BANTU, Ethiopia — This year, impoverished children in one Ethiopian village have something they’ve never known before—hope for the future.
Children attending the Bantu school, founded by Buckner International and Bright Hope, receive two meals a day, two school uniforms, daytime clothing, shoes, schoolbooks and supplies, personal hygiene materials and medical treatment.
“The people in this community earn about $11 a month,” said Bright Hope project manager Nebiyou Tesfaye. Isolated on a muddy dirt road, the community is occupied by farmers, walking barefoot with large bales of crops on their backs, and dozens of small children.
Ethiopian [puppet] President Girma WoldeGiorgis gave the land in Bantu to Buckner in 2006 to build the school for the community. But it’s much more than just a school.
“We are the ones who provide them with food, showers, soap, drinking water, clothes, shoes, vaccinations, everything,” Tesfaye said.
At the school, 200 children ages 4 to 7 learn everything from math to English in eight classrooms.
After morning classes end, all the children line up single file with their hands on each other’s shoulders to walk across the way to the dining hall. There they receive their largest meal of the day—a bowl of rice.
Café manager Fikru Gebremariam said most of the children do not have food at home.
“Food is important for the children because it builds their bodies and makes them strong,” he said.
Marta Admasu, the principal of the school, explained the community’s growing excitement since the school opened.
“We are experiencing great happiness at this time. The children have food, soap, shoes, toothbrushes, clothing. Because of this, they feel very happy.”
In addition to education, Tesfaye said, they help the community by “teaching them about sanitation and how to prevent disease and infection.”
Future plans for the school include building a house for guests and mission teams who choose to work with the children short term. They also hope to give the school “international” status, teaching American and British curricula, along with others, to promote future growth opportunities for students. The school’s ultimate goal is for every child to go to college.
“We desperately need books for the teachers and for the students,” Tesfaye said. “We need workbooks and educational books. If we want them to go to college, they need to read.”
Kyle Henderson, pastor of First Baptist Church in Athens, is part of the Buckner E-Team, a group of churches that helped support construction of the new school project and attended the inauguration in February.
Two years ago, he stood on an empty field with a group of pastors and the president of Ethiopia in the same location where a thriving school and community center resides today.
“I got to stand in a completed school with hundreds of children being reached,” Henderson said. “They recited English letters, numbers and animals. In just a few months, these kids have moved from dirt floors and no teaching aids to qualified teachers, in excellent facilities, and a new future.”
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – The roll-out of antiretroviral therapy has led to a decline of about 50% in adult AIDS deaths in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, over a period of five years, according the findings of a study published in the February 20th edition of the journal AIDS.
The effectiveness of antiretroviral roll-out in sub-Saharan Africa has been widely reported as encouraging despite persistent concerns about universal access and adherence. However, there are still only limited data on its effects at a population level on deaths.
In Ethiopia, antiretroviral treatment was made freely available in public hospitals from October 2005. The investigators carried out the current study to find out what effect the availability of antiretroviral treatment had had on AIDS-related mortality.
The researchers used data from burial surveillance records and ‘verbal autopsy’ interviews. Burial surveillance was implemented in all Addis Ababa cemeteries in 2001 and records about 20,000 deaths per year. The surveillance is undertaken by cemetery clerks who receive regular training. They record a lay report of the cause of death as narrated by close relatives or friends of the deceased and other demographic details.
Verbal autopsies are post-mortem interviews conducted by researchers with close relatives or caretakers, about the signs and symptoms they witnessed during the terminal illness of the deceased. Causes of death described in the interviews were then confirmed through physicians’ review.
Two different physicians reviewed the verbal autopsies to assign cause of death to the described symptoms. Whenever the assigned cause of death by two physicians did not match, a third physician was used to review the verbal autopsy questionnaire. The data used in the current study were derived from 413 cases involving individuals aged 20 to 64 years. Physicians assigned causes of death, classified as either AIDS or non-AIDS deaths.
