YEMEN – Habebah Hussein Mohamed, an Ethiopian national residing in Yemen as a refugee for more than 26 years has been a long-time volunteer to defend other Ethiopians in need of someone to report their daily sufferings to the Yemeni authorities.
Because of that, she has encountered many problems and harassment, either from Ethiopians working for the new government or from Yemenis unsympathetic to Ethiopians. She says an encounter has resulted in losing one of her eyes.
With regards to the current situation of the Ethiopian refugees, Habebah said that she is dedicating her time to defending the 530 who remain; the rest having been either repatriated or moved to another country.
She said that the problem of refugees began in 1995 when the Yemeni Government halted the material support, shelter, food and water and kicked out from their camp in Taiz. They were technically homeless in Yemen, she says. The security authorities later on began to arrest them and several were imprisoned.
Only Habebah was writing complaints to Refugees Division of Ministry of Interior for their release. Their situation was deteriorating from bad to worse, she said.
The Yemeni Authority asked the High Commissioner for Refugee in Geneva to find solutions for the 530 Ethiopian former officers and files in which they received assistant from end of 1995 till 1999, represented temporary resident permit and protection as refugees. The Refugee Commission to Sana’a stopped issuing these permits as refugees on the pretext the instruction of the Yemeni authorities not to grant them this identity.
Habebah, through the various media means, is urging the Yemeni Authorities and High Commissioner for Refugees to deal with the Ethiopian in Yemen humanly and not to vow to pressure the Ethiopian Government to repatriate them against their wills.
She also calls on the international organization and the United Nations affiliated organizations on refugees and peaceful settlement of disputes to intervene to accept them as refugees n Yemen or find a third country for them as their lives are still in danger by the current regime in Addis Ababa.
This visit to Ethiopia has been absolutely amazing, inspiring, saddening, heart-wrenching and humbling all at the same time. It’s hard to describe these experiences, but I’m going to try my best. Telling you how I feel about these is even more difficult, I need to reflect before I can try to share those.
So where do I start? The last couple of days here in Addis Ababa have been pretty intense… Our local crew have been showing us around the city, taking us to spots both well-known and off the beaten path.
Yesterday morning we met up with Abraham for a journey to the top of Entoto Mountain. It started out as a short walk from the Piazza area of town, just in front of Castelli’s Restaurant (which has become our meeting point). We trotted up Cunningham Street, stopping for a late hamburger brunch at La Coquette, located across from a local cinema and at a major intersection making for great people-watching. We continued on down the road to an impromptu bus stop, to begin our planned journey to the top of Entoto Mountain.
Ethiopian mini-buses are a common sight on the roads of Addis. Blue side paneling with white roofs, they are converted cargo vans with ten to twelve seats, and a capacity of about 25. The driver will usually decorate the bus with various religious articles, bumper stickers and other assorted paraphernalia. A ride in one of these typically costs between 0.50 and 1.00 Birr (about 5 to 10 cents US). As we boarded, the bus parked in front of it began to reverse and hit our vehicle. The drivers of each bus yelled at each and other this was When Cornelia noticed the Norwegian sticker plastered on the rear windshield which said (in Norwegian) “PLEASE KEEP YOUR DISTANCE”. Since the buses remained parked about 6 centimetres from each other, we were close enough to get a good photo of the sticker, which will be posted in due course. The bus we boarded was one of six we took that day to complete our journey to the top of Entoto.
Along our journey I saw a number of things, all of them interesting, some of them sad, some thought-provoking, and others just typical images of daily life in Ethiopia:
– A barefoot boy of about seven years of age eating discarded fruits out of a rubbish bin on the side of the road
– A woman with no eyes begging for money
– An artist friend of Abe’s dressed Rastafarian-style, showing off photos of his artwork (one of them I am considering buying — a v v cool mirror/painting combination)
– a road built by the Chinese, presumably as part of their bid to extend their sphere of influence to emerging markets in Africa (Ethiopia being one of the few African countries which has natural resources to offer China – Ethiopia’s main exports are coffee, flowers and qat – the last an edible narcotic illegal in the US but legal in the UK).
