Boto, ethiopia through the eyes of its youth by WKCD/Next Generation Press In Our Global Village

Few residents of Boto, a farming village in the highlands of southwestern Ethiopia, have traveled farther than their feet can carry them. But their coffee circles the globe.

In Our Village Boto, Ethiopia Through the Eyes of Its Youth

For more than a thousand years, coffee has grown wild in this lush corner of Ethiopia, under a thick forest canopy of acacia and other indigenous trees. Coffee is Ethiopiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s biggest export and, for Boto, a lifeblood. In a village where kerosene lanterns still light the night and children walk dirt paths to fetch water each day, the annual coffee harvest spells ballast or bounty. In this inspiring book, the youth of Boto bring us inside their village, with photographs and stories they gathered themselves. They have much to say, about the importance of family, community, education, and faith. They have much to teach, about resilience and dreams in the face of breathtaking hardship.

Edited by Barbara Cervone n e xt g e n e r ation pre ss

stor ies and photos from a coffee-growing village

In Our Village Boto, Ethiopia Through the Eyes of Its Youth stories and photos from a coffee-growing village

Edited by Barbara Cervone

This book is dedicated to the youth of Boto, whose words and images fill these pages

abduselam abamecha alfia abadir hawi bedru jemila abajihad muhidin ahmed seid kemer seifu teib zelika abamecha

Contents Preface

The boto tree

Wild and settled

Counting hard assets

Family necessities

Hastening to prayer

Ballast or bounty

Printed in Hong Kong by Great Wall Printing, Ltd.

One with livestock

Distributed by Next Generation Press

Duromina

ISBN: 978-0-9815595-6-8

Wattle and daub

CIP data available.

Injera and wat

Satisfaction, conversation, and blessing

Market day

Next Generation Press, a not-for-profit book publisher, brings forward the

Head to toe

voices and vision of adolescents on their own lives, learning, and work.

Child’s work, child’s play

With a particular focus on youth without economic privilege, Next Generation

Storytelling

Press raises awareness of young people as a powerful force for social justice.

In sickness and health

Next Generation Press, P.O. Box 603252, Providence, Rhode Island 02906 U.S.A.

Education, poverty, and wealth

www.nextgenerationpress.org

Hope in the unseen

Map

Fast facts

More about Ethiopia

Acknowledgments

Design assistance by Sandra Delany.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Preface Few residents of Boto, a farming village in the highlands of southwestern Ethiopia, have traveled farther than their feet can carry them. But their coffee circles the globe. For more than a thousand years, coffee has grown wild in this lush corner of Ethiopia, under a thick forest canopy of acacia and other indigenous trees. Coffee is Ethiopia’s biggest export and, for Boto, a lifeblood. Families gather saplings from the forest to plant in the small gardens that surround their homesteads. Each fall, they join together to pick the coffee berries, amid colobus monkeys and birdsong. In a village where kerosene lanterns still light the night and children walk dirt paths to fetch water each day, the annual coffee harvest spells ballast or bounty. I came to Boto, a day’s journey by four-wheel drive from Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, to engage a smart, curious group of local youth in capturing daily life there – and then to share their words and images far and wide, through the nonprofit Next Generation Press I oversee. Five years earlier, I had done the same with secondary students in Kambi ya Simba, a village in Tanzania near Mt. Kilimanjaro, where families subsist on the maize and beans they grow. The goal, then as now, was to create an unvarnished glimpse at life in an East African village through the eyes of its youth. In Kambi ya Simba, my young collaborators had expressed incredulity that anyone beyond their village would find their stories and challenges of interest.

(The book we created together has since sold over 10,000 copies and raised 30,000 USD for the village schools.) Boto’s youth greeted me with equal skepticism. I replied that for most of the world, Africa remains a dark continent – not for the color of its peoples’ skin, but because so few know much about the world’s second largest continent, beyond the heartbreaking headlines of war, famine, and illness. This was their chance to shed light, I said. Were they up for it? Our group’s first hour together had begun with a spirited round of musical chairs in the middle of a field. But after my question, a long silence fell. At last, fifteen-year-old Zelika stood up, with a grin as bright as her head scarf. “Gariidha jelqaba,” – she declared. “Okay, let’s begin!” We gathered each morning under a tree at the primary school to plan the day’s agenda. We appointed ourselves the village’s photojournalists: five young men and three young women, ages 14 to 18; two tireless translators, talented managers and educators from the non-governmental organization TechnoServe; and one ferenji (me). Every minute was precious. Zelika and her compatriots were not only missing school and duties their families counted on, but they also had a year’s worth of stories to share. When we paused for morning prayers the first day – in this part of Ethiopia, Islam predominates – our young journalists had covered a flip chart with over thirty topics. We broke into pairs and I handed out notebooks and digital cameras, whose mysteries took less than ten minutes for these technology-innocent youth to

unlock. We talked about what characterized a good narrative and a strong photograph. We critiqued photos I had collected on my laptop and they practiced taking their own. Story assignments in hand, each team then spent the next several hours hunting for images, information, and interviews that would bring their subjects to life. When we reconvened later, each team uploaded its photos, shared its interview notes, then summarized what they had learned and what they thought about it. For the week that followed, this was our routine. Like a curious editor, I always probed for more. In a tradition that still upholds arranged marriages, did they hope for a marriage based on love? How is the spicy butter niter kebbeh prepared so that it lasts unrefrigerated for a year? Why are conflict resolution and cooperation so prized in Boto? Restrained by poverty and by Islamic modesty, how do villagers develop a personal style? How many in our group had lost a family member to sickness (all had), and how did they die? What were their hopes and dreams, for themselves and their country? These exchanges, rich and lively, carried the heavy burdens of translation. Our young journalists spoke only Afan Oromo, and I was trapped in English. Our two translators, Bekele Damte and Ketemaye Arega, brought us together; they spoke English and Afan Oromo in addition to their native Amharic. We soon developed a rhythm for the intricate back and forth that kept us talking each day until sunset, across the barriers of language and culture.

Nonetheless, as I later wove those words and images into the stories that fill this book, I have paused again and again. Do I have this right? What have I missed? Is my own voice overtaking that of Zelika or Hawi or Muhidin? My young collaborators trusted me with their world, a profound gift. Keeping true to their world, while also translating and editing their words, is the gift I try to give back here. Almost all of the book’s photos, however, come directly from these youth – the first that any of them had ever taken.

