed a river in some dugout canoes to the opposite bank where we were greeted by a bunch of truant children begging to be paid for portraits. Upon arrival at the village we were reminded of the current rate for photos and again given a line up for pre-purchased humans for our photography pleasures. I’d really had enough of this, so I latched onto a local youth with good English skills and asked him to walk me around the village so that we could escape from the hoards of desperate people. I got a couple of nice photos at this village, but my heart really was not in it at this point.

Great face, great necklace.

I felt like people were competing with each other to have the most outrageous outfits (as these would most likely attract pay for photos)

Goat and girl

I came across two ladies building a house.

As we were leaving the village we were followed by a group of young girls who were desperate to have their photographs taken. They kept running a few meters ahead of us then stopping to pose in extremely awkward poses saying “photo money photo money”. The most uncomfortable thing about this situation was that the girls were posing in a sexualised manner (despite the fact that they would all have been between about 8-10 years old). I don’t know why they would do this unless they were either victims of sexual abuse, or alternatively had found that these poses were popular with tourist photographers. I can’t think of any nice reasons to explain their posing.

This particular village was one that practiced female genital mutilation (FGM) (otherwise known as female circumcision, a term that I find far too sterile to describe the custom or excision (in West Africa only)). It will probably come as no surprise that I find this practice absolutely abhorrent. When studying the topic in my masters degree I was taught that “female circumcision” is now the more politically correct term to describe the practice, as the term “female genital mutilation” implies mutilation of the woman. Whilst I understand that nobody likes to be deemed mutilated, there is really no other way to accurately describe what is going on here and I think that there is no point in pretending otherwise.

At the same time though, I do believe that change in reducing the prevalence of this practice must come from local advocates rather than international condemnation. One of the most inspirational women I have ever read about is a Kenyan woman named Agnes Pareyio who advocates against FGM at the village level. She travels between villages in rural Kenya with a model of female genitals that has been custom made to have removable parts so that she can show girls what will happen when/if this is done to them. She educates young girls about the complications (and there are many) of this procedure and then teaches them how to detect the warning signs that this is about to be forced upon them. Most importantly, she has established a retreat to which girls can flee if they choose not to have this done to them. At each village, she teaches girls how to reach her retreat and then, if they go there, she provides them with accommodation and education, ultimately saving them from lives of suffering and subjugation and giving them some agency over their own bodies and futures. This is my ideal model of advocacy for this issue, but I accept that it has limitations (most pertinently that it will only work in societies where the procedure is performed on older girls and cannot be used to save infants in regions where this is performed at a younger age). Promisingly, as education levels increase there is a correlate decrease in FGM and the data clearly shows that more highly educated mothers are significantly less likely to have this excision performed on their daughters compared to their less educated counterparts. Again, I think that education is so critical for development and progress.

Some observations

Ethiopia is a truly beautiful country and fantastic destination for tourists who are keen to learn more about unique customs and traditions. It is a shame, however, to see the impact that tourism is having on local communities. At the most basic level, tourism has been harming local communities. Guns purchased using money from tourist visits are being used to defend cattle, humans are being commoditized, and the landscapes are being polluted by tourist waste such as plastic bottles.

Moreover, some people have actually died due to tourism. It is now typical to drive along a road in the tourist areas and see children running out from their houses to dance on the road in front of cars, or simply straight out beg for money. As you drive past the children they will chase your car. Several children have been killed doing this, and the practice started because some tourists started handing out money/water bottles/sweets to children who would approach their cars. I’m not saying that it’s easy to ignore people begging (compassion inevitably sets in when you make eye contact with somebody asking you for something and it’s hard not to wonder whether it’s OK to give to just that one person, but nonetheless the best way to leave a good impact is to support local charities and on an individual level leave people with the gift of your friendliness).

