I will never forget my visit to Dali. We were spending a few days in Torscha in the southern part of the country. It’s a good 8 hours south of Addis, half of that on dirt roads. It’s a bit of a brutal trek to get there, by Texas standards anyway.

So we spend a lot of time going through the mountains. Some of the most beautiful scenery you could even imagine. Dali was up in the top of the mountains.

We traveled up there with the local Governor, the man who managed the district. He seemed to garner a great deal of respect everywhere he went.

So we get to the actual village and there were a lot of people milling around. We were taken into a local cafe for a bite and a warm local beer. We start noticing a bit of a commotion outside and we learn “they are waiting for us…”

We had no idea what we were in for.

We went out to a hundred or so people and local musicians in the back of a pickup. They were dressed in traditional ceremonial white and were playing long bamboo horns. We follow them a mile or so and then we see it. There is a greeting committee of thousands. How many thousand, I’ll never know. I estimate at somewhere between 3000 and 5000 people. There were dancers, musicians, priests (with those awesome purple velvet parasols), choirs, old people, little children… you name it. Thousands of people, singing, dancing, total flood of joy. They filled the dirt road for probably a mile. We got out for a brief ceremony and then made our way through the crowd.

It really was overwhelming.

We went to the school, over 2000 children going to a crumbling mud walled school, sitting in the dirt to learn.

Then we hiked down a hill to a watersource. An unprotected spring that came out of the mountain. The water was being collected in a muddy pool by a handful of women, scooping it up and pouring it into plastic buckets for the trek up the hill. As we stood there, a cow wandered into the same stream and, well, added TO the stream.

The link below takes you to a video of the village and our welcome there. You’ll also see Eric at the water point, clearly taken aback by what we had just seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7JxXi1Bk9U

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I’ve had some time to think about this. You come back from an experience like this and you rethink just about everything you thought you know.

In talking about this with my friends, I heard the same question. Why Ethiopia. We’ve got so much poverty and so many problems HERE.

So think about this if you will. What’s poverty.

I was coming back from San Antonio a few days back. Stopped in a gas station to get gas and there was a guy in a minivan, a little on the rough side, wanting money to buy fuel. I didn’t give him any money. I got back in the car and my fellow travelers asked my why I didn’t give him five bucks. Thats when we had a conversation I would have never had without my time in Africa.

So this guy didnt have enough money for his van. But he ad a VAN. I’d just spent two weeks where nobody had a van. Nobody had indoor plumbing, water, showers, toilets, electricity, TV’s, iPods etc…

Should I feel bad for this schlub who needs gas? Yeah, I feel bad. But not THAT bad. I met a LOT of people that couldnt conceive of owning a car!

I mean, c’mon people. Lets get a grip here. We can go make a HUGE difference in the lives of a LOT of people. For five grand, we can guy this schlub a car that got better mileage, or we can put in a well that will give clean water to 500 people.

Tough choice eh?

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We’re feeling pretty good lately.

We called a very cool Austin company and offered to do a total rethink of their marketing. For free. If they liked our ideas, they’d hire us. If not, it would cost nothing.

So we met with them, talked about their business and did our own research. We then went back a week later and presented our ideas.

We nailed it. We totally changed the way they looked at their business. We showed them why their current marketing wasn’t doing what they had hoped it would and completely rebranded them.

And we got a new client.

It was pretty simple. An hour of their time. A bit of ours. Instant connection and a whole new direction. We’ve already started on their campaign and will be testing soon.

It was so much fun, we want to do it again. So now it’s your turn.

Want to give it a shot? The rules are simple. You should be an Austin company (unless you want to foot the bill to get us to your office). We meet for an hour. We come back and show you brilliant ideas. If you agree it’s a better way to sell your business, you hire us. If not, we leave a nice parting gift and go away.

Simple enough, eh?

Call us at the office. 512-266-3697 or email chris@adranch.com. We’ll get started today.

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A lot has swirled through my mind since coming home. Some random thoughts:
- I like Ethiopians in general. Everyone I met was kind, gentle, somewhat softspoken and very likable. Even the guy who tried to rob me in Gondar was really nice.
- It’s a beautiful piece of the planet. Seriously beautiful. Maybe overall the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.
- I like the food. I was ready for a steak when I got home, but overall, I like it. There are spices and flavors you dont find in the states and you tend to take on the scent of the food.
- Our perceptions of the country are wrong, at least from what I saw. Much like Austin. Everyone thinks Texas is all deserts and twang.

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We were in the Simian Mountains… Stacy felt so horrible about a cold, shaking little girl in the that she took off her stylish down ski jacket and gave it to the little girl. It was plenty big on the girl but she’ll probably wear it for many years.

On the way back from Darwa, Lynn was in the car at a fuel stop and saw a woman trudge by barefoot with little else. She jumped out of the car, took off her own shoes and gave them to the woman. They hugged. Lynn came back barefooted. The woman walked over to the car and held our hands through the window, smiling. We left. She walked on, a little higher.