Eleven thousand kilometers away, surrounded by a world of “conveniences” my young collaborators could barely imagine, I too have a dream. In mine, this book by the youth of Boto opens your eyes and heart to a world where affluence comes from the soil, hardship is a way of life, and wonder abounds. Barbara Cervone Providence, Rhode Island USA September 2011

Ethiopia, long one of the poorest countries in Africa, stands poised to become an agricultural and economic engine, predicted at this writing to be among the continent’s fastest growing economies. Still, its hurdles are immense, as Boto’s youth attest. Paved roads, sanitation, electricity, health care, and well-equipped schools are rarities in the country’s shackled infrastructure. Yet the coffee harvest continues as Ethiopia’s prized commodity. On this front, the small farmers in Boto, with their new cooperative and top-quality Arabica coffee beans, can see, touch, and taste their poverty receding. As always, no economic prognosticator can convey the human spirit and resilience that lie beneath cold figures of profit and loss. In Boto, both spirit and resilience thrive, and so do dreams. Seid hopes to be an engineer, developing technology to fight global warming. Alfia, married at seventeen, wants to study agriculture and join her husband as one of the village’s agricultural agents. Jemila dreams of becoming her country’s president, spreading progress and peace “throughout the land.”

The boto tree Before there was a village here – before there was even the idea of a village – there was a clearing in the forest, and in that clearing stood a single boto tree. The tree was tall and straight. Its branches lifted the sky and its roots anchored the soil. Two brothers, Aba Garo and Aba Labu, squatted one day to rest in the shade of the boto. It was Meyazya 1926 (April 1933, by the Ethiopian calendar) and the long rains were weeks away. Still, enough pasture remained for the brothers’ two black mares to graze, and a nearby river carried cool water down from the mountains. A week later, the two brothers returned to the tree. This time, they brought with them twenty sheep, six oxen, four cows, and eighteen sacks of grain. The children of Aba Garo and Aba Labu had already carried the message off in every direction: next Saturday, a market would take place where the boto stood. When that day came, farmers arrived early in the morning, their mules laden with gourds of honey, woven baskets, cotton garbs, and bags of barley, teff, maize, and coffee. Traders pushed their small carts from the town of Agaro, bringing cooking pans, lanterns, and other goods to sell. Women carried baskets of vegetables on their heads and infants on their backs as they walked to the market. Many wore three layers on the journey, to sell the extra clothes.

People spread their wares on the ground below the boto tree and hung their extra garments on its limbs to announce the start of the market. All morning, the buyers and sellers haggled with each other. By noontime, smoke and aromas filled the air. Those who had made a profitable sale celebrated over grilled meat. Women burned incense and roasted and boiled coffee. Their customers sat on wooden stools, sipping the hot black liquid from clay cups. When the sky turned orange above the boto tree, men, women, and children loaded their belongings onto their mules, their backs, and their heads for the journey home. Aba Garo and Aba Labu counted their coins and livestock. They had done well that day. From then on, every fortnight, the market under the boto drew followers seeking profit or trade or communion – or all three. A textile weaver and a hide trader joined Aba Garo and Aba Labu as the leaders of the market. Families started building houses and planting crops on the land stretching outward from the tree. In time, an officer visited from the district government and agreed to register the growing settlement as a kebele. The officer entered the new village’s name into the records: “B-o-t-o.” As you can see from how brightly it shines from space at night, Japan is one of the most urbanized countries in the world.

Wild and settled Green, fertile, alive. In southwestern Ethiopia, hills and valleys roll into each other. Wild forests compete with cultivated fields; the red ochre soil turns hard when arid, sticky when soaked. The land drops to the grasslands of Sudan in the west and to the deserts of Afar in the east. Lakes carve into the landscape in the south; in the north, the Simien Mountains rise more than 4,000 meters high. Here in Boto, however, the environment feels intimate. We grow up learning the names of trees, as if they were members of our family. Give us a minute and we can list two dozen trees (in Afan Oromo, our language): reji, cheledema, togo, wallago, ebicha, bekenisa, qobo, kerero, kiltu, wadesa, hambesa, harbu, botoro, badessa, abayi, sombo, birbisa, ejera, cheka, qorasuma, ulumayi, walenso, hadami, baya. We wash our clothes on smooth stones, in the tea-brown streams where we swim and bathe. We know the names of every stream, too: Gema, Naso, Yembero, Alaltu, Mesa, Dogaja, Dumo, Chami. With over 150 types of butterflies, our task of naming them gets harder. Still, we have memorized many, like the “flying handkerchief” with its lacy, sculpted wings of pale yellow, tan, and silver. The birds we know by their calls: “haa-haa-haa-haa,” “a di-dii,” “wreeeee-creeuw-wreeeee-creeliw.”

Mischievous baboons try to steal our food, and the stoic black and white Colobus monkeys perch in our trees above our coffee farms. Leopards grow fewer in number every year, but every now and then one will take a sheep. We have more success guarding our crops from wild pigs, but they are quick to anger and challenge us back. This wildness has formed us. Yet now we push against the wildness, as we expand our settlements and our planting fields. Decades ago, wild coffee trees shaded by tall tropical forests covered our region. Now, cultivated crops are taking their place, and it is up to humans, not nature, to replenish the soil. Streams have dropped that once ran high except in the driest months; our need for water has increased but the rains have not. The butterflies are falling, both in number and color. To name our land we use a new word now: â&#x20AC;&#x153;sustainable.â&#x20AC;?

Counting hard assets Suleman Abamilki, Botoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s agricultural development agent, checks the village register for the latest census figures. The annual head count includes humans, livestock, and hectares. In a village with homesteads spread over five kilometers, collecting these numbers takes days of walking. Here is what Suleman and the other census takers found in 2010. Humans: 10,109 men, women, and children in 1,657 households. Livestock: 2,179 cows, 1,945 sheep, 1,952 chickens, 468 horses, 337 goats, 116 mules, and 12 donkeys. Hectares: 772.5 for crops, 728 for coffee, 387 for housing and gardens, 210 for forest, 164.5 for cattle grazing, and 34 for growing the plant called chat. The dirt road leading in and out of Boto, forty-five minutes from the nearest paved road, carries mostly foot traffic (people and animals) and rarely motor vehicles. Enter Boto by four-wheel drive and you could miss the town center if you closed your eyes, counted to one hundred, and kept going. Stop and get out and you may find the village restaurant, which seats eight, packed with men sipping their second cup of buna (Ethiopian coffee) and wrapping injera (Ethiopian bread) around a spicy wat (stew) of lentils. The infirmary across from the restaurant will likely be closed; with little equipment or medicine, it draws few patients. If you are a ferengi (foreigner) and look back from the infirmaryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s locked door, you may find it difficult to sort

the shops from the houses, all with tin roofs and strung together in facing rows. Up the road, several merchants look out from their stalls. Kedija specializes in bottled orange drink and matches, scissors and razors, socks and flashlights. Abdurahiman stocks the necessities – exercise books for taking notes at school, soap and razor blades, cooking ingredients, water jugs – along with the extras, like radios. Tahir sells kerosene for our lanterns, since Boto has no electricity. For much of his life the tailor, Taha, has been making clothes on a 1952 foot-powered sewing machine in a shop two meters wide. Many mornings, his three-year-old great grandson traces patterns with a stick on the shop’s dirt floor.