Epidemiological modelling was used by the investigators to determine mortality trends in the study population.
The investigators then compared projected deaths with observed numbers from burial surveillance.
To determine possible averted AIDS-related deaths, the investigators compared the estimated with the implied numbers of AIDS deaths in population projections. They estimated HIV prevalence using UNAIDS estimation and projections package (EPP 2007).
Results showed that the ratio of observed over projected deaths in adults peaked in 2001. However, between 2001 and 2005 the ratios dropped by about 11% (from 1.92 to 1.71) for women and 20% for men (from 1.80 to 1.44).This was a period when patients part-paid for treatment. The researchers attributed this average AIDS mortality drop of about 15% to treatment effect and noted that the drop was higher in men than women partly because of sex imbalances in access to healthcare financing.
The results further showed that between 2005 and 2007, there was a decline of about 25% for women (from 1.71 to 1.28) and 21% for men (from 1.44 to 1.13). The investigators attributed this drop of over 40% to free treatment, suggesting that treatment cost is an important factor in the decline of AIDS deaths.
To confirm whether the trends noted above resulted from reduced AIDS mortality, the investigators turned to the findings from the lay reports. They found a decline from 8467 deaths in 2001 to 4230 in 2007 (about 50%). The study further found that the decline was greater between 2005 and 2007 when treatment was free.
The researchers noted that the decline observed took place during a period when mortality was supposed to be very high. HIV infections in Ethiopia peaked in the late 1990s, demonstrating the impact of treatment. Assuming that the burial surveillance coverage was 85%, the scientists estimated a reduction of about 56% in AIDS deaths by 2007.
The 56% decline compared favourably with findings from São Paulo in Brazil, which reported a decline in AIDS deaths of about 65% between 1995 and 2002, noted the investigators. They further compared their findings to a New York study which showed a higher decline (63% in two years).
The researchers said that their findings demonstrate the effectiveness of treatment coverage on averting deaths in early phases of HIV care (long-term impact is not yet known). For Ethiopia and similar settings, the researchers said that the immediate worry is about short-term mortality because treatment coverage is still at its infancy (only 2% of adult patients are on second-line regimens in Addis Ababa).
The researchers also noted that their findings raise questions about whether and how the decline in mortality can be sustained, and whether improvements in access to antiretrovirals alone can achieve this goal. More proactive attempts to diagnose people earlier and initiate treatment earlier may be necessary in order to reduce death rates further, given the continued high risk of death during the first year of antiretroviral treatment in those who start treatment at lower CD4 cell counts in sub-Saharan Africa.
The investigators acknowledged that, even though their study was based on epidemiological models, model-based and observational estimates can be very different. The findings might have been limited further by shortcomings of burial surveillance such as under-reporting, said the scientists.
However, for adaptability to similar settings, the investigators noted that burial surveillance is logistically simple to implement because it uses existing structures and is usable in settings with no population-based data.
Reference: Reniers G et al. Steep decline in population-level AIDS mortality following the introduction of antiretroviral therapy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. AIDS, 23:511-518, 2009.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (PANA) – The Foreign Affairs Ministry in Ethiopia has lambasted the human rights report issued by the US State Department on Ethiopia. In a statement released here Wednesday by the ministry, the Ethiopian government said the report was “a deliberately Jaundiced view about Ethiopia’s progress on human hights”.
This is the second recent statement by the ministry criticizing such reports.
The Ethiopian dictatorial regime has similarly mocked at accusations of the Human Rights Watch late last year after the rights group accused Ethiopia of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Human rights watchdog said late last year that Ethiopian troops burnt down villages and killed, raped and tortured civilians in a counter-insurgency campaig n against the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front after its fighters had killed 74 Ethiopian and Chinese oil-exploration workers in 2007.
Ethiopia’s government was so incensed by the description of “systematic atrocities” in the Ogaden that it commissioned a report of its own that dismissed Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) allegations as hearsay and its methods as slapdash.
