05-AUG-B-10
MY ONLY WEEKEND “DAY OFF” BEGINS WITH A
WONDERFUL HIGH ALTITUDE RUN, AMID THE “WASTE OF WAR”
IN THE GRAVEYARD OF JUNKED MILITARY
MATERIEL
AND A TAXI TOUR OF THE
TO
SEE THE ROCKY TERRACED COUNTRYSIDE,
AND
RETURN TO MEET WITH DR. HAILE AND GWU’S DR.
August 14, 2005
This is a
good day, with a clear and dry morning, with a “day off” from the continuing
operating schedule, and the first and only chance for me to make a good
run. I had talked with John Sampson,
anesthesiologist from Johns Hopkins, who had said we would be making a run, but
had called me too early or too late each day we had tried. Today, however, we had a plan for an eleven o’clock
pickup by the taxi driver
So, after sleeping in for the first time since arrival, I got up and we started the long run out along the main street nearly deserted in the early Sunday morning, whereas it is usually filled with pedestrian traffic, and would be again later upon our return. We ran passed the various landmarks I had seen all week, and then turned out to go toward the countryside—an abrupt transition here as in many African towns. We encountered a group with singlets labeled ASIP, which I understand to be a town, doing a run as well with water stops and patrols on bicycles going along with them as they did their calisthenics on the run. I gave them a salute as we passed, and took a few Photo works pictures, as I had carried the camera with the last of the Photo Works roll of pictures that come by Internet and disc, with a roll of print film in the other hand to change into if we found something as photogenic as I was anticipating. We did.
There is a swampy grassy area across for some newly built and rather swanky housing which is filled with the “detritus of war.” A huge pile of heavy military materiel is stacked up including army trucks blown up in some convoy action, tanks, APC’s (Armed Personnel Carriers) and mechanized artillery, with treads falling off and rusting away in the magnificent wastage of war. I could not wait when I saw a contrast coming up into view around the hectare of hardware—and a small boy was driving a few sheep forward through the graveyard of armed might decaying in twisted carnage
SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI”
ERITREAN/ETHIOPIAN CHAPTER
WITH HEAVY ARMAMENTS SUPPLIED TO BOTH
SIDES FORM THE SAME SOURCE—ITSELF A FORMER SUPERPOWER
BROKER INTERVENTIONIST
I climbed
into the gun turret of a tank and watched as the small boy and an accompanying
person who may have been his father on a bicycle came closer. The sheep were cropping what little life had
sprouted in the cracks and crevices of the wastage of war. Who knows how many lives were lost in and
amid the rubble of twisted steel? And
along came a few gently sheep with the only sound being that of the grass ripping
as they cropped it between the fallen half track treads. I shot photos of the small boy and his
charges, a shepherd youth amid the unrealities of war fought in these remote highlands
on a dark continent far away from the source of where these machines were
made. Someone somewhere—most likely in
the Kirov plant of the Leningrad I had visited, where the same kind of T-38 Russian
tank had been manufactured that had been sent to Siyad Barre in Somaliland,
where I could sit in the disabled turret of that fallen heavy armament along
the road form Hargeisa to Berbera as that Russian misadventure in Africa had
also failed, leaving behind the heavy detritus of the ambitions of a now dead
Superpower. Somewhere else,
simultaneously, there are rusting hulks of new and expensive Humvees
interjected in deserts of foreign folk with ideas that do not match those of
democracy and freedom sent in by the sole remaining superpower on earth, with
outcome not dissimilar. The Russians in
the Soviet era were “Equal Opportunity interventionists” since they sent the
same hardware to both the Ethiopian and the Eritreans sides, guaranteeing a
socialist full employment at the
I had switched rolls of film to color print to carry back with me the impressions of the scene I was perusing in a contemplative mood. I ran the distance back to the Central Hotel—John Sampson gasping that he must have used up a lot of energy in the climb yesterday as it sapped him in the return run (remember, our gentle run is 69 minutes and eight miles at 7,400 feet elevation!) I packaged up the film I had exposed and the dozen rolls of print film and three rolls of Photo Works film will be going back with Amy Fielder as she returns from Karin today and goes back to Washington on Monday night—so you may have an early view of the scenes I have passed through all the way from Azerbaijan (another Soviet client state not necessarily left better off at the passing of the USSR and its influence and sponsorship of its own purposes) to Asmara—and the leftovers of conflicts in which it was sure to back losers—any side engaged in the use of its generous supply of hardware.