What saddened me about Southern Ethiopia was that tourism had forged such a path that it had became impossible to interact with local people on any meaningful level as everything had become transactional: ie, you take a photo, you pay money. This is such an immovable barrier, driven by desperation on the part of the local people, and curiousity and wunderlust on the part of the tourists. My friend, Rita, suggested a solution that would overcome this barrier (but I suspect would drive away tourists): ban photos. Assign one professional photographer per group so that everybody can access memories of the trip but remove the impetus for cash per photo to be the primary interaction between tourists and local people.

My local guide, Gele, had painted this photo (he is the guy in the image). We are re-enacting the picture, which is representing a Hamer person meeting a foreigner and immediately asking for money.

All of that said, I really loved Ethiopia. For the most part, the Ethiopian people who I actually got to know personally were friendly and kind. I feel this kind of tension: privileged and grateful that I have had the opportunity to witness the lives of people who live so differently to me, but also guilty that this exchange was only possible because of the vast divide between their wealth and my wealth leading them to accept my presence only for financial gain. I suspect that there is much more that unites us than divides us, indeed many of the people I had a chance to chat to are people who I would be friends with if I met them in Sydney, however the nature of classic “just visiting” tourism made it really difficult for me to see these purported similarities.

I had the opportunity to travel with some lovely people in Southern Ethiopia: Lene and Veronica, two delightful Norwegian girls who are also on long backpacking trips, Douglas, an art museum curator from Nebraska, and Paer, a retired financier and quasi-professional photographer. I am glad to have met these people, and believe that I have made some life long friends in Lene and Veronica (I will have to visit them in Norway some time J).

I’m unsure when my internet connection will be strong enough for me to post this latest update, but right now (as I edit the post) I am sitting in a beach side bungalow in Sierra Leone at the beautiful John Obey Beach.

One week in Addis Ababa

[apologies in advance for the lack of images. After spending half an hour trying to upload just one photo I have decided that my mood just can't handle the stress of that today]

My first stop in Africa was Ethiopia, a country that I have always wanted to visit. I spent almost three weeks there, the first in Addis Ababa and the following two in the deep south of the country, mostly in the South Omo Valley.

When I was planning my trip, I didn’t intentionally book a week in a big African city where I know nobody just for shits and giggles. In fact, my plan for that week had originally been to go to Bali to have a nice and relaxing week between finishing my placement in Indonesia and going camping in an extremely underdeveloped region of Africa, something that was undoubtedly going to be challenging in many respects.

Unfortunately, a series of visa problems necessitated that I go to Addis Ababa early to take advantage of the fact that it’s the home of every single embassy imaginable (including Vatican City, Somaliland, South Sudan etc). Travelling as an Australian is normally very easy: most countries do not require a visa in advance or at all, and Australians are rarely treated with suspicion by immigration officials the way that people from many other countries are (I’ve heard numerous stories from my friends who have tried to travel with passports from developing nations about how they have been given the run around by immigration, especially in New Zealand of all places!). That said, there are some places in the world that aren’t quite as friendly to Australian passport holders, and I have managed to include many of these places in my itinerary!

The story about my week in Addis Ababa begins in June 2013 when I started trying to organise my visas. After some brief research, I realised that I had a big problem. I needed visas in advance for: Vietnam, Myanmar, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Benin, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Brazil. There were two problems with this. First, the sheer number of visas that I needed, combined with the fact that some embassies stated a 25-business day (minimum) turnover time for visa applications, meant that I did not have the time to get all of these visas (my travel agent Sian added up the processing times quoted by her visa service and it was something like 120 business days!). Second, visas have a validity period, and for many visas this is 90 days, so if you leave your country more than 90 days before you are due to leave the country for which you need a visa, you must obtain it in some 3^rd party country somewhere along your journey.

