7.22.2006

Home

I am finally home, reeling from jetlag and long plane rides and lack of sleep and although I remember it well, I am still surprised by how clean everything is around here. Clean and white, I should add. Going through passport checking at Logan Airport was the first time I have been in a predominantly white crowd since last August. It was a strange realization.

Also strange is the way my mind is managing to hold two apparently contradictory realities simultaneously at hand as I start to move and function again in my familiar Old World. Flowing the 7 miles home down the smooth highway road, Big Dig disasters notwithstanding, I had a mental image of the precarious, mountainous, slippery Dessie road and its tipped buses and hairpin turns surrounded by people who have to spend a full day to travel 400 km. Walking into a Starbucks this morning (I had to, just for the novelty), I had a mental image of ordering macchiatos in small latte glasses at a rickety sticky table in a rural cafe while habesha music blares from busted speakers. Seeing a woman carrying a pink chubby baby in a carryall, my mind reflects to the fuzzily tattooed face and triangular hair arrangement of a barefoot young girl strapped with a shawl and a baby. It's quite disconcerting.

But as hard as it may be to grasp once comfortably esconced in the land of luxury, these two realities DO exist at once; and if you look hard enough, you can see the effects of the one in the other. For example, right now in the U.S., there is a bill called the HR 5680, the "Ethiopia Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights Advancement Act of 2006." It states the somewhat conflicting goals of a US Policy towards Ethiopia:

"(1) support the advancement of human rights, democracy, independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press, peacekeeping capacity building, and economic development in the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia;

(2) collaborate with Ethiopia in the Global War on Terror;

(3) seek the unconditional release of all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in Ethiopia;

(4) foster stability, democracy, and economic development in the region"

Namely, I find #2 to be the most likely to conflict strongly and even override numbers 1-4 (ummmm, Somalia and warlords on CIA bankrolls ring a bell, anyone?), but at least it's not the first item on the agenda, which is promising. The recent human rights abuses of the past year are discussed in the bill and attribute the burden of guilt to the current government, which is a good start. So are the explicit mentions of steps to open up the political scene and free the genocide-charged "prisoners of conscience," namely opposition party members, elected representatives, journalists and pretty much anyone (surviving) who was bold enough to speak out about the atrocities from June 2005 onwards.

If you find that you have an interest in Ethiopia's future, and in a future for its people, you should write your representatives and urge them to pledge support for this bill, a bill that the Ethiopian Government is allegedly currently lobbying hard against. As usual, Weichegud! (follow previous link) has a hilarious post about this, imagined dialogue and all...

posted by Margot @ 6:41 AM