Addis

After spending just two weeks in Addis Ababa Ethiopia I’ve realized this will be unlike any East African experience to date.  I landed in Addis one month ago to a cool evening.  Landing with a visa in hand I zipped through customs and escaped into the night ecstatic to be released from the confines of the steel capsule that had imprisoned me for the previous 16 hours on the flight over the Pacific from Nova Scotia.  I was driven to my hotel in a taxi vehicle produced by the company Lada from Russia.  These vehicles are ultra compact, gutless cars that seem to struggle on the slightest incline but are well known for their excellent gas mileage and simple design, facilitating easy maintenance.  With my head pressed against the roof we belched along for 15 minutes, and I was dropped off in front of a large newly built 10 story hotel, the Desalegn.  I had arrived.

Over the last month, orienting myself, I came to the realization that Addis Ababa is a large and very-fast growing city.  Everywhere I would look I could see buildings going up with their wild wooden pole scaffolding nailed together and looking like balsa wood stick structures, like I used to build in grade school, encapsulating the growing concrete and steel structures within.

 I experienced the city driving around with the manager of Oxfam Canada offices in East Africa and the Horn of Africa.  She lived in the Ethiopian Capitol last ten years ago and has made countless visits since, yet she could not contain her amazement at the changes in infrastructure that had gone in almost overnight.   Where once slums or small markets bustled with daily activities, giant modern buildings had taken their place.  This is a massive city, more modern and faster growing than any I have seen in my journeys through Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda.

If you ask a local person how many people live in Addis Ababa they just tend to shake their head with a small grin and say "who knows."  Some say 3 million people and others estimate it at 5.  Some say it doesn't even matter because the growth is happening so quickly once you secure a census it is already outdated.

In an attempt to find respite from the smog and congestion of my neighborhood, one weekend, I looked to climb the highest prominence in the area, a small hill elevated 600 or 700 vertical feet above the 8000ft base elevation upon which the city rests.

I began walking along the busy highways near my house and then turned onto paved side roads that ran through the more affluent neighborhoods with walls spiraled with razor wire and bougainvillea bushes bursting with flowers.  Keeping the hill in my sights, I eventually came to a rocky-unleveled road that led me up onto the flanks of the hill and between corrugated metal shacks and funky wooden shops and then on to old narrow stone paths, likely built by the Italians, which led straight up the hillside.  These stone paths gave way to old footpaths and heavily eroded drainages that I climbed making my way towards the modest summit.  Reaching at the top of the hill I expected to see on the other side a glimpse of rural Ethiopia.  To my amazement I found another arm of this massive city sprawling out below me.  Unknown millions of people and growing!