So, before leaving Australia I managed to get visas for Vietnam, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Indonesia (after four attempts: my first attempt was rejected because the visa is only valid for 60 days after issue and I’d applied a few days too early, the second attempt was rejected because I had not included the national ID document of the person sponsoring me at the university (as this was some requirement made up by the person looking at my application and in no way a formal requirement) and on the third attempt they issued a visa with my name misspelt, so I spent my final day in Australia travelling twice to the consulate on the other side of Melbourne in order to drop my passport off and then collect it again). I did some research that told me that the visa for Sierra Leone may be purchased online, so I did that when I was in Vietnam and the whole thing took all of about 10 minutes. I also learned that there is a Burmese consulate in Hanoi, so I specifically applied to do my Hoc Mai placement in Hanoi to enable me to get that visa there. Whilst in Hanoi I asked my hotel how to go to the embassy and they told me that they were happy to send off the application on my behalf. It took less than a week and was completely stress free.

In contrast, I had a not-fun time trying to get my West African visas through the French Consulate in Sydney, which is a place that seems to choose its employees based on maximum rudeness. The best information that I could find was that the Burkina Faso visa was valid for whatever period you requested, so I thought that I should try to get this one in advance so that I would have one less to worry about. Alas, this was not to be. The first time I sent them my passport, by courier service, it was sent straight back to me and I was told that visas for West Africa would only be accepted by appointment, and that the next available appointment was 60 days from that date, just a few weeks before I was due to depart. So I made an appointment, and when the date was soon to arrive went back on their website to check all of their requirements and saw a new announcement saying that visas for West Africa now needed to be sent in via courier and in person applications would not be accepted. So, by changing their requirements and giving me the run around they had made it impossible for me to get my visa in advance. Luckily, I discovered that it will actually be possible (touch wood) to get my Burkina Faso visa on the border, but for a grossly inflated price (approx USD 200). I’m posting this blog post on the day that I will be attempting to do this, so if you are reading this promptly you may be doing so whilst I’m actually in the process of crossing this border! So, I was left with just the Benin visa to worry about (I will try to get my Brazilian one in Ghana, as I am there for quite some time and there is a Brazilian consulate in Accra).

The best solution I could come up with for the Benin visa was to fly to Addis Ababa about a week before my tour and apply at the consulate there. Those of you on my facebook would have seen me complaining about the experience that I then had. On my first morning in Addis, I took a taxi to the Beninese embassy. Complication number one was that there are actually two addresses for the embassy, and the first that I chose to try was the ambassadorial residence, rather than the chancery, which is where you need to go to apply for visas. Since these two places were on pretty much opposite sides of the town the taxi journey became quite expensive. The second complication that I encountered was that there were all sorts of visa requirements for the Beninese visa that had not been published anywhere online. One of these was that you needed to provide proof of pre-paid accommodation, so I attached my trip itinerary (I’m doing a G-Adventures tour through Benin) to my application. Unfortunately, the lady at the consulate immediately decided that this was insufficient, and the only solution that I could fathom was that I could book one night in a hotel (using some sort of online booking system) and then produce that receipt and cancel the booking at a later date.

The rest of my Monday was hardly more successful than the morning at the Chancery. After my hassles with the visa I went for a walk looking for a nice place to have lunch. As I was walking down the street a group of drunk men on the sidewalk started shouting extremely sexual things at me, so I sped up and tried to walk with my head held up high, as if I’d not even noticed them. This strategy, combined with the fact that I was wearing sandals, was unfortunate, seeing as there was a bit of rusted metal poking out of the ground just where I was walking. I cut my foot open on this rusted metal, which was miserable as there was blood and dirt everywhere, and the best that I could do to clean my wound (which was quite deep) was to pour hand sanitiser on it before hobbling back to my hotel where I flushed out the wound and put antiseptic cream on it. After that I went to the Sheraton to have some quite time, and then it occurred to me that my tetanus vaccine is almost out of date, and that it would be advisable for me to get a booster. I texted a friend of a friend, Kristina, whose number I’d been given as a contact in Addis Ababa and asked her if she could recommend a doctor. She then came and picked me up in a taxi and together we found a decent doctor (the Swedish Medical Clinic) and fought for me to have an appointment with a nurse so that I could receive the vaccine that afternoon rather than waiting for an appointment with a doctor the following day (which would have cost me $200). Thus, I met Kristina and made my first friend in Addis Ababa.