Always the busiest spot in town, the chat market draws buyers, sellers, and on-thespot users who chew the fresh leaves of this shrub – stimulating but addictive – and pass the afternoon. Goats, sheep, and dogs join in. The chat leaves give them a kick, too, and no one seems to mind if they snatch a share. As the sun descends, a dozen women, ages fifteen to sixtythree, occupy a patch of ground just as the road leaves Boto. Each displays and sells the excess from her family’s garden: perhaps a dozen tomatoes, mangoes piled in a basket, coffee beans spread on a small cloth.

Family necessities On a cool April morning, Safiya Oljira prepares coffee for her family, roasting the beans over open flames. She uses firewood gathered by her daughter, Lensu, and water fetched by her twin five-year-old boys from the village pump two kilometers away. The maize flour she shapes into bread comes from the family plot, and everyone has a hand in its sewing and reaping. Usmael, the father, reminds his eldest son that today they will repair the fence that keeps wandering sheep and cows off their land. In the late afternoon, the family will together weed the vegetable garden. In our village, survival demands teamwork and teamwork demands families. Like rural families across Ethiopia, we are tied to each other by the daily chores we share as much as the love we feel. The birth of a child, we leave to God. The bringing up, we assign first to parents, and next to the community. Parents direct their children, not the other way around, and other adults keep a watchful eye when children roam. Elders, we turn to them for wisdom and to make the important decisions in our village. In Boto, we marry because we will not survive unless we do. â&#x20AC;&#x153;It is calculated and complicated,â&#x20AC;? says Seid, who has written a report on marriage in the village. Many marriages are arranged when the bride is a child, though Ethiopian law sets the minimum age for marriage at eighteen, and the husband is always older. Marriage through courtship, what most of us wish for, takes planning, too. The boy picks the girl, who often encourages his interest, 18

and the boy makes his intent known to his father, who begins the negotiations. An imam, accompanied by several elders, travels from the prospective groom’s house to the bride’s to ask for the marriage and establish the terms. Dowries of livestock or other valued items, sometimes more fiction than fact, pass from the male’s family to the female’s. Or the future son-in-law might till the land of his future in-laws, to show that he can support their daughter and earn her family’s respect. The marriage celebration, you may be surprised to hear, often begins with the two families playfully insulting each other: “Your son is a thief and your cattle are lame.” The insults soon soften into song, “We raise our voices in joy. . . ” Despite these traditions, everyone has her or his own story. Alfia, who at eighteen is one year married, describes her experience: My mother died in childbirth, when she was twenty-six, and my father married another wife. We are eight children in all. My husband raised the question when I was fifteen. Across two years, imams and elders visited us to be sure that our marriage would stand. I started shy with my husband-to-be. He was eleven years older and had an

important job in the village. By the time we married, he would have been my love choice. On my wedding day, I rented a traditional wedding dress and we feasted with sixty guests.

Aba Garo, fifty-seven or so, tells his story: I remarried in 1999 (according to the Ethiopian calendar) after divorcing my first wife, an agreement we reached with the help of imams and elders. I went to another village, met a beautiful woman, married her, and brought her back to Boto. We have five children: two boys, two girls, one deceased. Our way as husband and wife is to share things equally, to make decisions as a pair. They say to me, “Aba Garo, you make your own rules.” That’s how it is with me.

Hastening to prayer Peace and compassion, equality and honesty. No stealing, no spreading rumors, no adultery, no killing. Wish for others what you wish for yourself. Shelter the orphan, feed the hungry, nurse the sick, obey the elders. Life is a gift and God is great. These teachings from the Qur’an we absorb from childhood. In a region where almost everyone is Muslim, in a country where nearly half of the people are Muslim, religion is our second nature. “I am an imam in the kebele of Boto,” SheIsmael begins. “I was chosen for my deep faith and the faith others have in me. I lead the prayer and the community too. I build unions and resolve disputes, weighing the lessons of the Qur’an with what the parties agree to be just.” Like She-Ismael, we practice our faith daily, answering five calls to prayer across day and night. We perform Subii at sunrise, followed by Zuurii at midday; Asirii in late afternoon, followed by Magiriib after sunset. Ishaa is a night prayer, performed after twilight.

In bigger towns, the muezzin, a man appointed to call to prayer, climbs the minaret of the mosque and with a loudspeaker calls in all directions, “Hasten to prayer.” In Boto, our five mosques – small and squat – do not have loudspeakers, so we call ourselves to prayer, with the sun keeping time. On Fridays we put on our finer clothes and walk to the nearest mosque – they are spread across our hills – for midday prayers. We enter after removing our shoes and form long straight rows, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee. Men and boys crouch in the front, women and girls kneel in a separate room. Though we divide the sexes in prayer, Islam teaches us that males and females are equal. The holiest time, you may know, is Ramadan, the ninth month in the Islamic lunar calendar. For thirty days we fast from sunrise to sunset, a test of our individual will and faith. We break our fast on Eid-al-Fitr, a time of thank fulness and forgiveness. The exact time of this holy day is not decided until the night before – the moon must appear as a slim crescent in the sky – and so we wait in anticipation until the imam tells us it is time. We visit each other to exchange good wishes and we feast as one, neighbor with neighbor. The smoke from our cooking fires blankets our homesteads, and when Eid-al-Fitr falls at the peak of the harvest, the feasting and smoke last for days.

Ballast or bounty Two women winnowing a large pile of grain. A mother and her two children squeezing through a field thick with sugar cane. These images seem worlds away from the photographs of sad children with swollen bellies that circled the globe when famine struck northern Ethiopia more than twenty years ago. Drought and poor policy â&#x20AC;&#x201C; what a bad mix. Yet our countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s agricultural resources are vast: an abundance of fertile land, a diverse climate, mostly enough rain, and many families eager to work the land. In Boto, we are all farmers or farmers-to-be, from age three on. By necessity, we eat what we grow: teff, wheat, barley, corn, sorghum â&#x20AC;&#x201C; plus horse beans, lentils, chickpeas, and pea beans. Coffee is the exception, our cash crop; we will say more about that later on. Our plots are small, sometimes part of our homestead, sometimes a short walk away. Farming is a family enterprise. Younger children bring hoes and water and guard the fields to prevent monkeys and stray livestock from eating the crops. Older youth and adults divide up the tilling, planting, weeding, and harvesting. If the plot is large, neighbors take turns helping one another prepare the soil. We call this debo. The owner provides food and coffee to show his thanks.