It’s easy to give things away. They have nothing of this world.

A FLIPFLOP EXPERIMENT
So lets try something. You zapped one Sunday morning into the village of Dahli. Lets say we’re generous and land you on your own little piece of land complete with domed roof mud and bamboo and straw thatched hut. In you rgarden, surrounded by woven bamboo fencing, you’ve got bananas, teff, chickpeas, geans, corn and a dozen other staples. Maybe even a couple coffee trees for your own morning cup. No electricity. No flashlights.no running water. No toilet or toilet paper.

You land there and wander into your hut. It’s black inside with the door open. You see your bedding, a blanket on a raised section of mud along the edge. A small angular cooking stove with a domed cover. You put hot charcoals in the stove and use it to cook your corn, the dome is for pouring your injera bread dough on to cook. You might have some meat if someone slaughtered a sheep or chicken. Otherwise you’ll cook up chickpeas to eat with your injera bread.

Thirsty?

Better get hoofin. Grab your dirty 5 gallon plastic jug (recycled cooking oil jug most likely) and start walking.

And this is especially apprapro if you’re a woman or child. Generally women fetch the water. But lets say she’s off on a conference in DC and it’s up to you.

You head down the hill. Walk maybe a half mile, to full mile or two miles down the mountain to a spring that comes out of some rocks. When you get there, there are women scooping the muddy water into their cans. There are also women doing laundry and men leading cattle down to drink. Everything happens in the same water hole.

So there, you have it. Your first day in the village of dahli. Cept you now have to drag that 50 lb jug of water BACK UP the hill and see if you can bring yourself to actually DRINK some of it.

Then tomorrow you’ve got to tend the fields, pick whatever is ready to pick and eat. You might have some extra bananas you can trade for beans. You might even have a market day tomorrow. That’s where you load up 50 pounds of produce on your back, balance it on your head or, if you’re lucky enough to have a mule, strap it to HIS back and walk the 4 miles to the big tree in the village where everyone sits in the dirt trading and making deals. You might end up with some cash (get a beer!) or you traded for things you aren’t growing yourself.

Then you load up your donkey and head home, hopefully before it gets dark. The road is dirt and covered in sharp volcanic rocks and there are no lights, except for the occasional transport truck rumbling by, throwing up clouds of dust and diesel.

Yet you do all this with a smile on your face. You see a friend walking towards you and you embrace, smiling and talking. Maybe you’ve got your hand on his shoulder or you hold hands as you talk. Nothing weird about that here. It simply means you cherish each others friendship. More people stop. You talk in the dark, happy to made a connection. You part ways, and walk home. You fumble inside your hut in total darkness and lay down to sleep. You haven’t bathed and you are taking on the smell of the earth. Cooking fires, mud, dust, dirt, your own odor gone natural. You smell the way humans have smelled for a million years… but you and your friends get used to it because they all smell that way too.

You wake up to the rooster at 5, or maybe a call to prayer if you’re near a mosque or church. You fumble out of bed to greet the morning. No hot shower. No CNN. Just the natural world and you are now a total piece of it.

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Wednesday, sept 30.
This morning we got up at the crack of, well way before the crack of dawn. We were all leaving the Intercontinental at 4:30 AM. Got to the airport and the usual airport chaos ensued. Our flight to Gondar left at 6:30 am, or so it said. We got off the groud sevinish.

Landing in Gondar was a pleasure. Vintage airport, walk across the tarmac and enter the ancient building with crenilated turrets. Get to the hotel, check in, eat a great breakfast in the garden and head to Burbax. It was around an hour from Gondar. Typical Ethiopian drive. Beautiful scenery with the occasional village and people on the road carrying teff grass, and an endless procession of donkeys, goats, cows and their young herders… Many not more that 5 or 6.

I wondered how many kids in Austin could do what these kids do every day and not cause major havoc!

Simian Mountians… Friday.
Wow.
Seriously.
Wow.
Take the Grand Canyon and Hawaii, shake well and they become Fresno compared to the Simian Mountians.

OK. It was a seriously brutal 3 hour trek across dirt roads from Gonder (pronounced GondAr). It’s a long brutal drive. You pass amazing scenes but 3 hours on dirt roads, even in a nice Land Cruiser can take it out of you. And today, I drove the first three hours in a NICE Land Cruiser, and then 3 hours home in a really beat-to-shit! Land Cruiser.

On the way there, we commented on how nice the road was. On the way home, I’d asked someone in the back seat if they’d seen my liver.

But I digress.

The mountains truly are one of those “most amazing places on the planet” that well traveled TV types talk about.

HUGE, deep canyons, all draped in green, vast valleys, terraced fields, lonely roads, mist, bizarre trees….

BABOONS.