Ethiopia has now labeled the new report a carbon copy of the report by the HRW, describing its approach very similar to that of Human Rights Watch.
According to the report, the report is bizarre “and, the methodology appears equally flawed”.
The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour, in its 2008 country reports on Human Rights Practices issued on 27 February, accused Ethiopia of various human rights violations.
Few of the human rights abuses the Bureau highlighted include limitations on citizens’ right to change their government in local and by-elections; unlawful killings, torture, beating, abuse, and mistreatment of detainees and opposition supporters by security forces, usually with impunity; poor prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detention, particularly of suspected sympathizers or members of opposition or insurgent groups.
The ministry expressed government’s dismay over the US State Department’s continued reports of allegations from opposition groups, which, it said, kept on misre presenting the human rights situation in Ethiopia.
“The report was no more than a collection of unsubstantiated accusations from groups seeking to undermine Ethiopia’s process of democratization,” read the statement.
Fiction that takes us from Ethiopia to the suburbs
‘Cutting for Stone’ By Abraham Verghese (Knopf, 560 pp., $26.95)
Abraham Verghese is a doctor, an accomplished memoirist (My Own Country) and, as he proves in Cutting for Stone, something of a magician as a novelist. This sprawling, 50-year epic begins with a touch of alchemy: the birth of conjoined twins to an Indian nun in an Ethiopian hospital in 1954. The likely father, a British surgeon, flees upon the mother’s death, and the (now separated) baby boys are adopted by a loving Indian couple who run the hospital. Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters — and opening a fascinating window onto the Third World —Cutting for Stone, while not perfect, is an underdog and a winner. Shades of Slumdog Millionaire. — Jocelyn McClurg | USA Today
“I will not cut for stone,” runs the text of the Hippocratic oath, “even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.”
Those words provide an epigraph partway through Abraham Verghese’s first novel, “Cutting for Stone,” and also explain the surname of its narrator, Marion Stone, along with his twin brother, Shiva, and their father, the almost entirely absent surgeon Thomas Stone. Absent in body only: in spirit, Thomas’s disappearance after their birth haunts and drives this book.
Yet until the reader comes across the oath, well into the novel, the title may seem pleasing to the ear but puzzling to the mind: it tries to do too many jobs at once. It neither suggests the book’s action — as, say, “Digging to America” does — nor evokes its mood, as “Bleak House” does. Still, Verghese strives for the empathy of Anne Tyler and the scope of Dickens. If he doesn’t quite manage either, he is to be admired for his ambition.
Verghese is a physician and an already accomplished author. His two nonfiction books, “My Own Country,” about AIDS in rural Tennessee, and “The Tennis Partner,” a moving and honest memoir of a difficult, intimate friendship, are justly celebrated. His commitment to both his professions is admirable: currently a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, he also holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But why mention qualifications? What do qualifications matter where fine writing is concerned? Not at all, is the correct answer, and yet qualifications like Verghese’s are tribute, at the very least, to his stalwart effort. This effort is both the making and the unmaking of “Cutting for Stone.”
The plot of this big, dense book is fairly straightforward. Marion and Shiva Stone are born one dramatic afternoon in 1954 in Addis Ababa, the same day their mother — a nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise — dies of complications from her hidden pregnancy. The boys are conjoined at the skull, yet separated at birth; they are raised by Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha, a forceful woman known as Hema, and Dr. Abhi Ghosh, both immigrants from Madras and both doctors at the hospital where the boys’ natural parents also worked. Missing Hospital, it’s called: “Missing was really Mission Hospital, a word that on the Ethiopian tongue came out with a hiss so it sounded like ‘Missing.’ ” They grow up amid the political turmoil of Ethiopia (its actual chronology altered slightly by Verghese to suit his fictional purposes), and in 1979 Marion flees, first to Nairobi and finally to New York, where he qualifies as a surgeon. Shiva, too, goes into medicine, specializing in treating vaginal fistula, for which work he is acclaimed in this very newspaper, a sure sign of his renown. Almost supernaturally close as children, the brothers become more and more distant as the novel progresses; they are dramatically reunited at its end — through the mysterious agency of the long-vanished Thomas Stone.