Here, the growing season stretches from February to September, and each stage has its good points and bad. Our favorite is spring, when we sow possibilities with our seeds and wait for the rain to fall. When the harvest arrives, we all reap the rewards: ballast when the harvest is modest, just enough to keep us going, and bounty when our luck is good, enough to eat well and store the rest.

Chat, a crop with mixed blessings, covers some of our fields. When its bright green leaves are chewed just after picked, it works as a stimulant and dulls the appetite. Chat is a social drug, used for centuries, but it is habit forming, and that is its downside. The kick from chat is said to make us more productive. Come afternoon, however, you are far more likely to see farmers moving their mouths in the shade than their hands in the field. As a cash crop, chat fetches five times as many birr as a hectare of teff, which makes it valuable to grow. One of our chores as children is to bring chat to our elders.

We keep beehives, too, in woven baskets hung high in a tree or in wooden frames close to the house. They produce two kinds of honey depending on the time of year. The first is white and delicate, from the pollen of coffee flowers. The second is dark and sweet as anything we taste. A geography book at school says Ethiopia is a potential beekeeping giant. It will lead Africa in the production of honey and beeswax, if we do not harm the trees and flowers that give bees the pollen and nectar they need.

One with livestock We are joined with our livestock. We name, bless, curse, and thank them. Every family in Boto has at least one cow or sheep or chicken; most of us have a mixture, ideally more livestock than children. The more we have, the wealthier we are. Walk any path in our village and, in moments, you will pass a half dozen cattle grazing in a clearing, a young child leading – always from behind – a pair of sheep, a mule with its back sinking under the weight of water jugs and sacks. This makes it seem, though, as if the animals know their place. Truth is, they own the place. They wander into our classrooms, nuzzle in the town’s center, and stand, even lie down, in the middle of the road, assured they have the right of way. But their contributions are serious, in two categories: food and labor. We count on chickens, always underfoot, to give up their eggs and on cows, always eating, to share their milk. They add protein, along with variety, to our staples of grains and vegetables. We raise sheep, male cattle, and goats for cash, for others to eat; their meat is a luxury to us.

Oxen plow our fields, singly or in pairs. We have no tractors. A man without oxen may plow another’s land in return for the use of the oxen on his own land. We harness horses and mules for plowing, too, though we turn to them most for transporting goods – and us. Oxen far outnumber horses and mules: 1,797 compared to 468 and 116. Mules (a cross between a donkey and a horse) are valued for their work, but horses make better companions. We have a joke about this animal rivalry. A horse sees a mule and says, “You look funny. Who is your father?” The mule replies, “I wouldn’t know. My mother is a horse.” Tending livestock is mostly a child’s task, a low job in a social order that holds animals high. When it comes to cattle, we have a system where families can band together to graze their cattle as a group, watched over by a herdsman paid for his attention. It works like this: a farmer drops off his cattle in the morning and picks them up at sunset, paying the herder five birr (about 30 U.S. cents) per day. The herders rotate daily, but few of us know their names. We know the names of each other’s animals, though, and one thing every animal knows is how to find its way home. At day’s end, the free roamers, wherever their day’s wanderings have taken them, head back to their homestead like a baby to the breast.

Duromina Few crops could be more natural to a place than coffee is to Ethiopia. If you walk through one of Boto’s many forests, you will see thin, tall coffee trees growing wild, just as they have for centuries. The Arabica bean originated here, not in Arabia. By tradition, we grow our coffee under a thick canopy of shade, using organic farming practices. We let nature give back to the soil, with dead leaves that have dropped from the trees above. There is a scientific word for this: symbiosis. “If it were not for coffee, all the big trees and all the old forests would be gone by now,” explains farmer Nezif Abafogi. “We cut down the forest to build our houses, to plant maize and teff. But we need the forest to grow coffee.” And we need coffee to grow Boto. Ketemaye Arega, our business adviser, travels each week from the city of Jimma to help us get the most from our coffee trees. She says: You have the right soils, altitude, and climate for growing coffee of the highest quality. This is good. And coffee is one of the few agricultural products that can survive the dusty truck trip – five days and 950 kilometers – from Boto to Addis Ababa to the Djibouti port, and then the long boat trip to Europe or America. But until now, you have processed your coffee poorly and marketed it weakly. This is unfortunate. For these reasons, you have remained poor.

Last year, Boto’s coffee farmers, after months of meetings and discussion, formed a cooperative to join assets and build strength. They drafted a charter, elected thirteen leaders, and chose a name: Duromina, which means “let’s make ourselves wealthy” in Afan Oromo. Then they set to work. The cooperative obtained a bank loan, and the 113 members constructed a coffeeprocessing factory (a “wet mill”), laboring through the rain so that it would be ready when the harvest came. Once the mill was finished, the leaders hired workers from the village – a manager, an accountant, a clerk, a machine technician, several guards, and more than a dozen day laborers.

As hoped, the good aromas we create far away circle back to us.

The teamwork needed for success, our farmers were experienced with that. The value of modern practices and carefulness, these lessons were new. Ketamaye explains:

Yes, we taste a future where the coffee we grow sweetens the lives we lead.

“The farmers receive a lot more money with this arrangement,” says Nizamu Abamecha, the elected head of the cooperative. “They can improve their houses or send children to school. The wet mill creates jobs for young people, especially during the harvest season.” The success of Duromina’s coffee has attracted the district government, too. A new road, co-funded by the cooperative, will make vehicle travel to Boto possible even during the rainy season, which used to strand us from the world.

Each day during last year’s coffee harvest (October to December), farmers arrived on foot, by mule or by donkey, to deliver their freshly picked coffee cherries to Duromina. Using the wet mill, the cooperative de-pulped the cherries, separating the fleshy fruit from the bean, and then soaked the beans overnight. Shortly after sunrise, the beans were rinsed and brought onto tables for drying. If the weather was good, the coffee was fully dried by the sun after a week or two. Any mistake during this process – letting the beans soak too long, forgetting to cover the drying tables at night to keep the dew out – and the coffee could be ruined.

We were quick learners, it seems. The farmers of Duromina sold 900 bags of coffee in their first year, enough to fill almost three shipping containers. Cafés in America serve our coffee, Ketemaye tells us, and they are eager for more. Like new plant shoots, coffee buyers now appear in Boto to “cup” (professionally judge) our coffee and give us their feedback.

Wattle and daub In rural Ethiopia, traditional houses are round, their walls made of wattle and daub. Wattle is a woven web of wooden strips, daubed with a sticky material usually made of some combination of wet soil, clay, sand, animal dung, and straw. Wattle and daub has been used for at least 6,000 years, and it remains an important construction material across Africa. The roofs of these dwellings are shaped like a cone and made of thatch, and the center pole has a sacred meaning. In Boto, we call houses like this citaa. But it is only one of several designs. There is also godoo, a rectangle house with a thatched roof, and qorqooroo, which is rectangular with a tin roof. Prosperity brings with it new designs: houses with cement walls, solid wood doors, sometimes even glass windows. Such houses are few in number, but their colorful paint and carved doors make them stand out. With more income, we imagine a future where all roofs are tin.

