About fifteen minutes away from me, in the Dilla Town, Internally Displaced Peoples (IDP) camp there will be about seventy people sleeping in a 5 x 3 meter canvas tent, a space about the same size as my room. At the other side of the football pitch sized compound there is a concrete warehouse with a tin roof, about 30 x 10 meters, that is home to about 1,450 people.
While I sit here, breathing in freshly roasted (single origin) coffee and watching a young woman prepare it in the manner of the unique Ethiopian coffee ceremony, I am reflecting on my day and waiting for my dinner to be prepared and served for me. But the images and sounds of my second stop, a food distribution centre, play on continuous loop in my head. 9,000 people lined up, had their credentials inspected and stamped, carried their supplies out into the heat of the day, placed their mark on a verification record and lugged their months’ worth of rations (15kg of wheat, 1.5kg of beans, 0.45kg of vegetable oil per person) back to cook on a wood fire wherever they found a space to call home.
How can I not compare? How can I not feel guilty for my privilege? A privilege born, not from anything I deserve, but as a result of being born in a lucky country.
Just over an hour ago I was sitting in the dirt and smoke of the canvas tent talking to Etenesh Beyene, a forty-two-year-old mum with eight children. She and her family are among 40,000 people living in the Dilla Town IDP camp, and these are among the one million people displaced by the Gedeo - West Guji tribal conflict that is now almost 5 months old.
Etenesh, her husband and children left their home on April 10 this year when their neighbours house was set on fire and after their possessions, including their years’ harvest, (800 kg of coffee and 800 kg peas) was destroyed. They walked for four days, hiding at times in jungle and aqueducts to avoid raiding parties. Some of their friends were killed along the way, their money was stolen and their remaining possessions destroyed.
It’s been five months now for Etenesh and her kids, a baby only 8 months and the oldest 15 years. With the rest of the group she is living with, she and her husband have set up a place for the kids and they share all they have including their rations. In the far corner of the tent a wood fire is burning, filling the small space with smoke and cooking the beans ready for dinner. When asked about the future Etenesh says: “Now I don’t have any hope. How can I return? But, if peace is restored I will go back”.