As a novelist, Verghese looks to models like Salman Rushdie and John Irving: the novel is capacious, not to say baggy, in the way those writers’ novels can be, and it is tinged, albeit lightly, with a sense of magic, though one senses that Verghese in his soul is too much a realist ever to be quite convinced of his own attempts in this department. (The brothers’ being joined — but only briefly — at the head is an example of this slightly half-hearted effort.) Much more forceful are his vivid descriptions of surgery, vivid enough that those with weaker stomachs may find them disturbing. One would, I suppose, be ill advised to use this novel as a textbook for liver transplantation or bowel surgery, but it might almost be possible. The trouble is that for all the author’s passion, this kind of writing periodically stops the book in its tracks: “Hema smiled, as if to say, Very little escapes me, my dear man. And then she was thinking of . . . rugaeform folds, of the median raphe that separated one bollock from the other, of the dartos muscle, the cells of Sertoli.” Hema’s mind, as the author then says, is racing: but the reader’s goes into a stall.
The novel is crippled, too, by the use of back story. There is a feeling of Greek drama about the narrative: a lot of the real action happens offstage. We finally learn, toward the end of the novel, what made Thomas Stone the man he is, with all his strengths and deficits, yet by then the tale seems curiously belated and less than fully integrated into the novel. The same is true for the later events in the life of Genet, Marion’s childhood sweetheart, the daughter of his nanny, who joins a band of Eritrean guerrillas but reappears fleetingly in Marion’s life to devastating effect. Verghese’s weakness is the weakness of a writer with too much heart: it’s clear he loves his characters and he just wants to cram in every last fact about them, somehow. Great novels are not built merely on the agglomeration of detail.
This is a first novel that reveals the author’s willingness to show the souls, as well as the bodies, of his characters. In Verghese’s second profession, a great surgeon is called an editor. Here’s hoping that in the future the author finds stronger medicine in that line.
(Erica Wagner is the literary editor of The Times of London and the author, most recently, of the novel “Seizure.”)
More than a decade ago, in 1994, Dr. Abraham Verghese made headlines when he wrote of his struggles as a doctor in a small town in Tennessee, helping his patients fight back the growing AIDS epidemic. His nonfiction book, My Own Country, became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the story of medicine in small town America was one Dr. Verghese brought home beautifully with it. My Own Country was set in Johnson City, Tennessee and Dr. Verghese showed us how American doctors are often loath to practice in small towns like it—leaving the locals to the care of “foreign medical graduates.” Dr. Verghese, an immigrant with South Indian roots, born and brought up in Ethiopia before political unrest forced him to flee, was one such foreign medical graduate.
Now, years later, Dr. Verghese has written his debut fiction novel, Cutting for Stone, and in here, he uses one of fiction’s favorite axioms: Write what you know. The story in Cutting for Stone seems to be modeled after at least a few of Dr. Verghese’s own experiences. Quite like Dr. Verghese, Marion Praise Stone, the novel’s protagonist, is also a doctor with South Indian roots, born and brought up in Ethiopia, who eventually immigrates to the United States in the wake of political unrest. The novel is written in the voice of Marion who narrates a grand tale—one of his birth along with his twin brother, of life growing up in the shadow of a missionary hospital in Ethiopia, of gradually increasing political strife in the country and finally of the life of an expatriate American doctor.
