Untold Stories

Power Politics Trump Democracy in US-Backed Ethiopia

Editor's Note: While reporting on water scarcity in Ethiopia, journalists Alex Stonehill and Sarah Stuteville happened to meet up with Ethiopian journalist Eskinder Nega, who has been imprisoned multiple times under the country's restrictive press laws.  While not directly related to water, it felt like the story was too important to ignore.

By Alex Stonehill and Sarah Stuteville

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia—Dawn in the Merkato breaks over a tangle of streets jammed with shouting hawkers and towering pyramids of ripe produce from Ethiopia’s fertile countryside. Today it is a popular destination for sunburnt foreign tourists, expensive cameras poised to capture lively scenes from one of Africa’s largest open-air markets.

Few of them, unloading from tour buses today, know that less then three years ago these bustling streets were stained with the blood of murdered citizens who had flooded into the center of Ethiopia’s capital city to protest the contested re-election of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

“People were pissed off,” says Eskinder Nega, who was a columnist and publisher for several Ethiopian newspapers during the 2005 protests. “It was the first time we really had hope, and when the elections were stolen, people were angry. … It wasn’t planned — people just started pouring into the streets,” Nega said.  The government reaction was swift.

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Ethiopia and Kenya: Water Crisis

By Alex Stonehill. April 17, 2008

Water is the new oil. I’ve spent the last four months reporting stories on water from Ethiopia and Kenya, two countries at the forefront of the world’s coming water crisis . And while western politicians and consumers fret over the declining economy and increasing oil prices, the news from East Africa is that with a growing majority of the world living on less than a dollar a day, the liquid that fuels bodies is becoming even more contentious than the liquid that fuels cars.

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Ethiopia: Running on Hope

By Alex Stonehill. April 16, 2008

Ethiopia has been a dominant force in long distance running for decades. Despite a shortage of training infrastructure, athletes have excelled thanks to hard work, the high altitudes in their home country and the purity of the ancient sport, where whoever runs the farthest and the fastest, wins. Alex Stonehill's photo slideshow offers a taste of training in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

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Kenya: Being Typical

By Sarah Stuteville

March 25, 2008

Nairobi, KENYA—One of the first pieces of advice I received  before leaving on this reporting project was from an Ethiopian diplomat in the  States that requested that I "not be a typical journalist" in my coverage of  Africa. What he meant, and what he went  on to say more specifically, was that he didn't want to see any more stories  about African poverty in the news.

"Why don't you write about positive things, like investment  opportunities," he suggested cheerfully as we toasted with Ethiopian honey wine  in his spacious suburban home.

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Ethiopia: Heading South: Five Days in Southern Oromiya

We stood in the pre-dawn glow of the streetlamps, greeted by intoxicated heckles from the previous night’s most diligent drinkers.  A battered, extended cab Toyota Hilux pickup pulled up, carrying a mound of mysterious goods under a green tarp and bearing faded Ethiopian Red Cross decals on its doors.  Seeing that there were already three passengers inside, I almost threw in the towel right there and sent my colleagues Ernest and Julia on without me, motivated as much by the practicalities of fitting so many people into such a tiny space as I was by the thought of my still warm bed waiting for me just down the block.

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Ethiopia: Timkat in Addis Ababa

By Jessica Partnow with photos by Sarah Stuteville
January 21, 2008
According to Ethiopia's unique calendar, the year 2000 started last September. Christmas was two weeks ago, on January 7th, and this weekend, at the end of the twelve days of Christmas, the country's 33 million Ethiopian Orthodox Christians celebrated Timkat, or Epiphany, a commemoration of the baptism of Christ. CLP Audio Producer Jessica Partnow brings us this report from the nation's capitol, Addis Ababa.

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Ethiopia: An American's Water Shortage

By Sarah Stuteville
January 21, 2008

Addis Ababa, ETHIOPIA —The water in our new house in Addis has been turned off for days and my back is so sore I’ve been squirming around on our dirty couches all evening begging for a position that doesn’t hurt. 

It’s shameful how annoyed I am by the conjunction of these inconveniences given why I’m in Ethiopia at all.  I’m here to research and write on water scarcity issues.  In the past three days I’ve interviewed a woman whose son died of typhoid and a man who held four of his children as diarrhea from waterborne dysentery drained the life from their small bodies.  I watched an old woman fall to her knees and kiss the ground in thanks of water.

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Ethiopia: My Romantic Reunion with Africa

By Ernest Waititu
January 12, 2008

Close to 40 hours after leaving Athens, Ohio, I arrived to my destination in Addis. My Emirates flight was not exactly that long...I had two stopovers - four hours in Hamburg and 12 in Dubai. It is the kind of thing you have to contend with when you make a decision to fly cheap.

      

I made my time in Dubai a little productive, making calls to family and friends. I also had a chance to visit the Dubai Duty Free - perhaps one of the finest testimonies of the huge capitalistic market Dubai has turned into. Then I took some time to catch a beer at The Irish Village right at the airport. It was a very good decision I must say, one which reunited me with my colleagues of The Common Language Project. I had lost contact with them more than ten hours earlier in New York, when they took a different flight. The happy Reunion seemed to prove a point: there is always a way to smoke out drinkers.

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Ethiopia: Back to Africa on a Water Mission

By Ernest Waititu
December 14, 2007

Some of my toughest times growing up in Kenya were those spent on my way to and from the village river. I call it the village river because it was by and large the only source of water for my village. Never mind the fact that the river was four miles away and was shared among scores of villages along its course.

      

Like other countries on the east coast of Africa, Kenya has no cold or warm season as understood in the West; rather it has a dry and a wet season. During the wet season, people collect the rainwater in all manner of water reservoirs ranging from small plastic bottles to dams. On a good wet season, the collected water is expected to sustain a family and their livestock for months.

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Ethiopia: Dawn in Addis

By Sarah Stuteville

January 13, 2008

Addis Ababa, ETHIOPIA -- 5:30am and still dark.  But the rooster knows the sun is coming and his crow trills up past the sulfurous street lamps into the still night sky. 

He’s woken the dogs, and suddenly their frantic howling seems to come from the top of every hill in Addis, making the city seem surrounded by their feral packs.

The sharp barks are soon undercut by the rising moan of the muezzin.  He sings the same words that have woken me around the world, but his melody here is unique, more of a monotonous chanting than the sung declaration I’ve heard before.

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