Ethiopian Housing

I should probably begin with my overall perception of the trip. I had an absolutely wonderful time in Ethiopia. Everyone I met was kind and generally, in a pretty good mood. The weather was clear and sunny for just about the entire time we were there, and the food was wonderful. Especially the fresh fruit.

While we were in a suburb of Addis Ababa, we stayed at a guest house where for a very modest fee (by western standards), you had a warm bed, some running water, electricity and meals. The green shacks along that back is housing for the guards. The food was outstanding. Something that I didn't expect were the walled compounds with 24 hour guards watching the building. The guest house was a fairly modest 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home with a large dining room/family room and a small kitchen. The courtyard is large enough to bring in a couple of vehicles if you so desired. You are continuously reminded that you were in a third world country by water and electrical outages.

There were a large number of condominiums built by Chinese investors and they all look identical and very utilitarian. They are located on the same land that used to house a refuge camp and the 15k refugees had to move elsewhere. Barbed wire fences seem to be really common and seem to be aimed at managing people rather than animals. Large multi-lane streets are being put in to handle the anticipated traffic from the new middle class.

Just to the north of the condominiums is a refugee area adjacent to the hospital and the housing here is mud mixed with straw with corrugated steel for the fences and roofs. In the city, there are a lot of beggars on the street and this is the area where many of them live. Even in these areas, the concept of a compound existed to limit access to the living areas. We visited several families in this area some of whom were HIV+ and in most cases, six or eight people lived in about 80 ft² with no limited utilities. Sometimes there was a tap on the electrical wires up on the pole supplying power to a number of homes.

Many of the compounds have concrete homes and are surrounded by an eight to ten foot tall wall usually topped with razor wire and in some cases, broken bottles. All to keep out thieves.

This is the wall surrounding the guest house where we were staying. Upon arrival at night, there were packs of dogs and the occasional hyena running around and they are considered pretty dangerous. Adjacent to the refugee area is the dump and there were quite a few wild animal sounds from that direction at night. Whenever that was a power outage, the guards seem to get pretty busy circling the compound aiming their flashlights at the top of the wall. Supposedly to let people know they were there and watching.

One of the goals for the trip was to help construct some additional classrooms behind the church. The group sort of had the idea that we would be showing up and actually building foundations, walls and roofs. The reality is, we westerners (including a couple of engineers), were completely clueless on how they build using locally available materials and labor. I learned quite a bit from the skilled laborers doing the construction. Here are a couple of the new exterior walls being painted. The framework is steel square tubing welded together and the steel skin is spot welded to the frame. I will go into the foundation construction in a future post but it was a lot different than we do around here...

Next post - Food