Bush’s Prostitution Loyalty Oath

George Bush: a good man in Africa As he starts a five-nation tour, the US president is an unlikely hero to the poor of a continent ravaged by Aids

This cheerful report (Guardian) on Bush’s Africa tour, reminds us about some of the issues at stake like AFRICOM or HIV programmes in Africa. Some of what we had seen in Ethiopia came to mind.

PEPFAR (The United States President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief ; please check their website out: photos of Bush with African children and glossy promotional videos) was founded in 2003 and has showered billions of dollars to some 15 countries in Africa. The fact that it has been an overpowering display of money has been widely acknowledged:The Global AIDS Act authorized the President to spend up to $15 billion over 5 years (2004—2008), including $10 billion in new money to expand global HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria programs. (from Pepfarwatch)

The music we like

 

 

In Etiopia, ogni istante è accompagnato dalla musica proveniente da negozi di dischi, bar, ristoranti e autoradio. Inizialmente, la difficoltà consiste nell’adattarsi al volume degli altoparlanti, che sono sempre al massimo e spesso in overdrive, ma superata questa fase, dopo la prima settimana, si cominciano a capire e ad apprezzare i gusti musicali degli etiopi.

 

 

 

Tito & Me

One of our last days in Addis, Luisa brought us finally to meet her beloved grandfather: Jagema Kello is an 80-year-old man full of stories to tell. Still a young boy, he was already one of the leaders of the Ethiopian anti-colonial resistance.

He showed us a lot of pictures of himself during the guerilla years: his Afro hairstyle was supposed to scare the Italian soldiers, but we find it incredibly beautiful.

So many friends

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