In an interview, Verghese said that his ambition in writing this fiction debut was “to tell a great story, an old-fashioned, truth-telling story.” The scope of Cutting for Stone—set as it is, on three continents—and spanning at least a few decades—is as ambitious as it gets. As the novel opens, Sister Mary Joseph Praise is leaving India (just as the country gains independence) for Ethiopia. She is a nun chosen by her diocese to cater to the dying in Africa. In Missing (an Ethiopian corruption of “Mission”) hospital in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, an unlikely relationship develops between her and the hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr. Thomas Stone. The product of the relationship is twin boys—Marion and Shiva Praise Stone. The twins are born conjoined at the head and before Sister Praise can receive the proper medical care, she bleeds to death in childbirth. The father, Dr. Stone is so distraught by all these happenings, that he completely walks out of Missing—leaving his twins behind. This huge act of abandonment will stay with Marion till the very end until he finally makes a tentative peace with it.
The twins are adopted by two other doctors at Missing Hospital—Hema and Ghosh—who do their best to give them a normal, healthy life. When they become teenagers, a deep misunderstanding develops between the brothers that slowly simmers and threatens to permanently sour their relationship. Cutting for Stone is set against large political events in Ethiopia—the coup that deposed the country’s emperor and put an army official, Mengistu, in charge; and the rise of the Eritrean Liberation Front, an organization that eventually brought about independence for Eritrea. In the novel, one of Marion’s friends is charged by the authorities for subversive activities. The authorities determine Marion to be guilty by association, and soon he is forced to flee the country for the United States.
Dr. Verghese describes the everyday workings of Missing hospital and of life in Ethiopia beautifully. He has said that his goal in writing Cutting for Stone was to show how “entering medicine was a passionate quest, a romantic pursuit, a spiritual calling.” And his descriptions of Hema’s career at Missing and especially that of the adoptive father, Ghosh, certainly fit that bill. Yet many of the situations in the story feel overly melodramatic. Verghese’s writing is often punctuated with dramatic similes and metaphors. And while he uses his doctor’s expertise to good effect, sometimes it feels like one is reading extended versions of Gray’s Anatomy, as in here:
With the colon swollen to Hindenburg proportions it would be all too easy to nick the bowel and spill feces into the abdominal cavity. He made a middle incision, then deepened it carefully, like a sapper defusing a bomb. Just when panic was setting in because he felt he was going nowhere, the glistening surface of the peritoneum—that delicate membrane that lined the abdominal cavity—came into view. When he opened the peritoneum, straw-colored fluid came out. Inserting his finger into the hole and using it as a backstop, he cut the peritoneum along the length of the incision.”
One of the other challenges of Cutting for Stone is its uneven pacing. With numerous side trips and distractions, frustratingly enough, just one event that the book opens with—the twins’ birth—takes Verghese nearly 150 pages to narrate. Although the pace does quicken somewhat after this, it remains shaky till the end.
The reader will also be struck by just how many times the doctors resort to God as a healer. In a country like Ethiopia (or India) where medical resources are limited and where destiny is a frequent explanation for why things go awry, perhaps this is understandable. Yet, I found it unnerving to have it come up so often in conversation even among science professionals. For example, a doctor like Marion Stone chalks up an appearance by an individual at a particular place and time to “a disturbance in the universe.” While I personally found it hard to digest such lines of thought, perhaps this would not be as big a problem for other readers.
As in My Own Country, Dr. Verghese is best when he describes the failings of the American medical system especially when it comes to serving the poor. “The poorest in America are the sickest,” he writes, “Poor people can’t afford preventive care or insurance. The poor don’t see doctors. They show up at our doorsteps when things are advanced.”
Dr. Verghese also does a good job at character development—Marion, the gifted twin Shiva, Hema, Ghosh and even Missing’s chief operator, a woman named simply as Matron—are all beautifully portrayed in the book. All in all Cutting for Stone is a good first effort. It is grand in scope and creates characters the readers can empathize with. Had Dr. Verghese toned down the melodrama a fair amount and paced the story better, Cutting for Stone would have been an even better read. Lessons for the next one, perhaps?
BADHAASAA, Ethiopia (AP) — A cattle-herding tribe in southern Ethiopia has crowned a new king in a secret ceremony considered so sacred that the Borena people believe it has the power to kill unauthorized observers.
