Tigray
Flying into Mekelle, the capital of Tigray, is done via a tiny propeller plane that shakes with turbulence, while the passengers shake with cold due to the barely regulated cabin temperature. When we disembarked, frozen feet stumbling on the asphalt runway, the first thing I was struck by was the emptiness. Dry bluffs stretched around the horizon, dotted with scrub, and the tiny modern airport with its carefully manicured garden was a white oasis in the middle of nowhere. Not a person in sight. I turned to Amel and said, “Where is everybody?” It was the first time I have seen the open landscape with no people—no goat or camel herders, no women burdened with bales of firewood, no donkeys with tchat, no children. It was an astonishing emptiness.The town turned out to be a few kilometers down the nicest paved road I’ve been on in Ethiopia (this trend continues throughout Mekelle), situated in dry brown plains framed by tabletop mountain bluffs, and boasting a cloud of dust instead of the customary cloud of smog suspended over the city center. The surrounds are empty of people and settlements, and the whole scene makes me think of Luke Skywalker’s home planet.
Mekelle is a quiet, clean town of 200,000 people, with surprisingly smooth, broad boulevards and palm trees which seem oddly Arabic—Amel kept having flashbacks to her childhood in Saudi. The homes are constructed with limestone and have tiny squares or crosses for windows, reminding me of the old plains villages in northern Spain, where you could find cornerstones with Roman inscriptions forming someone’s doorstep. The second thing I noticed (after the amazing roads, for which I am increasingly nostalgic) was the lack of street children and beggars, compared to Addis. This is partly due to Mekelle’s small size, relative and recent prosperity, and a strong cultural disapproval of open begging. This disapproval goes double for young women, who are forced to turn to prostitution when they are kicked out of school and home by early pregnancy or when abandoned by their husbands. This is partly why I am here, to document the really phenomenal work of one of our partners addressing this vulnerability. More on that later.
There are many new buildings, mostly empty but nicely painted, indicating the newness of investment in the area. Some background for my fellow history geeks: Tigray was the region hardest hit by the rule of the Derg, the famines of the 80s, and the current government’s war with its sister Eritrea, whose capital Asmara is a short hop over the mountains and UN military buffer zone. Most Tigrayans have family in Eritrea and vice versa; the two areas were not formally separated until the 1998-2000 war, when about 100,000 Ethiopians were estimated to have died in the conflict. Tigray resistance formed the backbone of the movement which eventually overturned the Derg; thus, the current government is formed of many ex-guerrilla fighters from the rural, semi-arid area.
The UN Military Observers have their HQ in Mekelle and I saw many of them walking around in full fatigues—our hotel was a popular eating spot for them. Eritrea recently kicked out the UN Observers on its side, leading to the increased consternation that the war would resume, but it appears to be a political game on Meles’ side and Isaias, the Eritrean leader who is rumored to be a cousin of Meles, is an egomaniac who plays right along.
posted by Margot @ 3:25 AM
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