– elderly women carrying huge loads of dried grass, branches and other underbrush on their backs, hobbling down mountain roads while groups of five or six men lounge on the roadside in the shade)
– panoramic views of the city of Addis from a curving mountain road
– plantations of eucalyptus trees which apparently are water-intense and were introduced by Australians in 1905. The heavily forested mountain-side is now an important source of firewood for the city.
– a long line-up of people sitting on the ground with piles of jerrycans (gasoline cans) around them – they were waiting to fill them up with water at 0.25 Birr for 10 litres (about 2.5 cents US). That may not seem like much but in a country where those who work, do so for about a dollar or two dollars a day, and many don’t work at all and resort to begging or making money from unstable means (such as working as an independent tour guide), the plight of Ethiopia’s poor begins to dawn on you. A new friend here who is doing a fellowship with the Ministry of Water told me that NGO estimates are that about 30% of the country is covered by the water distribution network. The government estimates it at about 50%. The lack of access to clean water by the local people of course exacerbates the existing problems of disease, poverty, and famine.
On our sixth and final bus change, I got outside of the bus to stretch my legs and began talking to a group of local men in their late teens and early twenties. One of them introduced himself as Maradona. Another, who spoke broken English and had a bright but wary smile, approached me and introduced himself as Samuel. He told me that they were a group of friends but he was the only one who spoke much English at all. He recounted how he had learned his English from giving impromptu tour guides to foreigners that he would encounter randomly in the city. At twenty years old, he had just finished a technical course in baking and confectionery and was looking for work and seeking to expand his skill base. He seemed like someone with a bright spirit and a good heart, so I introduced him to Abraham who I felt might be a good role model for him. The two of them immediately hit off, so we invited Samuel along on our journey and began our final ascent to the peak.
Entoto Mountain overlooks the city of Addis and is situated at 3,200m above sea level (Addis itself is at 2,500m above sea level) and is home to the former capital of Ethiopia, Entoto. Emperor Menelik II and his wife Empress Taytu lived at the top of Entoto over 100 years ago and ruled the country from that naturally defensible location. It is now the site of a museum and a monastery and the emperor’s former palace. More recently it has become famous among Ethiopians as the source of a “holy water” which can cure people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Today there is a small community of sick and disabled people who live atop the mountain.
At the top of the mountain, we visited an HIV-positive boy of 8 years old, who lived in a hut made of branches and mud and covered with a blue tarp to keep out the rain. It had no running water and no electricity and it was a small room about the size of a bathroom. At least three people lived there, consisting of the boy, his mother, and another woman (who was HIV+). None of them work and depend on begging to pay the “house rent” of 65 Birr a month (6.5 dollars US) and buy food and water. HIV medication is provided free by a local aid agency. The boy, who was diagnosed with HIV five years ago (it was not clear during our visit how he contracted it) cannot speak apparently due to permanent complications from spinal meningitis. Oe of the consequences of spinal meningitis is deafness.
Meeting the boy and his mother was the objective of our visit to the top of Entoto Mountain. Our other activities while we were up there included a two-hour hike through mountain-top farmland, playing soccer (football) with local schoolchildren, a visit to local artist Wasihun Amake (sp?), a tour of the museum and palace hosting artifacts from Emperor Menelik’s reign.
There’s so much more I could write about… the dinner out at Zebra Grill with Will Davies and Bryn Saxe last night, the nightcap at Harlem Jazz, our visit to the Merkato (one of Africa’s largest markets) today, the time spent with Abraham, Solomon and the newest member of our local crew — Samuel… but will save some of those memories for my next update and others for my grandchildren.
Modern humans may have evolved more than 80,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study of sophisticated stone tools found in Ethiopia.
The tools were uncovered in the 1970s at the archaeological site of Gademotta, in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. But it was not until this year that new dating techniques revealed the tools to be far older than the oldest known Homo sapien bones, which are around 195,000 years old.
Using argon-argon dating—a technique that compares different isotopes of the element argon—researchers determined that the volcanic ash layers entombing the tools at Gademotta date back at least 276,000 years.
Many of the tools found are small blades, made using a technique that is thought to require complex cognitive abilities and nimble fingers, according to study co-author and Berkeley Geochronology Center director Paul Renne.
