A Day in the Life in Hawassa
Every morning I wake up to sound of Amaric music, goats, and the conversations of the hotel staff on the floors below mine. I make my way down for breakfast where I have gotten in the habit of treating myself with freshly squeezed mango juice every morning. Mangos surely don’t taste like this in the United States. Shortly after, I am picked up via motorcycle by my colleague Desta, who is the program facilitator for the Girl Power Education Project. We discuss the after work happenings in between the nearly constant waves and hellos Desta says during our ride. Somehow he seems to know about half of the people in Hawassa. When we arrive at the CISO office I begin with my work. I am creating a new website for CISO and am in the process of putting the final touches on it. If you want to learn more details about CISO’s work, please take a peek! I also have been working on networking with other donor and partner organizations. CISO is working to expand its projects to other kebeles (villages) in southern Ethiopia and therefore needs to expand its funding and capacity resources. I fear that the CISO staff has far too high expectations of me on this front. I have already reached out to my limited contact base, and am now in the seemingly fruitless process of reaching out to other organizations. Networking is a big challenge for CISO. Learning the ins and outs of the donor world and creating those contacts that such a world revolves around takes time and experience, which CISO is gaining slowly. I am certain CISO and their incredible work on the ground will be recognized by more organizations in the future, however my support in making this happen is limited.
Around three times a week, I go into the field with different members of the CISO staff. Often we go to visit schools and check in on the progress of pit latrines. We often meet with teachers and have discussions about volunteerism and girls education. I also have frequented a number of different trainings revolving around girls education for civil society members, teachers, and concerned stakeholders. Another big project that CISO is working on is the Community Led Total Sanitation and Hygiene (CLTSH). For this I have attended a number of kebele and district level celebrations on becoming open defecation free, which I have mentioned in earlier posts. I am often asked to speak at these different trainings and celebrations. When asked to give these short speeches, I am constantly confronted with the limits of what I can do to benefit these communities. What insight could I possibly have that adds a new dimension to the skilled local trainers I am working with? This is a conflict I will continually have to confront, if I choose to continue to work in the development world. But it is an extremely important conflict to have.
Being conscious of the importance, relevance, and necessity of “local knowledge” (which I discussed in my last post) is a step in the right direction. I have recently finished James Scott’s book “Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,” which describes the importance of mētis (his term for “practical knowledge”) in any sort of development and social engineering scheme. He shows in detail how the grandest and often most well-intentioned plans of states (such as Julius Nyerere’s villagization process in Tanzania and planned cities) have failed because local knowledge was viewed as backwards and unnecessary. Scott also shows how people who these schemes are made for resist in a variety of ways. State governments, development organizations, and economists attempt to create structures that depend on the abstraction of everyday life. Villages are turned into homogenous population statistics and the complexity of local village markets are somehow graphed into supply and demand curves. What these numbers and statistics leave out is the complexity, history, and contradictions that are constantly at work behind the numbers. Abstractions are innately false because they depend on essentializing and reifying peoples and environments. And in the end, life always succeeds in unnerving such abstractions simply through engaging in the complexities of the everyday. Thus, the problematic conflict that I face everyday while giving these little speeches is in itself productive. Though I am struggling to figure out what I can contribute within these local contexts, I am well aware that anything I do manage to contribute must be situated within and founded by local knowledge. On one occasion, I was asked to give a short speech to a group of around 2000 people celebrating the end of the school year and awarding top performing girl and boy students in the school. As I climbed over the small school bench to take the microphone, I tripped and fell in front of everybody. Loud claims of “sorry sorry sorry” came from all around me as I heard giggles suppressed by many. I smiled and said I was okay. Desta said that I was always so full of “the drama.” He may be right. If the kebele thought I was some well poised American development worker about to give incredible insight, their expectations were leveled in that moment. And coincidently, I was able to come up with a speech on the spot that actually proved to be effective in encouraging the community about girls education. Perhaps that initial moment of humility is always needed on such occasions.
After my days in either the office or the field, I make the 25 minute walk from the office back to my hotel. I usually take a run (sometimes a walk…) around the hill in the back of my hotel. This hill is special because when you climb to the top of it you can see all of Hawassa city on one side and the sun setting on Hawassa Lake on the other. When I am feeling especially ambitious I stretch out my exercise by adventuring down to the lake where I am surely to be met by a chain of children grabbing onto my hand, a group of women and men bathing and washing clothes in the lake, and even on occasion a hippo lounging in the shallows. I usually eat dinner at my hotel or venture down to Lewi Resort, which is a nice hotel and restaurant right on the lake. I indulge myself in either one of my two favorite Ethiopian dishes: Yebeg Tibbs or Bozena Shiro. When eating at Lewi, I have to be especially on guard as the lakeside front seemed to have attracted a number of monkeys who enjoy taking people’s food right of the plate in front of them. I have been a victim to such crime a number of times already. I end my nights catching up with the news via BBC or falling asleep to a movie on one of the three television channels I receive. My days are so full of newness and questions, that I am usually exhausted at an embarrassingly early hour.
My time in Hawassa is dwindling to its end in the next week and a half. In the next post or two I will attempt to consolidate what I have learned from this experience and give thoughts on how to move forward with such insight. I will also begin the thought process about re-integration as my arrival in the United States is approaching quickly. And after seven months and seven countries, such a process is surely not to be easy, but will be an incredibly important part of figuring out how to translate all of the new knowledge, insight, and views I have acquired and refined in the last half year to my daily life in the states. More to come!
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