Guyyoo Gobbaa sits surrounded by people shortly after he was crowned the 70th king of the cattle-herding Borena people, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2009 in Badhaasaa in southern Ethiopia. Guyyoo Gobbaa became the 70th king of the Borena people this Tuesday in a secret ceremony considered so sacred it has the power to kill unauthorized observers. Like his predecessors, he was chosen from birth to serve an eight year term in a system that rotates power between the tribe’s top clans and is as difficult to explain to outsiders as the American electoral college.(AP Photo/Anita Powell)
Guyyoo Gobbaa is spending the three days following his inauguration Tuesday drinking warm beer under an acacia tree and eating goat meat with various elders and government officials, some of whom walked hundreds of miles to his village.
Like his predecessors, Guyyoo was chosen from birth to serve an eight-year term in a system that rotates power between the tribe’s top clans and is as difficult to explain to outsiders as the American electoral college.
“If you see them exchanging power you’ll die,” said Mohammed Nur, a member of the Borena tribe who is also a local government official. “You’ll spit blood. It is totally sacred.”
The Borena king is recognized as an Ethiopian government official and his duties will include mediating in land disputes between tribes.
Traditional rulers exist alongside formal government in many African countries, and their behind-the scenes influence can help or hinder vital national interests.
In the oil-rich Niger Delta, chiefs in top hats and coral beads have sponsored peace talks between rival militant gangs and helped free foreign hostages. In Uganda, the government has legally limited the traditionally independent kingdoms to cultural custodians, but they can use their influence to encourage people to take part in campaigns like the one trying to limit the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Guyyoo, a 36-year-old cattle farmer, has promised to fix his 1 million people’s ailing economy by improving access to livestock markets and patching up relations with other tribes.
Desertification and punishing droughts are gradually pushing Guyyoo’s people to seek pasture for their cattle and camel herds further and further from home, bringing them into conflict with other tribes already settled on those lands.
Guyyoo’s official seal of power is a whip made of rhinoceros and giraffe parts, but he says he does not intend to use it, preferring diplomacy.
“My main aim is to uphold this traditional culture,” he said. “Not only for Borena. For the whole of Ethiopia.”
The Borena say their system, which dates back more than 550 years, relies on co-operation between the clans to ensure peaceful transitions and limits the potential damage caused by a bad king to eight years.
But even as they hail their new king, perhaps the advantages of a different form of governance have not been entirely lost on the Borena.
The 2-month-old son of Mohammed, the government official, is not eligible for the Borena kingship under traditional rules. But little Barack’s father — so named after Mohammed’s wife lost her plea to name the boy Obama — demurred before ruling him out.
“I don’t know,” he said when asked about the future. “Maybe we won’t want the traditional power. Maybe we’ll want the democratic one.”
Ethiopians have for centuries made a honey wine known as tej. You can sometimes find this meadlike beverage for sale at some Ethiopian restaurants. Or, you could try a mead made domestically.
For most diners looking for that Ethiopian meal out at a restaurant or for takeout, the drink of choice most likely will be beer or a grape-based wine.
The question is: What sort of wine to pour with Ethiopia’s highly seasoned meat and vegetable dishes, most of which are served on rounds of injera, the tart Ethiopian flat bread made from teff flour.
Tom Benezra of Sal’s Beverage World stores, located in the Chicago suburbs, wants a wine with an “earthy minerality” alongside the fruitiness to enliven the food. That’s why he goes with Old World or Old World-influenced white wines. He particularly likes a South African chenin blanc or a French Vouvray to counter the berbere spice paste, a widely used combination of red pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, onion, garlic and other seasonings, that provides zip in many Ethiopian dishes.
“For red wine drinkers, the fruity-spicy combination found in California zinfandel and Australian shiraz will work especially well with beef dishes,” he said. “Expect some fireworks in your mouth if the dish is hot.”