To cut a long story short, I spent every day that week anxiously contacting the consulate about my visa and being repeatedly told that it would be one more day. On Friday I decided to attend the consulate in person and stay there until my passport was returned to me, complete with visa. When I arrived I was told that the visa application had been approved, however there was a person employed solely to put the stamp in the passport, and he had not shown up to work that day. So, I said that I was happy to sit there and wait until he showed up (it was 2pm at that stage). I sat there for 45 mins and then the guy was at work and putting the stamp in my passport (sit in = success). Unfortunately, the next thing that I was told was that the ambassador had to sign the stamp in my passport. So, again, I said that I would sit there and wait. I sat there for 90 minutes until I was told that the ambassador was actually “attending a lively social function” at the African Union Summit (which was inconveniently being held that week, causing massive road closures and special Summit week inflated prices, not just for contract taxis but also for hotel rates and restaurant food!) and would be in no fit state to sign my passport that day. Seeing as I was leaving Addis Ababa the following day (a Saturday, and the consulate is only open on weekdays during limited business hours), I had no choice but to leave my passport with the consulate for the visa to be signed sometime over the next week and a half.

Surprisingly, the last step of getting this visa was extremely easy and occurred on the day that my tour returned from the south of the country to Addis Ababa. My group had pulled over on the side of the road in the suburbs of Addis for some people to purchase coffee from a reputable coffee shop. I was sitting waiting in the car when I realised that the area looked very familiar, and then I turned around and saw the Beninese Chancery signposted (about 100m away). So, I jumped out of the car, sprinted to the Chancery, grabbed my passport, and then sprinted back to the car, all before people had finished buying their coffee.

The rest of my time in Addis Ababa was spent visiting museums, meeting friends of friends, and hanging out at the Sheraton Hotel (because sometimes you just need a break from Africa, especially when pissed off about the bureaucracy). I met some great people during the week – Kristina, Adrian, Biruk, Winta and Feduku – and experienced many facets of life in Addis Ababa from expat house parties, karaoke, Reggae clubs, Salsa dancing, ultimate Frisbee (on my last night in Ethiopia) and the mandatory trip to Yod Abyssinia cultural restaurant. I had low expectations for the week, but it turned out to, with the exception of the Monday, be quite pleasant. On the Saturday evening I met my tour group and had dinner with a couple of lovely Norwegian girls from the group, and then the following morning I departed  Addis Ababa for my adventures in the south of the country.

Two weeks of infectious diseases study in Jogja

Introduction

I spent the second half of January in Yogyakarta (say the Ys as Js and you’re saying it right), Indonesia, studying infectious diseases. This placement is the shortest placement that I have planned for 2014, and it was with some dismay that I departed from Yogyakarta after two weeks for a short stay in Bangkok on route to Ethiopia.

Long-term travelling undoubtedly teaches the traveller lots of things about themselves, and for me the time that I spent in Indonesia was one of self-discovery.

The first thing that I have discovered about myself is that I hate good byes. I flew to Indonesia after a 16-hour transit in Bangkok that was devoted to eating some decent food and buying some business clothing to wear in Indonesia (my placement had strict dress requirements and I lacked any clothing that would satisfy these requirements). The morning that I left Bangkok was extremely hard for me. I had spent the previous two weeks travelling with one of my closest friends, Emily, and had become comfortably accustomed to having her pleasant and easygoing company 24/7. Emily also completed a Hoc Mai placement in Vietnam, albeit in Da Nang (she was the friend I visited over Christmas), and she was the final vestige of homeliness that my travels will have until I next meet up with people from home (friends and parents) in Europe in May. So, saying good bye was extremely hard and, it turned out, a bit unceremonious, as I had to leave for the airport at 4.30am. I managed to hold it together during the bit where she was there and we were uttering pleasantries, but then had a bit of a cry in the hotel lifts, at the airport, and then again at KL airport where I had a long transit, which was quite embarrassing really. 