Houses made of wattle and daub and grass, they need yearly repair, especially after the rainy season and its winds. We build our houses as a community, one helping another, and we keep them up as a family, sons helping their father. At seventeen, Hawi Bedru can name what you will not find in his house, or any house in Boto. His list begins with electricity and running water and ends with beds and tables. Missing too is privacy, he says. Most houses have three or four small rooms â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a salon, kitchen, bedroom, and a room for storage â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and everyone shares the same bedroom, unless thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an extra. We burn a fire all night to keep out insects, and we accept the dirt floor, dry or wet. Our livestock, we encourage them to sleep in the stick shelters next to our house, but sometimes they become bedmates, invited or not.

Some of us hang colorful cloths on the walls inside our house, like people do in the city. It looks fancy and bright, a contrast to the darkness of our rooms and, for young couples, a statement that they are modern. Eighteen-year-old Alfia Abamilki and her husband, the agronomist, have made their home in the center of Boto a blaze of red, white, and green patterns.

Injera and wat A western visitor to our village compared Ethiopian food to an artist’s palette: mounds of paint on a large, thin round of wood. We had never heard of this before, but he is right. Injera is our daily bread, our palette: a flat, slightly sour bread about 50 centimeters in diameter made from fermented teff, a grain we all grow. On this we heap a stew called wat, which mixes cooked ingredients with spices such as tangy berbere. Unlike an artist with his brush, we eat with our hands (right hand only). The injera is both plate and utensil; you get extra to break into pieces and scoop up the food. Fifteen-year-old Zelika Abamecha gives more details: To make injera you mix yeast, water, and teff flour, cover it, and let it stand for one to three days, depending on the humidity. When the dough is ready, heat a cooking pan over the fire and pour the batter into the pan, tilting the pan to quickly even out the batter. Cover the pan and cook it for about one minute. The bread should not be brown, but slightly raised and easy to remove. It is cooked only on one side. Wat stews begin with a large amount of chopped red onions, sautéed in a pot. When the onions have softened, the cook adds niter kebbeh (a spicy butter we make ourselves), then berbere (like red pepper) to give it hot flavors. Then she adds water and vegetables – lentils, potatoes, cabbage – depending on what she has – and boils them until they are cooked. She places scoops of wat on the injera and we sit with the single injera between us, having our fill.

On special occasions, we may eat doro wat, which is made with chicken slaughtered that day. We also eat scrambled eggs on injera or bananas or even pasta, with or without the spicy sauce.

Zelika catches her breath and continues: For fruit, we have so many: bananas, of course, but also pineapples, mangoes, the fruit of the prickly pear. We cut sugar canes, chewing and sucking its sweetness as we carry it around, like a never-ending snack, favored by children. We prepare porridge when guests come to the home or for the mother after childbirth, using sorghum or enset. Enset is a unique plant we have that looks like a banana but has no fruit. (Its nickname is the â&#x20AC;&#x153;false banana.â&#x20AC;?) Instead, we make a flour out of the dried stalks and roots and ferment it for a month. Dabo is our local bread, which we make by mixing the powder of wheat or maize in water, adding yeast and spices, then wrapping the mixture in the leaf of the false banana and baking it in an oven of stones and mud. Gomen is a popular holiday food, made of boiled, dried, then chopped collard greens, served with butter, chili, and spices. It is sometimes eaten with kitfo, raw meat cut into little pieces and served with niter kebbeh.

We make niter kebbeh like this: we collect milk from the cow, cover it and let it stand for four to six days, then push and pull the milk for about six hours to get butter. We add red and green peppers, garlic, ginger, korarima (cardamom) and other spices. Because of the spices, the butter keeps for a year, ready to bring out the taste of our wats. Firfir, made from shredded injera and leftover wat, is a breakfast dish.

Jemila, who is fourteen, adds some final points: Since we eat with our hand, just before the food is ready a basin of water and soap is brought out for washing, and it returns when the meal is finished. During a meal with friends, a person may strip off a piece of injera, roll it in the wat, and put the rolled injera into a friendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mouth. This is called a goorsha, and the larger the goorsha, the stronger the friendship.

Satisfaction, conversation, and blessing The mother pours her coffee, dips a finger in the warm liquid, and puts it in her toddlerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mouth to suck. We grow up sipping coffee, several times a day, for company as much as pleasure. You may have heard about the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, a tradition hundreds of years old. Buna zigijit joins families and neighbors in stories, gossip, debates, and friendship. This is how it looks. Liya, the oldest daughter of Fatuma and Mohammed, spreads fresh long grasses across the floor and lights the nearby incense burner. She fills a jebena (a round-bottomed, black clay coffeepot) with water and places it over hot coals. Today it is her turn to prepare the hour-long coffee ceremony for her family and neighbors. She tosses a handful of green coffee beans into a heated, long-handled pan, then shakes the beans over a fire until they are clean. With the same pan, she roasts the beans, stirring them constantly. Unlike her mother, who removes the beans from the heat when they turn medium brown, Liya roasts them until they are blackened and shimmering with oils. She walks the pan around the room, sending wafts of roasted coffee in every direction and letting each guest breathe in its sweet aroma.

Liya then reaches for a small, heavy wooden bowl, called a mukecha, and a wooden pestle, a zenezena. She transfers the beans to the mukecha and grinds them until they are a fine powder. Soon, the water in the jebena is ready. She removes the jebena’s straw lid and adds the fresh coffee. She brings the mixture to a boil again, then removes it from the heat. On the floor next to a kerosene lamp lies a tray with ten small, porcelain handle-less cups, arranged so that each cup touches the next. Liya bends over the tray and pours the coffee in a single stream from about twelve centimeters above, one cup to the next. Liya is good at this and she rarely breaks the stream. She also knows when to stop pouring, so that the grounds at the bottom of the jebena do not end up in the cup. She picks up the tray and carries it from one person to the next, handing each a cup of hot buna. Fatuma praises Liya’s coffee and skill, as do the others. Tradition requires this exchange, but in Liya’s case, the compliments go beyond the customary. Mohammed adds salt to his coffee. Aysha adds niter kebbeh, our spicy butter. When Jemal had stomach pains a week ago, he added the herb talatam, known to ease indigestion. Liya’s younger brothers and sister ask for sugar. Stories and gossip flow freely between sips. After the first round of coffee, Liya prepares two more—three in all. The first is abol, for satisfaction, the second is, tona, for good conversation, and the third is baraka, a blessing. Each serving is weaker than the one before, but each cup is said to transform the spirit.

