Zway: Going To See Old Friends

In Zway Ethiopia there is a sign on the highway erected by the local caustic soda factory that warmly welcomes you to the town.  It even proudly boasts how many years it has been there, helping the economic development of Zway.  There are a number of green houses cultivating flowers, and employing local townspeople.  Every summer there are volunteers from Spain, Italy, and The United States teaching English, and running summer activities for some of the poorest people in town.  On a walk down the main drag along the highway you can see various buildings that have been built with foreign money.  It is almost amazing how much the town grows every year.  These are all wonderful things, and the town is like a “growing child” maturing and developing exponentially.   

       I want you to think about that last statement for a minute or two before you go any further because there is another side to everything I have just mentioned in the previous paragraph.  While the caustic soda factory provides employment opportunities, it also does not abide by working conditions that westerners take for granted and pays it´s workers that most of us would consider to be slave wages.  People talk about the factory in hushed tones because everyone who works there gets sick.  Political freedom as we know it does not exist in Zway, and there are certain things you don´t mention because you never know who is listening.  Those greenhouses spray pesticides on the people while they work,  just quitting is not a realistic economic alternative.  Those same volunteers, who devote their time and money to come here and make a difference, come here to help and enlighten them like you would a “growing child”. 
   
      We as westerners think we have an idea of how the world works, and what normal is.   We arm ourselves with narrow ideas of relative poverty and a social conscience and then go fix it.  The one thing we forget is that Ethiopians can fix their own problems if given the opportunity and resources.  They don´t need foreigners coming from rich countries to teach them how to live.  Just because you consider Wi-Fi a birthright doesn´t mean you have a realistic solution to anything.  Now, this doesn´t mean we should leave Zway and the rest of Africa to fend for itself, because they do need help, but last thing they need is to be saved from themselves because there is a lot more they can teach us than we can teach them.  While we can only give them tools such as education or capital investment, Zway can teach us about humanity, and brotherhood.  While we have tendency to be comforted in our own cynicism, they can teach us what it’s like to be optimistic and grateful in the face of real hardship.  Despite the calamities that have befallen the unlucky continent there has been something intangible that has held the people such as those of Zway together that cannot be defined in a single word, but hopefully I can scratch the surface with a about a thousand words.  Sometimes, there are some things that can only be experienced to be fully understood.  The opportunity to live and work in Zway is one of them, and once a person gets to feel that the feeling never goes away. 

      I am one of these volunteers in shining armor that comes to Zway every summer to each an English, and work in summer program that is geared toward instilling the young girls of the community with the tools to prosper in a male dominated society.  What started as a cool experience that seemed to be a much better idea than rotting in the heat of the Spanish summer has turned into something much more.  I know my way around the town, I´ve made friends with many of the young people I work with and have been invited into their homes.  I don´t return every year because I think they need me because there are thousands of people capable of doing what I do just as well, but because I think I need them.  It´s very hard to pinpoint the one overriding theme that drives me and the other volunteers back to Zway every summer because it´s impossible to know where to begin.  The one thing that strikes me is the passion I see in so many of young men and women of Zway to make a better life for themselves and their community.  This comes out in almost every conversation I have with them.  They have no doubt they will succeed, and help to build a better Zway, a better Ethiopia, and a better Africa.  In this drive there is a sense of community and a common goal, that quite frankly does not exist where I´m from.  There more I get to know the people of Zway the more I am convinced it will happen. 
   
      When you first arrive to Zway the emotions swirling around in your head are unimaginable for a typical westerner like me.  I am a Marine Corps veteran with multiple tours in the middle east so I figured going to Ethiopia for the first time wasn´t going to be that big of a deal.  I couldn´t have been more wrong about anything.  I had seen poverty before but this was the first time I had become immersed in it.  Things that most of us see in pictures or documentaries became very real and tangible things.  You realize very quickly that you are the exception to the rule, and the social, political, and economic values that you hold dear don´t necessarily apply here.  It moves you so much that you write an essay only a westerner would ever seriously write. 
  
        Once you´ve spent a day or two in the community it feels like you´ve always been here, and flying back to Spain at the end of the month seems like a lifetime away.  The minute you see past the poverty, you start to notice the all of the subtle beauty and richness that makes this place so wonderful.  I have had more conversations with perfect strangers on the side of a dirt road or in the market than I have with strangers on the metro in Madrid, and I´ve lived here for over four years.  Everyone is a cousin; extended families live together in small shacks where running water and electricity are rarities. 

        The first time you visit someone´s home for a coffee ceremony you feel bad for taking something from them when they have so little, while you have so much.  It makes you think about how so many of us have a hard time giving a fraction of that in our own society.  You forget for a moment why there are so many people living together.  Death is a part of life here, dying from preventable diseases and exhaustion is common place.  All you have to do is walk down the main road and look at all the men standing on the side of the road because there is no work, women with children begging next to them to understand what life can be like here.  Still, nobody here asks for sympathy unless it’s how they put food on the table.  People will come to you on the street and talk with pride about their town, and the best way to their heart is to let them know how grateful you are for the hospitality. 

      Finally the children are what steal a part of you forever.  The way they grow and develop every time you return is what makes you come back.  The one valuable that we bring to them is not our language or the crafts that we teach them, but the idea that they are not in this alone.  We are teaching them that there is a broader world beyond Zway, and it is up to them to take their own and their lives into their own hands.  I have no doubt that they will.