A NEARLY RANDOM TOUR OF THE CONTURYSIDE
IN THE ROCKY
TO “MAISIRWA”
I met
PRIDE OF PLACE AND PEOPLE,
AMID VOYEURISTC PHOTOGRAPHERS
It is a
hard life here. WE have pooled our
resources to go out for what may be impossible for the crowd here to
understand—a “joy ride.” Gasoline has
gone up at the stroke of midnight from 32 Nakfa (15 N= $1.00 US) per liter (or,
$8.00/gallon) to 38 N/liter= $10.00/gallon.
We are going out to see what we can in the harsh barren highland rocky
terraces where these people must scrabble amid the stony ground to eke out a
survival, and our very presence indicates we have disposable income to come to
a place so far away to check to see if it is really a “Paradizo.” So, the envy of our presence (here—separated
from our obvious volunteer work among patients in a hospital or clinic setting
where the same equations are as readily drawn in our favor) is not unalloyed
with resentment. I am shooting a lot of
pictures form the hip. The loud
objections of the goatherds to the presence of the two guys who had spilled out
into their earthy scene of animal excrement and hard-living outdoor herders in
foul-smelling cattle clothes had come from being overtly photographed. The explanation given through
DRIVE THROUGH ROCKY TERRACED COUNTRYSIDE
TO SMALL VILLAGES ALONG THE WAY
While we
considered this explanation, of no man wishing to appear at other than his
best, and in a position of some meaningfulness in which he can take pride, we
stopped at a small village in the fork of a road. Donkeys were carrying burdens past small
shacks of the kind that offer the consumer goods—little kids selling
“Bellas! Bellas!”—the cactus fruit—and
piles of sandals made of tire casings on the down market end, or with a speacil
Chinese stamp of a leopard on the upper end.
We saw many small items in the roadside stands, like hands of bananas,
or a few items for food, but went to get a bottle of “Mai gas”” sparkling
water. I had to consume it on the
premises, since the brown bottle was worth 15 Nakfa and the water itself
contained therein was only five nakfa. I
watched form a distance as the group drew a crowd. We had crossed through a village called Wokkie,
which had a single claim to fame—it was at 8,000 feet, a bit higher than we are
at
We were headed to some kind of renowned historic site, which I had heard described before departing, but had not a clue as to what we would see. I had heard about this immense baobab tree which was a pilgrimage site that had been hollowed out and to which worshippers went to receive some kind of blessing—but the group of us going to Karin would see that this weekend. When we to the road entrance to the historic site there was roadblock. The road was out was the explanation that came back. I thought they were negotiating with the driver when they had seen a yellow “Best Driver” Korean taxi carrying a group of North American tourists, but when other vehicles came up and got the same explanation we turned around and gave up on the historic site we would have seen.
We went back and had to take a fork in the road that went toward the Karin the others had visited. WE saw a road bend with a tank and an APC in the ditch which obviously had considered this stretch a strategic one for ambush, but had themselves got ambushed and were lying askew in the fields now cultivated from the stony ground around them. Since I had sat up proud and straight in Siyad Barre’s tank on the road from Hargeisa to Berbera, I had to hop out and try these on for size as well and posed in the turret and porthole of the tank as well as the rusting APC. Yes, the fellows in these hot heavy armaments were probably convinced that they were the local world’s superpowers—and they probably persisted in that thought as they drove off the road into the ditch and were incinerated as the hulking metal casket they had hoped to drive to rule their world carried them out of it. I looked down into the 16 cylinder diesel engine open to the outside elements and thought again of the deducted mechanics in the Kirov in Leningrad producing this dreadnaught T-38 Soviet tank as an export to rule the world—as that world changed and the Soviet empire they served no longer existed. So, the same flaming strategy is repeated here as it was in the last of this same vintage tank I had sat in not that far away in the Horn of Africa, and probably closer to me than America as it is happening on the other side of the Red Sea even today as more martial materiel is going up in flames with the personnel inside them.
We drove on
to a town with a mosque and a church called Adekelson which is not far from the
Karin to which the others had gone for a “change of scene” to convince them
that they really were in Africa and not just a capital city anywhere. It was much more rural and simple as they had
described it, a first view of some people living without electricity—for
example. We turned around and drove back
to the intersection with the same roadside stand where we had been seen earlier
in the day when
As we left, I wanted to stop at an unusual sight I had spotted on the way in—a donkey carcass. Here on the grassy plane around the protected watershed of the reservoir, a donkey had chosen to spend its last moments and fallen over, and there were a group of birds of prey and scavengers nearby awaiting the passage of the bright yellow taxi—hardly a camouflaged ”stealth vehicle.” But the big birds were all spooked by our return so I could not get a positive identification on many of them, all of whom went off to the distant tree to sit in the canopy and roost out the interference with their choice morsel before its “sky burial.”
When I got
back to Central Hotel I paid off
One of
But, in