Market day Once a week, on Mondays, an open-air market fills the small town of Bashasha, a 45-minute walk from Boto. Cattle, oxen, and traders jostle for position. You have to keep an eye in every direction to avoid hoofs and umbrellas. Horses, dressed to sell, graze nearby. Goats, sheep, and their owners form small crowds, noisy and active. A line of women selling sisal ropes faces the sun, ready to cut them to any length. On the road above, merchants attend to tumbles of clothing, underwear and socks, headscarves, flashlights, pots and pans, fabric, shampoo, toothpaste, matches, plastic containers, grains, spices, fruits, vegetables, and more. Across Ethiopia, this scene repeats itself according to local schedules, as entrepreneurs and customers from villages with little commerce come together to exchange goods and cash. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like a traveling shopping mall. The livestock traders have most to win â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or lose. Many have journeyed six hours by foot, along with their livestock, to reach Bashasha. At the end of the day, five hundred sheep, goats, cattle, and horses may have changed hands. Traders either count their blessings or, with empty pockets, lead their caravans back home. The price of livestock depends on its size, use, and attractiveness, as well as the time of year. Mahmoud Ahmed, a trader who has come to Bashasha for eight years, explains:

Oxen, because of their plowing strength, cost from 3,500 to 6,000 birr [206 to 352 USD; 17 birr = 1 USD]. The price of horses goes from 1,600 to 3,000 birr. Cows, which are valued for their milk and are second to oxen for pulling, cost from 1,600 to 2,200. Sheep, which are sources of cash income, especially when crops fail, and of milk, manure, and wool, cost 450 to 1,000. Goats, the last, are used for the same reasons as sheep but also for their hides. They cost 250 to 650 birr. Right before a big holiday or feast, one of the few times we eat animals for their meat, the price for goats and sheep can double.

For the past four Mondays, Neima has walked two hours to Bashasha with the intention of buying a cow, the second for her family. Last year’s coffee harvest put enough birr in this mother’s hands to pay for the purchase. Still, her heart is heavy as she searches for the best cow for her budget. “I know it is a worthy investment,” she says, “but it is a fortune. I pray to God that my choice is right and my cow is healthy and productive.”

While the livestock buyers and traders inspect their assets, the merchants lining the slope and the road call out for customers. Women, men, and children move from one vender to the next, touching, lifting, sizing, biting (sampling), and smelling. Most have come for necessities they cannot buy in their village, from rubber shoes to berbere. Some have a special purchase in mind, one they have saved for carefully: a new tray for serving coffee, a sitting stool, a blanket. Youth like us, we look for the latest in salvaged clothing. We wear new clothes only for special occasions; one set will do. Salvaj costs one-fifth or one-tenth of the price of new clothes and gives us a bigger wardrobe. We like to think that washed and pressed, against the sun, our previously owned skirts and pants look almost new. We just wish we too had made their journey: starting in China or India, then maybe to the United States, ending up in Bashasha.

Head to toe Islam calls us to modesty, not just in how we behave, but also in what we wear. It says how much of our bodies we may expose and what we must cover. Poverty limits our choices too. We hand down and pass around clothes until they are threadbare. Then we patch them up and wear them again. Fashion is a luxury. Still, when it comes to our appearance, we want to stand out just as much as to blend in. It starts with our hair. As girls, we braid our hair with pride as soon as it’s long enough to twist – even though we cover it with a headscarf starting at age seven or eight. We have at least nine popular styles, from the simple achare to the intricate qutitire. Some of us stick to the same style all year round and some of us change it up every few weeks. Girlfriends, mothers and daughters, older and younger sisters spend many hours on the weekends, after chores are finished, telling stories and taming each other’s hair. We put fresh butter in our hair, too, to bring out the shine and keep down the frizz. Our “conditioner.” Boys until the age of seven, their heads are shaved completely except for a tute (tuft) on the top. It is said that the tute shades the brain while it is growing. When the skull is strong enough, we cut the tute in a special ceremony. After that, male hairstyles fall into two groups: shaved or styled.

The minimum dress requirements, set by Islam, go like this. Females must wear long skirts, long sleeves, and a scarf over their hair. For males there are fewer restrictions, but long pants are preferred over shorts. Older men usually wear a dress shirt and jacket, maybe a scarf, and the traditional head covering called taqiyah. For Friday prayers, we all wear our better clothes, decent and cleanly pressed if possible. Dressing modestly also means that clothing should be loose, hiding your curves if you are a woman, and thick enough that the skin does not show through.

Outside these rules, we wear the colors of the rainbow and patterns of every description, with no prejudices about what goes with what. Elders still prefer handmade clothes, using traditional fabrics. But the younger generations, we find factory made clothes more interesting – mostly used and made in far away places, as we said before.

As for footwear, sturdy is the rule, constructed to keep out the mud and dust and carry us across the rutted walking paths that weave through our village. Cheap shoes in different styles but made entirely out of rubber are sold at the markets. The least fortunate of us go barefoot, turning the soles of our feet as tough as leather.

And, yes, we prefer snug clothes to loose, which causes words with our parents – or, in the case of some boys, baggy jeans that sag down below the underwear. Unlike students in the major towns, we don’t wear school uniforms, since many families cannot afford them.

With dust everywhere, and no running water or electricity, you can imagine how much human power – woman power, really – goes into keeping our clothing clean and pressed. The standards are lower for the youngest among us: except on special occasions, their look is tattered and torn.

Child’s work, child’s play “It’s a well worn arrangement,” Muhidin says, describing the obligations that bind children and parents. “Children give their labor and time, and the parents – most, anyway – give back food, shelter, and love. This is subsistence: everyone in a family contributing what they can.” The first chore young children do is to fetch water daily from one of the village’s four pumps, usually a trip of several kilometers. Walk a path in the afternoon and you might see a five-year-old girl with her eight-year-old brother, she balancing a small jug against her hip, he a bigger one on his head. Increasing age brings increased chores: collecting firewood, carrying farm materials, weeding, helping to plow, caring for livestock, roasting coffee, helping to cook, watching after younger children, guarding fields from baboons, helping with repairs, beekeeping. “A family’s worth,” Muhidin notes, “can go up or down by the contributions of the children. Parent behavior matters, too. A father who mistreats a son or daughter, he falls in the eyes of the community.” Play is also part of the equation, however, mixing naturally with work. You won’t hear a parent in Boto tell a child, “Finish your chores, then you can play.” For us, they go together.

