Black man arise!

 

We don’t want to go, but we are coming. We are almost melancholic, the transports, the adventures, the Rastafarians, nice music and nice weather. We have made more than 30 interviews; we have visited so many different people. We have been moving around Addis Ababa like crazy. Lorenzo’s favourite place is the Entoto Mountain, between arat kilo and sidist kilo, and the campus of social sciences, an old palace given from Haile Selassie to the students.

DV 2009

The DV 2009 is very popular in Ethiopia. The US green card lottery makes many dream with migration. All over Addis Ababa, internet shops offer the possibility to help fill out online questionnaires. For a small fee (around 7br) anyone can fill out a form prepared in the shop and give in some photos (or make them there as well). The internet shop takes care of the rest.

The Green Card lottery program enables non-American natives to obtain their US immigration Green Card citizenship through a lottery based program that makes available 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.

For a European citizen a lottery system sounds like something only American could invent. It carries with it the fate and the luck that a self made man needs. Europeans seem rather to set on a more anal question of rights.

Bunna, Spris, Harar-Beer

Although once we asked for cappucino, they gave us milk with choco powder, macchiato is instead the wonderword for the nicest drink, and it comes in all varieties and styles!!!

But there are so many great things to drink besides bunna…

Interview Log

For the moment we have the following accounts:

Good to be back in Addis again

Oops… ist’s been a while: Ethiopia is too much fun to sit around and blog (+ the connection is tooo terrible).

So we left Addis for Shashemene and passed by the lake Zway and all over the place we found very nice people, wonderful hospitality, and loads of women that had been in Beirut!

And we filmed, and we talked and we went to Jamaica, and we travelled on old buses, horse driven “garis” and even on the redcross ambulance (just for the pleasure). And we saw a dead hyena, live pelicanos and the huge ethiopian Savannah…

We dream of postponing our return, but I guess we won’t.

As for our work, everything is going much better than we expected, we are terribly busy and I hope we will be able to give some very intelligent observations. The first one is: We love Ethiopia!!!!!

Coca Cola

The New Millennium in the Land with the 13 Months of Sunshine

The new millennium came on September 11th to Ethiopia, and it is still present everywhere, with national flags or what is remaining of them, welcoming signs, the unavoidable Ethiopian coffee grain, a government campaign and t-shirts, earrings and songs (like Teddy Afro’s Abebayeoh)

Notes on Coffee

The image for the Ethiopian New Millennium is a grain of coffee surrounded by the national flag, because coffee plays a very significant role in Ethiopia. It is its main export product (or the 2^nd according to our research) and is celebrated in everyday life with the timely coffee ceremony, where women make coffee starting by roasting the grain. They burn incense at the same time, another typical Ethiopian product, alongside with slaves, especially for the Arab peninsula.

In Ethiopian mythology, Kaldi, a young goatherd, first noticed the effects on coffee back in the 10th century. Kaldi’s coffee is also the name of the fake Starbuck’s that opened near the Airport, in the modern Bole Rd area. Its owner, a priced women entrepreneur, Tseday Asrat, in Addis Ababa supposedly asked Starbucks for a franchise and did not get it, so she went on her own. Kaldi’s resembles Starbucks, the same green aprons, lettering and expensive coffee.

Maybe Howard Schultz visited Kaldi’s lately during his official visit to President Zenawi. They have ended the months long dispute, earlier this year, because Starbucks’ opposed Ethiopia’s plans to copyright its coffee, Starbucks has signed distribution, marketing and licensing agreements with Ethiopia.

As usual, coffee is business.

Il business del Development Aid

Let us remember that the main purpose of aid is not to help other nations, but to help ourselves.

Richard Nixon

L’aiuto economico, attraverso cui i paesi ricchi (o maggiormente sviluppati) versano ogni anno milioni di dollari nelle casse dei paesi del cosiddetto terzo mondo, non solo è perfettamente inutile, ma è anzi assolutamente dannoso. La semplice considerazione che negli ultimi 60 anni tutti i paesi più poveri si siano ulteriormente impoveriti, nonostante gli ingenti e costanti flussi di aiuti economici, e siano sommersi inoltre da un debito insostenibile, dovrebbe essere sufficiente a decretare il fallimento di tali politiche ed auspicarne la fine immediata.

Invece quello che accade, paradossalmente, è proprio il contrario: gli aiuti economici ogni anno, da 60 anni, aumentano. Il business delle ONG, sparse oramai per tutto il terzo mondo da circa 20 anni, non ha affatto migliorato la situazione, anzi, la ha peggiorata, se possibile.

 

Women migration from Ethiopia to Lebanon

Defining the actors:

- Women: wanting to migrate to the Middle East, and returnees as well as those (friends or family) working in Lebanon

- Private sector: agencies (legal/informal – trafficking)

- Government: labour office, women’s affairs – Lebanese representation in Ethiopia

- Non governmental or Inter governmental actors: international development bodies (UNDP – UN Development Programme, IOM – International Organization for Migration), lawyers (EWLA – Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association), local NGOs or organizations (?), religious institutions or organizations near to the church/islam (?)

- Academia/ Media: how female migration is perceived in Ethiopian society

Our fieldwork in Addis Ababa began by defining the actors we wanted to contact, besides the women themselves, to understand the phenomenon of women migration. The principal actors were established as being: the government, the private sector (agencies) and non governmental actors including international development bodies like the UNDP or the IOM, but also local associations like the EWLA or local organizations that provide in anyway support to the women. Finally, we will try to understand how the phenomenon of women’s migration is perceived in Ethiopian media and society.

Defining the places:

- aeroport of Bole
- immigration office where the women get their passports done
- employment agencies

1^st Day

Today we interviewed Mahdere Paulos, the director of the Ethiopian Women lawyers Association, and Dawit and Asefach from the Counter-trafficking unit of the IOM. From their accounts emerges a recapitulation of the emergence of the issue of human traffic. The first complaints and distress calls from women were filed at the EWLA at the end of the 90’s. The EWLA decided to engage themselves in the case of Teshiwork, an Ethiopian woman accused of murdering her employer in XXx and sentenced to death. Other cases that lead to media interest involved the death of domestic workers in Lebanon, which seems to be very prominent in the abuse of these workers.

The first surveys and information round tables on the situation were financed by the IOM at the beginning of the year 2000 and led to the creation of a specialised unit in the organization. Since then and until now, the IOM has taken the lead in tackling the issue. An inquiry commission of the Ethiopian government lead to the establishment of an Ethiopian consulate in Beirut, to give support to the workers.
At the moment the government gives legal permits to employment agencies, which number around 60, although informal traffickers are still at work. Advocacy of the EWLA has led to a change of the Criminal Code on 2005 to include cases of forced labour and higher fines for human traffic.

The IOM collaborates with the government now to “manage labour migration” (in IOM terminology) that is, to prepare agencies for example in convenient pre-departure programs to prepare the women for migration. The IOM unit has also followed up with a series of brochures, conferences at schools and a weekly radio program to create awareness on the risks of informal work migration. Women migrating seem to be young (18 to 25), school dropouts and with little or no chances in the local labour market, who are mostly unaware of the risks they are taking. Legal migration involves registering with an employment agency which does not charge the worker with fees for the recruitment (everything has to be paid by the future employer) and can be held accountable for the wellbeing of the worker. Illegal migration or human traffic is used to define the case where these woman resort to brokers that charge the women with enormous fees to find them work and where the woman find themselves working for up to a year to pay back for the recruitment.