Some archaeologists believe that these tools and similar ones found elsewhere are associated with the emergence of the modern human species, Homo sapiens.
“It seems that we were technologically more advanced at an earlier time that we had previously thought,” said study co-author Leah Morgan, from the University of California, Berkeley.
The findings are published in the December issue of the journal Geology.
Desirable Location
Gademotta was an attractive place for people to settle, due to its close proximity to fresh water in Lake Ziway and access to a source of hard, black volcanic glass, known as obsidian.
“Due to its lack of crystalline structure, obsidian glass is one of the best raw materials to use for making tools,” Morgan explained.
In many parts of the world, archaeologists see a leap around 300,000 years ago in Stone Age technology from the large and crude hand-axes and picks of the so-called Acheulean period to the more delicate and diverse points and blades of the Middle Stone Age.
At other sites in Ethiopia, such as Herto in the Afar region northeast of Gademotta, the transition does not occur until much later, around 160,000 years ago, according to argon dating. This variety in dates supports the idea of a gradual transition in technology.
“A modern analogy might be the transition from ox-carts to automobiles, which is virtually complete in North America and northern Europe, but is still underway in the developing world,” said study co-author Renne, who received funding for the Gadmotta analysis from the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)
Morgan, of UC Berkeley, speculates that the readily available obsidian at Gademotta may explain why the technological revolution occurred so early there.
Complicated family tree
The lack of bones at Gademotta makes it difficult to determine who made these specialist tools. Some archaeologists believe it had to be Homo sapiens, while other experts think that other human species may have had the required mental capability and manual dexterity.
Regardless of who made the tools, the dates help to fill a key gap in the archaeological record, according to some experts.
“The new dates from Gademotta help us to understand the timing of an important behavioral change in human evolution,” said Christian Tryon, a professor of anthropology from New York University, who wasn’t involved in the study.
If anything, the story has now become more complex, added Laura Basell, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford in the U.K.
“The new date for Gademotta changes how we think about human evolution, because it shows how much more complicated the situation is than we previously thought,” Basell said.
“It is not possible to simply associate specific species with particular technologies and plot them in a line from archaic to modern.”
The Woyanne kangaroo court in Ethiopia has sentenced popular Ethiopian singer Tewodros Kassahun (Teddy Afro) to 6 years in prison today after convicting him of hit-and-run and manslaughter. He is also ordered to pay 18,000 birr in fines.
Judge Leul Gebremariam, who also conducted the sham ‘treason’ trial of Kinijit leaders 2 years ago, prevented Teddy from making a statement after the sentencing, angrily telling him to get out, according to EMF sources.
Leul Gebremariam is not a real judge. He is Woyanne cadre who is assigned to conduct show trials against individuals who are deemed enemy by the ruling party.
Thousands of Teddy fans had gathered outside of the court that was surrounded by heavily armed Federal Police troopers. There crowed dispersed with no major incident after Teddy was transported back to prison.
Let me entice you with yet another book that I cannot put down despite the busy schedule toward the end of the semester. Cutting For Stone is the debut novel of Dr. Abraham Verghese, who is a Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University. Set in Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, in 1954, Sister Mary Joseph Praise died in childbirth. She is survived by twin sons Marion and Shiva. Rumor has it that Dr. Thomas Stone for whom Sister has worked as an assistant in the surgery room is the father of the twins.
The novel is narrated by one of the twin brothers. The gripping read takes opens in a mission hospital in Ethiopia and travels on a boat out of India to Yemen, then an inner-city hospital in New York City, and finally back in Ethiopia to complete the epic story of the twin brothers who seek to unlock the life of their mother.
“We two unnamed babies, newly arrived, were without breath. If most newborns meet life outside the womb with a shrill, piercing wail, ours was the saddest of all songs: the stillborn’s song of silence…The legend of our birth is this: identical twins born of a nun who died in childbirth, father unknown, possibly yet inconceivably Thomas Stone. The legend grew, ripened with age, and, in the retelling, new details came to light. But looking back after fifty years, I see that there are still particulars missing.” [98]
The novel is scheduled to release by Knopf in February 2009. Dr. Verghese will kick off his 14-city book tour in our very own Palo Alto in the Bay Area.