We count singing as play, and we sing a lot. When we guard the farm, we sing to the monkeys: “Hin dhufin midhani amma iyyu hingaeeny” (“Don’t come because the crop isn’t ready yet”). While doing chores early in the morning, we sing back and forth with a friend in hearing distance, “Kuku lulu,” like a rooster crowing. Pass a field where children are grazing livestock and you will see frolicking, too. We might jump rope, balance on a seesaw fashioned from a big rock and a long piece of wood, or play soccer with a ball made from plastic bags and old clothing. There’s also horseplay, of course. We use our bodies to make formations and show off our flexibility with backbends and splits. Swings hang from a few large trees in Boto and we line up for turns. We swim in the rivers and join up on the paths. At school, we play volleyball and tim tam (tetherball) and hold jumping contests. In a country known for its marathon winners, we run part of the way to and from school, which for some of us can be a five-kilometer trip, one-way, uphill and down. In short supply are toys. A push toy for toddlers, made by attaching a small wheel to a stick, that is about it. Few of us have ever seen a shop with toys, so we don’t know what we lack. “Work and play, I don’t separate them,” says Zelika. “To me, they are the natural ways of childhood.”

Storytelling “This is a story about rats,” Sultan with his deep wrinkles and deep voice, warns us. Gathered by the light of a kerosene lamp, we listen intently. “There was a whole colony of rats who thought they were superior to all animals on earth,” he continues. “They were very arrogant and ambitious and they had a king who was the worst of them all.” Elders like Sultan can take a story we know word for word – rats and all – and give it new breath. Their reputation stands as tall as their shadow. One of these stories, a national legend, concerns the goat herder from Kaffa and the origins of coffee. You may know it, too. It goes like this: Once upon a time, there lived a sober and responsible goatherd named Kaldi, with goats as sober as he. One night, Kaldi’s goats did not come home, and in the morning he found them excited, almost dancing on their hind legs near a shiny, dark-leafed shrub with red berries. Kaldi soon determined that it was the red berries on the shiny, dark-leafed shrub that caused the goats’ unusual behavior. Soon he was dancing too. A learned priest from a local monastery came by on his way to prayer. He saw the goats dancing, Kaldi dancing, and the shiny, dark-leafed shrub with the red berries. Disapproving, the priest took the red berries back to the monastery and tossed them in the fire. Within minutes the aroma of roasting beans filled the air and the other monks gathered to investigate. They raked the beans from the flames, crushed them, distilled the substance in boiling water, and bravely drank it. After sitting up all night, they found new energy for their prayers, though they did not dance, being holy men. The miracle drink, coffee, spread from monastery to monastery, across the Red Sea to Arabia Felix (Yemen), and from there to the rest of the world.

Another story involves a lion, a monkey, and honey. Animals are the mischiefmakers or heroes in so many of our folktales. Once upon a time, there was a river, a monkey, and a lion carrying a jar of honey on his back. The monkey said, “Please, Mr. Lion, can you give me a ride across the river?” The lion agreed. But as they crossed the river, the monkey, who was very clever, sneakily feasted on the honey. When they reached the other side, the lion felt a sticky liquid in his ear. “What’s this?” he growled. “They are my tears of joy, for your commitment to help me,” the monkey answered. Soon enough, the lion learned the truth, and as the monkey jumped off his back for the nearest tree, the lion bit off her tail. Using his authority, the lion ordered every monkey to attend a meeting the next day, so that he could identify the culprit, the monkey without a tail. That night, the clever monkey told the other monkeys: “Every one of you has to remove your tail.” The next day, instead of finding one monkey with no tail, the lion couldn’t find a single monkey with a tail. So he ordered the monkeys to jump into the river, figuring the monkey who had eaten his honey would be too heavy to jump. This strategy worked, and the lion captured the monkey, put her into a deep hole, then went off to gather wood so that he could set her on fire. The monkey, meanwhile, dug her way out of the hole and threw in a popping plant so that when the lion lit the fire, he would think the popping sound was her body exploding. As the lion danced around the fire, the monkey laughed from the treetop.

Stories like this feed our imagination. Although our world is changing, they stay mostly the same as they pass down the generations.

In sickness and health For Seid, death first visited when he was eight. “My six-year-old sister got very sick, but there was no medicine for her in our village and we did not have the money to transport her to Agaro. She died in a week.” Jemila’s sister passed at five: “She got bloated, then just died. I still feel sad when I think about her. We were close.” Hawi’s father passed at forty, of acute malaria: “He had taken traditional medicines that were no match for the malaria.” Alfia’s mother died in childbirth, when Alfia was eight and her mother was twenty-five. “After the complications arrived, my father and others started the four-hour walk to the hospital in Agaro, carrying my mother in a traditional bed. She died along the way.” In our village, you see, life begins, continues, and ends mostly unattended by modern medicine. We pray for health and endure sickness. The village clinic, staffed by a nurse on call, dispenses immunizations and antibiotics, when they are available, but little else. The metal examination bed, barely hidden by a curtain, is hard and cold. If someone has been sick for a few weeks or more, the nurse may examine the patient and recommend a trip to the doctor in Agaro. More often than not, we rely on healing plants, not because we believe they are better but because they are all we have. Life expectancy across Ethiopia is fifty-six years, and our village is no exception. What takes life early where we live? Pneumonia, dysentery, childbirth gone wrong, kidney problems, typhoid, malaria. Some causes we cannot name, since the tests and equipment for diagnosis lie largely beyond reach. 66

It is a sad story, in all, for which we have few visual images. Instead, the images are etched in our heart. But there is change. The Ethiopian government now assigns to each village a health extension worker who teaches about family planning, HIV, and how to push back against waterborne illness. We have learned to clean our water containers and we know which water is unsafe to drink under any circumstances. In the past, we used the grass or trees for toilets; now we are building latrines. We still turn to traditional herbs for their curing powers. They are affordable, familiar, and often work just as well as the modern equivalents. For stomach aches or dysentery, we may take guru (black seed), halbata (fenugreek), or talatam (rue). For a cough or cold, we have zingibil (ginger), qullabbiiadii (garlic), and qarafa (cinnamon). If your head aches, semhal (peppermint) eases the pain. There are herbalists in the village who give advice, but they are not â&#x20AC;&#x153;witch doctors.â&#x20AC;? And if we can obtain modern medicines, the health extension worker teaches us about how to take them properly. The brightest change comes from our new clinic, four rooms in all. The clinic stands on the road going out of Boto, making concrete our hopes to live long lives.

