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Day 2

Posted Monday, March 07, 2005

Today stank. Well, I stank. I became a dung seller for the day!

This morning we headed off to Debra Zeit, which is a little village just outside Addis Ababa with Gail and Barry. When we got there we met XXXX. XXXX makes her living out of selling dung pies – that’s pies from cow sh*!t. We helped her out a little by shaping them and putting them on the trays to dry. She gets 3-6 Birr, that’s about 30p, for 3 pies and price changes seasonally - I think the cows make more raw materials in the wet season!

After we’d helped make the pies me and Barry took them down to the market for XXXX. It was manic. There were loads of different kinds of poo, in every shape and size you could conceive. People were going crazy for it – this was good S*!t man! Classic example of how nothing goes to waste in Africa, even waste.

Once we’d off-loaded the dung we headed back to the village where we helped finish building a toilet in the village. JECCDO are behind this as well. They let the village committee know there’s some money in the pot and then they choose what they think is needed most for the village.

This time round they’ve chosen to build a proper toilet to help with sanitation. About 10 families will use it and it means that people like Allam who we met yesterday will have a proper toilet to use.

It was a bit of a tricky job but we got it up in the end, although trying to get cement to stay on upside down was a little harder than I thought. Thankfully I’ve got a hard head and with a bit of bashing and pulling we got there.

When it was all finished everyone gathered round and we all ended up singing and dancing, it was mad – I loved it! And then at the end the most perfect thing happened they brought out coffee and CAKE! it was bloody brilliant, the spiritual guy blessed it and then we got to eat it, it tasted great. We had a right old knees up. After yesterday it gave me loads of hope and made me really smile.

DAY 4

It’s been a long and emotional day.

First thing this morning I went out with Genet, an amazing aid worker with GOAL*. to pick up some of the kids who are forced to sleep on the street. Genet told me that more than 90,000 kids live on the streets in Addis, 90,000! It’s hard to imagine that many youngsters living rough with no one at all to look out for them, but it’s happening – every single day.

A lot of these kids have been orphaned through HIV/Aids and now, especially the young girls, are incredibly vulnerable to all kinds of abuse and danger on the streets.

As we were driving around in the morning sunshine the city was coming alive, people bustling around, bright colours everywhere, street vendors setting up for the day - the noise was amazing.

At about 7.30am

we pulled up to where the kids normally sell the stuff they scavenge from rubbish tips around the city. Scarves, old toys, scraps of clothes, anything they can get their hands on, anything that back home we would just see as useless rubbish. But it’s not useless to them, it’s what they rely on to stay alive.

But this was not a nice place. You could feel that the atmosphere could turn at any moment and often does. As if their lives weren’t tough enough, these kids are forced to battle it out everyday with the older vendors and the street beggars, they are often set upon and hit with sticks. It’s dog eat dog and the smallest ones come out the worst.

I felt worried and angry for these kids, fighting to earn a few pence to buy some food. But it doesn’t end there - the worst thing was that a lot of the time they were scrambling not just to look after themselves, but their whole family. Imagine a 9- year-old boy with that on their shoulders - if he doesn’t provide every single day they don’t eat. It is almost too much to comprehend.

Gail got really upset. She just didn’t know what to do. As soon as she saw the state that some of these kids were living in she just wept. I know how she feels, it’s overwhelming.

Later on after we’d dropped off the kids at the project we drove off again to find some others we’d heard were living in a demolition site. The police had moved them off their street corner a couple of weeks earlier.

The place was horrific. All you could see was half eaten animal bones, plastic sheets littering the site and human waste everywhere. But there was no sign of the children. Then after a couple of minutes about 6/7 young kids emerged out of this small little breeze block hut wearing old torn clothes – it was a shocking thing to see. How can anyone live like this?

There, amongst all the filth and the garbage lived more than 2 dozen children. It was indescribable. They had become almost like little animals scurrying around. They lived by scavenging in the dustbins around local shops and shacks, eating what they can.

Genet does this everyday. She travels around Addis collecting and helping as many street children as she can. These kids could not be more alone, fending for themselves in the most desperate of circumstances.

The Comic Relief funded project here does all it can to give as many of these children a way out of this misery. But it needs more help, because there are always more of these children who deserve the chance of a better life, deserve the chance to experience love and care.

This trip has touched me like never before. It made me realise how close to the edge so many people are in Ethiopia. And showed me just how much good can be done with relatively small money. Thank God for Comic Relief.