I immediately liked Indonesia and was happy to be there despite the fact that I was in a bit of a mood rut for the first couple of days until I decided that I needed to proactively ensure my own happiness even when feeling a bit unsettled and alone. This was how I came to learn the second thing that I learnt about myself in Indonesia, that I shouldn’t assume that everybody will dislike me before they’ve even met me, because that’s just silly. It’s very unhelpful when you’re travelling to avoid talking to people and making the effort to meet you people simply because you’re scared of being rejected. Once I realised that my happiness required being a bit brave, I arranged to meet some people and keep myself busy, and as a result I had an amazing two weeks.

Sightseeing and socialising in Yogyakarta

On the first morning of my placement I was met by Maria, a very sweet first year medical student from UGM who’d been assigned to me to help me settle in to my placement. We had lunch with Maria’s friends and, despite the language barrier, I had a nice time. That evening I decided to take myself somewhere with lots of tourists, hoping to meet some fluent English speakers because I was just bursting to have a good conversation because I love talking. After looking online at restaurant recommendations I decided on this travellers’ café called Via Via, purely because it shared its name with one of my favourite cafes in Arusha (Tanzania). It turns out that this shared name was no coincidence, as the two cafes are actually part of a global chain of travellers’ cafes. This made my night, along with the realisation that Via Via had a great travel desk where you could book a range of short tours, many of which could be done on an evening after finishing up at the hospital for the day. They also had a notice board where people could advertise for people to join them on tours. I saw a note from somebody called “Heather” who was looking for somebody to join her on a tour called “Spiritual Java” and I immediately decided that this would be a nice idea (my, only slight, moment of hesitation was when I realised that Heather is the given name of my former school principal and for a fleeting moment I was concerned about the possibility that this person could be her, but then I googled Australian school term dates and realised that it was probably too close to semester starting for her to be gallivanting around Indonesia). Joining the tour with Heather turned out to be the best decision I made during my time in Indonesia, as it meant that I met two fascinating, inspirational and just altogether lovely ladies who made the rest of my stay in Yogyakarta amazing (more on that later).

ViaVia cafe, Yogyakarta

ViaVia cafes around the world!

My second day in Indonesia was an unexpected public holiday (for the Prophet Muhammed’s birthday) and Maria offered to take me to the Kraton (old palace) on the back of her motorbike for some sightseeing. With the exception of a one day rural motorbike trip that I took in Vietnam in 2007, I had never been a passenger on a motor bike and was a bit apprehensive about the whole thing, especially after hearing horror stories from my mother, a former physiotherapist, and also seeing several people in ICU in Vietnam with horrific injuries following motorbike accidents. Nonetheless, I got on the motorbike and managed to refrain from both screaming and also overbalancing the bike on corners, and consequently had a pleasant day at the Kraton. It was extremely crowded due to the public holiday, and lots of people had apparently travelled there from rural areas to attend the festivities. As such, I was stared at a lot, and one woman even grabbed a handful of the skin on my arm and stood there pointing and laughing, which was something that I didn’t quite know how to react to (I’ve since developed a deep tan and this has not recurred).

That evening, I met up with Robbie, a friend of a friend of a friend. It turns out that asking your friends if they know people at your destination (or simply just mentioning where you are going (often met with “oh, I have a friend who lives there. I’ll put you guys in touch”)) is a great way of meeting people. Assuming that you like your friends, you’re probably going to like their friends, which has universally been my experience so far with this networking strategy. I had dinner with Robbie and his friends (which I guess makes them friends of a friend of a friend of a friend) at this lovely restaurant in a garden setting called Gadjah Wong. We had a great night, which concluded with us going to this bar with live music where we were the only bules (Indonesian slang for foreigners). Unfortunately for me Robbie and his friends were taking a bit of a vacation to a beach somewhere in Java for the next few days, so I wasn’t able to hang out with them again, but it was nice to meet some fun people even if I could only see them once.