Education, poverty, and wealth Until 2006, education in Boto ended at grade four. That year, the primary school added another grade, and one more each year since. We now have eight full grades, a complete primary school in the Ethiopian education system. Across the country, the number of students enrolled in school has risen like a bumper harvest, five hundred percent in twenty years, they say. More children attending more school – we should be glad. We are. But it’s a mixed blessing, to tell the truth. Having grades four through eight creates an opportunity for us to go on to secondary education: two years of level one and perhaps two years of level two. But to do so, we must leave our village and pay fees that few of our families can afford. After grade ten, we could teach primary school. After grade twelve, we have the chance – small, to be sure – to go on to university. More education means more possibilities, this we know. But poverty still gets in the way. The conditions in our village school, never good, have grown worse. Bulcha Albamilki, whose parents never attended school, teaches grades one through six. He has this to say: With 1,000 students and thirteen teachers, the classrooms are too full. It is better now that the younger students come in the morning and the older in the afternoon, but that reduces the education by half for each group. There are not enough tables, not enough chairs, and no desks. Students who live near the school sometimes bring their own

chairs. In the dry season, we spread outdoors, with the teacher and students grouped around a blackboard that leans against a tree or classroom wall.

Seid picks up where Bulcha leaves off: We lack books, we lack laboratory materials, we lack community support. The roof leaks and, without proper fencing, the animals come in. We speak Oromiffa, the language of our region, but the few books we have are in Amharic or English. We get discouraged. The 150 students who enter the first grade drop to 48 in the eighth.

Despite these challenges, many of us study as hard as we can, borrowing time from daily chores to do “maths” and answer our teachers’ questions, copied down from worn blackboards. “What countries border Ethiopia?” “What planets revolve around the sun?” “How many meters are there in twenty kilometers?” “What gases cause global warming?” A sign in our school, handwritten on a piece of fabric, reads, “Education is wealth.” May we be wealthier than our parents, we say as one, and may our children be wealthier still.

Hope in the unseen In our culture, first names convey wishes of success and wisdom. They remind us that we each entered this world carrying the hopes of our parents and generations before. Among our group, there is Alfia, which means “beginning,” Seifu, which means “professional,” and Abduselam, which means “one who speaks about peace.” The name Jemila equals “beautiful” and Hawi equals “lucky.” Muhidin and Seid both stand for “teacher.” Zelika is the name of a young and beautiful heroine in the Qu’ran. The eight of us, we are determined to live up to our names – and to succeed against large odds. What other choice is there but to hope? We hope for possibilities we do not know directly, possibilities we have never seen. “We break down hope into two parts,” Seid (the “teacher”) explains. It is like the soil. There is the soil on top, which gives – or erodes – plant life. Our first hope, our topsoil, is that we will have enough to eat, that we will have shelter and health, that we will belong to a family who supports us and whom we can support back. Sometimes we express these hopes backwards: that when the growing season is poor, we will have enough food stored to protect us from hunger; that when we are sick, we will be able to obtain the medicines that will keep death away. Then there are our deeper hopes, our unseen hopes, buried in the subsoil where a plant’s roots lay hidden. Some of these hopes are as big as can be: we long for the day when we, and all female and male children in Ethiopia, get the education we deserve;

we pray that globalization will lift our village, not leave us behind. In Boto, we prize cooperation and we resolve conflicts through negotiation. We want this to be true for the world, too.

I want to be a scientist and develop vaccines against the diseases that still kill people I love. – Zelika I want to be a university professor, surrounded by big ideas. – Seifu

As for our individual futures, we have dreams that demand persistence, sacrifice, wings, and god’s blessings. We start with two handicaps. We are behind in our education, since our village school ended at grade four until recently, and half of us will be eighteen when we graduate from primary school. And to continue our education, we must board at a secondary school a day’s travel from our village, with fees we cannot easily afford. For our families, the sacrifice stands as tall as the Boto tree where our village began.

I want to be the mayor of a city, like Agaro, and bring progress. – Abdusalem I want to be the president of Ethiopia and reduce poverty, raise opportunity, and thread harmony. – Jemila

Still, we hope and dream. I want to become a doctor and return to the village infirmary to care for the healthy and cure the sick. – Muhidin I want to be a professor of agriculture and work alongside my husband, Suleman, the agricultural agent. – Alfia I want to be an engineer and design technology to reduce global warming. – Seid I want to be a teacher and share my knowledge at the primary school here in Boto. – Hawi

Fast Facts on Ethiopia Location: The Horn of Africa, bordered on the north and northeast by Eritrea, on the east by Djibouti and Somalia, on the south by Kenya, and on the west and southwest by Sudan Area: 1.12 million square kilometers (437,794 square miles) Population: 82,000,000 (2010 estimate); 13th in the world* Population growth rate: 3.19 percent (2011 estimate); 8th in the world* Capital: Addis Ababa Climate: Tropical monsoon; wide variations induced by topographic factors Terrain: High plateau with a central mountain range divided by the Great Rift Valley. Lowest point: Danakil Depression at minus 125 meters (minus 400 feet). Highest point: Ras Dashen at 4,533 meters (14,872 feet) Major languages: Amharic (official), 33 percent; Afan Oromo (official regional), 32 percent; English (official language taught in secondary and higher education), 15 percent courtesy of mapsof.net

Ethiopia

Major religions: Orthodox, 43 percent; Muslim, 34 percent; Protestant, 19 percent

Government: Federal republic Monetary unit: Birr (approximately 17 birr = 1 USD) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth: 8 percent (2010 estimate); 19th in the world* GDP per capita: 1,009 USD (2010); 160th out of 172 countries Main exports: Coffee, hides, oilseeds, beeswax, chat, and sugarcane; the largest domestic livestock population in Africa; poised to become one of the top flower exporters in the world Natural resources: Small reserves of gold, platinum, copper, potash, natural gas (unexploited), hydropower

Literacy: 62 percent of males age 15 and over can read and write; 39 percent of females (2008) Education expenditures: 5.5 percent of GDP (2007); 42nd in the world* Drinking water source: Improved, 38 percent of population; unimproved, 62 percent Sanitation facility access: Improved, 12 percent of population; unimproved, 88 percent Roads: 36,469 km (22,600 mi); 24 percent paved, 76 percent unpaved Mobile phone users: 5 per 100 persons (2010) Internet users: 0.4 per 100 people (2008)

Work force: Agriculture 80 percent; industry and commerce 20 percent Urbanization: 17 percent of population (2010)

Sources: CIA World Factbook, United Nations Human Development Report, World Bank

Arable land: 10 percent

* These (approximate) rankings are from the CIA World Factbook.

Median age: 16.8 years Total fertility rate: 6.02 children born per woman (2011 estimate); 7th in the world* Life expectancy at birth: 56.1 years (2010)

Note: According to the United Nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Human Development Index (HDI), Ethiopia ranks 157th out of the 169 countries that were part of the 2010 HDI. The index measures a countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s average achievements in three basic aspects of human development: health, knowledge, and income. Introduced in 1990, the HDI is an alternative to conventional measures of national development, such as level of income and the rate of economic growth. It emphasizes that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone. In the case of Ethiopia, the HDI underscores how much more needs to occur in Ethiopia with respect to reducing poverty, improving health, and increasing literacy.

Infant mortality rate: 109 deaths per 1,000 live births (2008)