Monday, April 20, 2015

compulsory community labour? non-negotiable doesn't end well

Before "Greening"
After "Greening"
BBC | In the pink-streaked twilight, a river of humanity is flowing across Tigray's dusty Hawzien plain. This cracked and desiccated landscape, in Ethiopia's far north, occupies a dark corner of the global collective memory. Thirty years ago, not far from here, the BBC's Michael Buerk first alerted us to a biblical famine he described as "the closest thing to hell on earth".
Then Bob Geldof wrote Do They Know It's Christmas? - a curious question to ask of perhaps the world's most devoutly Christian people - and thereafter the name Tigray became synonymous with refugees, Western aid and misery. The Tigrayan people were depicted as exemplars of passive suffering, dependent on the goodwill of the rest of the planet just to get through the day without dying.
But here, outside the village of Abr'ha Weatsbaha, I'm seeing a different version. From all directions, streams of people are trickling into that human river. You hear them before you see them - some chatting excitedly, others singing hymns - as they converge on a viciously steep valley at the edge of the plain. They were summoned before dawn by horns, an Old Testament echo calling every able-bodied man and woman over 18 years of age to report for the first of 20 days of compulsory community labour. Their job, quite simply, is to tame the desert.

"This is how the Axumite kings got stuff done 2,000 years ago," says my guide Zablon Beyene. "With the same tools, too."
By 10 in the morning, some 3,000 people have turned up. Using picks, shovels, iron bars and their bare hands, they will turn these treacherous slopes into neat staircases of rock-walled terraces that will trap the annual rains, forcing the water to percolate into the soil rather than running off in devastating, ground-ripping flash floods.
"Sisters are doing it for themselves," says Kidane, a pick-wielding Amazon whose arched eyebrow suggests I might want to put down my camera and do some actual work. Brothers, too: from strapping, sweat-shiny youths to Ephraim, a legless old man who clearly ignored the bit about being able-bodied and sits on his stumps, rolling rocks downhill to the terrace builders.
Overseeing this extraordinary effort is 58-year-old Aba Hawi, Abr'ha Weatsbaha's community leader. Short, pot-bellied and bearded, he darts from one side of the valley to the other, barking orders into his mobile phone, slapping backs and showing the youngsters the proper way to split half-ton boulders. Rumour has it that Aba Hawi once took up arms to fight for Tigrayan independence, but these days he prefers to describe himself as "just a farmer".

3 comments:

CNu said...

Two things magne;

1. Dealing with wattles, please be sure to call out what makes the desert fathers and the Axumite Christian praxis different. In school, you have to teach http://listserv.okstate.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind9802B&L=orthodox&P=19493 Unless of course it's Master Ken type school

2. Source URL always prominently displayed so I don't get ratchetmessreturned..., http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32348749

https://youtu.be/1_-aAnxdcVI

Dale Asberry said...

1. Oops, hurried through it too quickly
2. I'm actually still working on that myself but this was some nougat-y goodness after seeing the Shatner interview...

Constructive_Feedback said...

Huge Deposits Of Underground Water Resources Found In The Desert Regions Of Africa
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2133339/Massive-underground-reserves-water-Africa.html

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/04/22/article-2133339-12B4E711000005DC-739_634x657.jpg

A vast reservoir of a life sustaining elixir, more vital than the long chains of hydrocarbon molecules found in abundance within the tectonic plates a few thousand miles to the northeast.


Those with the vision of what this would mean for these arid lands and the technology to bring it to the surface would indeed provide a set of services UPON WHICH any other higher level set of civic and social engagements provided by the Catholic Church or Judaic Order would rest upon. For, indeed, even a 'Father' or a 'Rabbi' must drink before he can give 'The Least Of These' a 'drink'.

Africom Expelled From Niger Just Like Little French Bishes...,

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