Natalie MacLean, a Canadian wine writer who runs an online food and wine matcher at her Web site, nataliemaclean.com, likes cabernet sauvignon with lamb-based Ethiopian dishes.
“But stick with New World cabs that are more fruit-forward and can also handle the spices in the dish,” she added. With doro wot, the Ethiopian chicken and egg stew, MacLean recommends an oaked chardonnay for a white or a syrah for a red.
“These deep, voluptuous wines will marry nicely with the richness of the dish,” she said.
The tasting
We tried three reds, two white and a honey wine to find a good match for doro wot, the popular Ethiopian chicken and egg stew. Why a honey wine? It’s a traditional beverage in Ethiopia. The big winner? A South African chenin blanc. It scored first on its own and when paired with the doro wot. As with all food-wine ratings, the final score reflects how well the wine and the food worked together.
2007 Mulderbosch Chenin Blanc
This South African white had a brilliant light yellow color, a jazzy herbal nose and a mouthwatering crispness. The richness of the doro wot cut the wine’s tartness while the wine made the stew taste spicier. $15
2006 Yangarra Grenache McLaren Vale Old Vine
This big Australian red had a nose of eucalyptus and smoke. The flavor offered lots of black cherry fruit and a touch of mint. The wine and the doro wot balanced each other well; the wine’s flavor lingered on the palate. $24
NV Wild Blossom Meadow Mead
Tasters loved this Chicago honey wine’s intense clove scent. A refreshing acidity kept sweetness in check. But panelists weren’t so sure how the mead worked with doro wot. Some thought the wine’s spices gave the stew a delicious zap, yet others thought the mead didn’t work with all of the stew’s ingredients, especially the hard-cooked egg. $13.
2006 Georges Duboeuf Fleurie
A red from one of so-called cru villages of France’s Beaujolais region. The nose was a tad musty, and the flavor was lean on fruit, but the doro wat’s seasoned sauce reinvigorated the wine to a degree. $15
2004 Kim Crawford Chardonnay, Tietjen & Briant Vineyards
This white from New Zealand’s Gisborne wine region was classic chard: color, aroma and flavor. Expect notes of vanilla, oak, toast. The texture of the buttery wine made the doro wot seem plusher. $17
2005 Ajello Majus Nero d’Avola
Solo was a terrific Sicilian red, with an extraordinary nose of tea, tobacco and cedar and a lush fruit flavor kept in check by just the right degree of tannin. But the wine lost its luster with the doro wot. The two vied too much for attention, reducing each other. $11
Sources: These wines may or may not be in stock at your local store; inquire first. At least one of these wines was found at these stores: Binny’s Beverage Depot , Sal’s Beverage World, Sam’s Wines & Spirits, Sav-Way Fine Wine & Spirits, Uncork It, DiCarlo Fine Wine & Spirits in Mundelein. Prices are rounded off.
BANTU, Ethiopia — This year, impoverished children in one Ethiopian village have something they’ve never known before—hope for the future.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – The roll-out of antiretroviral therapy has led to a decline of about 50% in adult AIDS deaths in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, over a period of five years, according the findings of a study published in the February 20th edition of the journal AIDS.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (PANA) – The Foreign Affairs Ministry in Ethiopia has lambasted the 
Abraham Verghese is a doctor, an accomplished memoirist (My Own Country) and, as he proves in Cutting for Stone, something of a magician as a novelist. This sprawling, 50-year epic begins with a touch of alchemy: the birth of conjoined twins to an Indian nun in an Ethiopian hospital in 1954. The likely father, a British surgeon, flees upon the mother’s death, and the (now separated) baby boys are adopted by a loving Indian couple who run the hospital. Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters — and opening a fascinating window onto the Third World —Cutting for Stone, while not perfect, is an underdog and a winner. Shades of Slumdog Millionaire. — Jocelyn McClurg | 
Ethiopians have for centuries made a honey wine known as tej. You can sometimes find this meadlike beverage for sale at some Ethiopian restaurants. Or, you could try a mead made domestically.