On Thursday evening Maria and I went to the silverwork part of town to attend a lesson on silver jewellery making. This turned out to be quite a fun activity and we now have (almost) matching friendship rings that would have been matching if I hadn’t melted part of my ring with the blowtorch due to sheer stupidity.

Friday evening and the weekend were real highlights for me. On Friday afternoon I went on the ViaVia Spiritual Java tour with Heather, and one other girl, Cory who had also seen Heather’s notice. The tour was interesting, but needed to be much more developed in terms of structure and explanation, as there were large periods of time where the three of us had little idea of what was occurring whilst the guide sat there meditating. Nonetheless, I’m glad that I went on the tour as it meant that I met Heather and Cory. Heather is a British lady who is on a long (about 7 months I think) trip. Interestingly, Heather, for sustainability reasons, has chosen to avoid air travel. Hearing about her trip, including the 20-something days that she spent on a freight ship from Spain to Singapore and all of the fascinatingly unconventional experiences that travelling this way has led her to experience, really made me question my own travel choices for this year. I am well aware that my plans involve substantial carbon emissions, but I’ve never seriously considered alternative modes of transport and travel styles (spending longer discovering a region rather than jumping around the place) until I met Heather and heard about the world of possibilities when it comes to sustainable travel. Cory was also fascinating and very sweet company. She is my age and hasn’t travelled extensively, yet she had the guts to quit her job and fly to Asia to look for new and exciting life experiences. She has secured a job in Kuala Lumpur for several months and plans to travel around Asia before and after this internship. Kuala Lumpur was actually the first place that I visited independently of my family or school group (in 2006) and I remember at the time finding the city intimidating and also feeling immensely homesick, even though I was only there for a few days. I can’t even begin to imagine the courage that it takes to commit to living somewhere that you know little about when you are not yet a seasoned traveller, so props to Cory!

This is every body else meditating on the beach during the spiritual Java tour. I had missed the memo that this was meditation time and instead thought that it was time to take some long exposure photographs.

Spiritual Java tour. Haven't got the faintest what's going on here, but it involved an old man, fire and incense. 

After the Spiritual Java tour we organised to meet up with each other a few more times before Cory left Yogyakarta. We dined at an amazing vegetarian restaurant (Milas), had a fun time looking around a supermarket and taking photos of bizarre condom boxes that featured tacky 80s art, and we spent a morning at a local market called Sunmor (situated between two universities: UGM and UNY), where I bought a tacky PSY hand sanitiser to attach to my stethoscope, as this was a bit of a fashion statement at the hospital where I was undertaking my placement. Here are some condom pictures from the supermarket:

yeah, i got some weird looks from Indonesian people who saw me and my friends taking these photos

The rest of that weekend was spent visiting Borobodur and Prambanan. These experiences were very similar to my experience at the Kraton; I spent more time obliging various photo and interview requests (no, I am not a celebrity, just a bule) than I spent enjoying the attractions. Luckily, I had a brief moment of respite at both attractions as it started bucketing rain causing all but the most die hard tourists (typically those who have paid the inflated foreigner entry price and will not have an opportunity to simply come back on another day) to leave the attractions. Here are some photos from when it was bucketing down rain:

Borobodur in the rain (it was still hard to get this photo without people in it)

Prambanan with Mount Merapi peaking out from behind the clouds

I had one more sightseeing opportunity in Yogyakarta. I undertook a walk through the Kali Code area of town (a former dangerous slum, now industrial area that gives visitors an interesting exposure to local culture). I booked this tour (having a guide who understands the local culture greatly enhances your experience in situations such as this) and was joined by Heather (from my other tour) as well as two lovely Dutch ladies (mother and daughter). Some of the highlights from the tour included: watching a display of homing pigeon training, meeting people who collect song birds as a serious hobby and learning about songbird competitions and the social status that victory in such competitions brings the owner, meeting an amazing artist who makes bespoke stamps for batik printing, and learning various other curiosities about Indonesian culture, including that the red and white of the flag symbolise women and men respectively (have a think about specific bodily excretions and you will come to the same conclusion that our guide told us about why these colours have been assigned to the sexes). We concluded the evening by dining at our favourite vegetarian restaurant and sharing life stories (Dorine, the daughter of the mother-daughter pair had some fascinating stories about her time spent in Yogyakarta as a medical student 20-years ago, and also about various other places where she has lived and worked, including Khartoum).

Kali Code river at sunset

2000 words later and I have finally reached the part about my actual student placement

I undertook a two-week student placement at Universitas Gadjah Madh in the Faculty of Medicine. I was based at Rumah Sakit Dr Sardjito, a large hospital situated conveniently next to the campus. I was placed in the internal medicine department, specifically infectious diseases.

Faculty of Medicine, UGM. Sorry about photo quality, was taken with a much abused iPhone 3 circa 2008

Some of the interesting cases I saw during my placement included:

• -       TB patients
• -       Multi-drug resistant TB patients
• -       HIV patients
• -       Patients with a whole host of diseases, often TB and HIV (being HIV positive increases the likelihood of contracting TB due to the way that HIV damages your immune system) and occasionally a third infectious disease, such as viral hepatitis
• -       Tetanus
• -       Snake Bite
• -       Malaria-induced jaundice
• -       Sepsis

One of the main things that I observed during my time at the hospital was how the patients were mostly poor people from rural areas. This is not to say that infectious diseases were not also endemic in the city, but rather that for the diseases to reach the level of severity where the patients required hospitalisation generally meant that there was a triad of poverty, lack of health awareness, and lack of education. Most of the patients I saw from urban areas were in relatively good condition and just in hospital to attend outpatient clinics for routine management of their chronic infectious diseases.

The physical condition of some patients was quite shocking. Many of the patients had severe wasting syndrome and looked like they could barely weigh more than 30kg. These patients reminded me of photos that I have seen of victims of the Holocaust upon being released from concentration camps at the end of the Second World War. In some cases I was unsure whether this was attributable to their medical problems or more broadly to social disadvantage. I guess it was probably a combination of both factors. Either way, I found it quite shocking to see adult men who were lighter than the luggage that I have been hauling around the world for the past few months.

The 5 moments of hand hygiene. I am a bad person because I can only ever remember 4 of them.

The highlight of the placement for me was spending a day at the HIV clinic. The clinic had 40 patients that day, which was quite a busy day for them. The clinic is where patients are required to attend (on a monthly basis) to collect their anti-retroviral treatments. Every six months the patients are supposed to have a blood test prior to their attendance, so that they can bring the results and the doctors at the clinic may monitor their CD4+ T-cell count (a proxy for measuring viral load). There are a variety of ways for HIV to be transmitted, those I saw at the HIV clinic that day were (from most to least common): unsafe sex, injecting drug use, tattoo and piercing (2 patients).

Most patients had fairly well controlled HIV, having attended the clinic regularly since diagnosis and been reasonably compliant with their treatment regime. There were however some patients with terrible treatment compliance. I saw two patients with CD4+ counts of <10 (shockingly low, as a normal count is 500-1200 and treatment for HIV commences when the count drops below 200 in Indonesia (the threshold is higher in many other countries)). Some patients would send a proxy to collect their medication on their behalf (due to convenience mostly) and this was creating problems with monitoring, as, obviously, a proxy cannot have his or her blood tested on behalf of the patient, nor can the physician make valuable observations about a patient’s general health status when the patient is not there to be observed. The clinic had a clever way of handling this problem. Patients could not send proxies for more than one consecutive appointment unless there existed extraordinary circumstances. For general poor compliance (which is easy to detect either by blood test results, by the patient admitting that they had stopped treatment, or by multiple missed appointments) the clinic had a counselling service. Patients with poor compliance were referred to mandatory counselling, which seemed to primarily take the form of educating patients about differing prognoses and the role of treatment in preventing the progression of their HIV infection into full on AIDS.

Mount Merapi teasing me by almost revealing itself from the clouds one day

One patient really sticks in my mind from this day at the HIV clinic. He was a man in his early 30s who had contracted HIV many years earlier through injecting drug use, and was highly involved in a peer group (other IDUs) several of whom had died horrible AIDS deaths. Nonetheless, he had decided to pretend that he was not infected with HIV, despite the fact that several of his friends had died of AIDS related complications.  I found it difficult to understand why somebody would take such little care of his health after witnessing the horrible outcome of letting HIV destroy an immune system, something that should be a powerful motivator to comply with treatment. The only reason he had attended the clinic that day was that he had just been offered a job working on a cruise ship and the company required him to be on treatment for the duration of his employment contract. The doctors dealt with this man well. The head of the clinic sat him down and asked him lots of probing questions about his attitude to treatment and then said to him “you’re an adult now and it’s time for you to grow up. A big part of growing up is looking after your own health, and for you it will soon be too late.” I think that it would be difficult to be this direct with patients in Australia, but this was exactly what he needed to hear. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the message really sunk in, as, in a brief moment alone with me in the treatment room whilst the doctors were sorting out paperwork, the patient asked me where he could buy drugs to take whilst he was on cruise leave in Sydney (I told him that I believe drugs are difficult to find in Australia, but we have lots of great food and outdoor activities that he might enjoy instead).

A final interesting thing that I saw in the hospital were the Waria. Waria are Indonesian Lady Boys. Unlike their counterparts in much of Southeast Asia, the Waria suffer from extreme social marginalisation, mostly due to the fact that Islam is the dominant religion in Indonesia and this is not at all accommodating of their gender identity, despite the fact that most Waria are practicing Muslims. Warias are highly visually confronting; the first time I saw them I was confused and a little apprehensive, and the best explanation that I could summon to explain their bizarre appearance (they are not at all like Lady Boys in Thailand, who often make better looking women than most people born with two X chromosomes) was that they were victims of failed plastic surgery experiments. Mostly, the Waria look like what you will find if you google image search something along the lines of “plastic surgery disasters”. It turns out that I wasn’t too far off the mark, as the Waria frequently undergo “backyard” plastic surgery, for example the injection of hot oil under the skin behind the nipples to create breast-like enlargements, and also the insertion of various prostheses behind the skin of various parts of their faces. As the only Waria I encountered in Indonesia were either attending the hospital or begging on the streets, I was unable to get a photo, however this article includes photos and further information about the Waria for anybody who is interested: http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-warias-full-length (this is not a publication that I would normally read, but it’s the best information that I could find on google).

Where to now?

I am writing this in Ethiopia (I wrote my first draft in a terrible mood so decided to bin that and re-write, so this has taken me quite a while). After 6 weeks of medical placements in Asia I have seen some fascinating things and had my beliefs challenged in ways that would never occur in Australia. I left Asia feeling desperate for a vacation and feeling relieved that I had scheduled 6 weeks of “vacation” before my next medical placement. It turns out, however, that I have a very strange idea of vacationing; instead of soaking up beautiful landscapes, indulging hedonistic desires, or lounging about on a beach, I have spent the past couple of weeks in Southern Ethiopia seeing some pretty confronting things (for example ritualistic whipping of tribal women by their male relatives – I never EVER want to witness whipping again, once was definitely more than enough). I am still collecting my thoughts on Ethiopia but hope to have another blog post out in the next few weeks.

Me in Ethiopia. This photo really doesn't do justice to my deep suntan