Seriously, you round a bend and there are 500 freaking baboons there. HUGE males strutting like gods. Skinny little babies. Wanton females (yup, caught some of that). It was amazing.
And then there are the locals. Once you get inside the Simian Mountain National Park (a guy with an AK47 at the gate opens the gate and tells you not to drive the road after 6PM….), yes once you get inside, you stop to gape at some amazing view. Within seconds, small children wearing typical mountain garb show up to sell you bizarre hand woven wool caps (anywhere from 20 to 50 Birr, $2 to $5), or little baskets or weird woven wool slingshots.

How they show up so fast amazed us all.

You pull over, and poof. There they were. And the peak is at 12,000 ft. it’s Alpine high and cold. And these skinny little kids show up with no shoes, wearing hand woven wool caps, filthy threadbare blankets an no shoes and they’re making deals.

I bought two caps. WAY cool. Scary cool. I had to buy them. But as I wore the first one, I felt pretty stylin but I started to notice this smell. It’s the smell of an African mud hut.

It’s the smell of unwashed people, OLD clothes, wood or dung fired cooking fires and ancient civilization.

I’d smelled it a hundred times since I got here. There is so little water available to the average person here, they don’t bathe. And they live in hand made mud huts, many with thatched roofs and they cook inside or outside the hut. And the clothes they have they’ve had for years. It’s not unusual to see a man wearing a suit, matching jacket and pants, with a white shirt and tie, and big knee high rubber boots. That would be his Sunday Go-To-Meeting suit. Otherwise it was torn pants and a ratty shirt.

And he has that smell. It’s just the smell of humanity. In my world, we’ve all been conditioned to reject that and cover it up. But here in Africa, that’s just how it is. They don’t have the capacity to really change it, so live with it and move on.

Got the idea that the Simian Mountains needs another awesome hotel. Came up with the idea of doing seven small places, maybe a dozen rooms each. Make each at the top of a mountain with a different view and make them a short trek. So you book for a week and walk to the next place each day. Great idea.

I’ll get back to the Simian Mountains again some day. It’s perhaps the most amazing place I’ve ever seen. Period.

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TUESDAY, OCT 6.
Wow.
Wow.
Seriously.
Wow.

We went to the village of Dahli. It’s on an mountain ridge above Torcha, which is the little town we’re staying. Torcha is a dusty little berg with two hotels and a restaurant. One hotel is next to the restaurant, which has loud music till tenish. We’re staying in the other one. It’s pretty scenic, but the water doesn’t work and we’re all getting pretty ripe, but no matter.

The village blew us away. There are around ten thousand people living in this whole region, but the village of Dahli is about a two hour drive up the mountain on ROUGH dirt roads. Winding switchbacks, dips, streams, rocks and everywhere you look, people walking on both sides of the road. You round a corner and get hit with the most amazing view you’d ever seen. Green mountains as far as you can see, broken up with every kind of growing thing imaginable. Everything grows here. And every mud hut has a beautiful garden with fifty different plants in neat rows. And all along the roads there are neat woven bamboo fences.

Miles and miles and miles of neat woven bamboo fences. Our first stop was a water point funded by Tyler Perry, an actor in the US. We pulled up and created a scene.

We create scenes everywhere we go.

So we pull up in our half dozen white Land Cruisers and a hundred or two people come out to greet us. We all walk down a path, through the huts and gardens to a protected spring. Normally, a spring might flow out of the ground but could be tainted by animals and runoff. What they did here was cap the spring, run it into a big cement cistern and below that run it to a cement basin with two pipes. It’s all pretty ingenious really and provides water for around 200 families.

We shot a lot of pictures and video. It was pretty powerful stuff…. But wait.

Then we loaded up and bumped and ground our way to Dahli.

We got into town and they invited us to a tiny café (with ELECTRICITY!) and put out plates of food and brought us cold (not ICE cold, but COLD) St. George beers. Had a great break, then we noticed the noise level outside growing.

Once we got outside, we were surrounded by people, kids, old folks and a great four piece band. Three guys with long bamboo horns and a drum. We hopped into the Land Cruisers and headed up the hill.

We hadn’t gone far when we saw it.

A thousand, maybe two thousand people. Loud horns. Priests in their finery and velvet parasols, an old guy with a spear doing a wild dance, choir kids in purple robes. And a sea of people behind them as far as you could see. They enveloped us, singing, dancing, smiling, chanting… you name it. It was absolutely astounding. I jumped up on the running board of the Land Crusier and taped the scene as we slowly drove through the massive crowd, all the way to the top of the hill and the center of the village.

There were dozens of uniformed police and soldiers smiling… Yes, SMILING. When was the last time you saw a bunch of cops doing crowd control and they were smiling and waving and happy.

This is just such a bizarre country!

We ended up hiking down to a spring-fed stream where they gather their water (for around 5000 people). The water was brownish and a cow was walking through. They scoop the water into jugs at the top, then just below they wash clothes, then the cattle drink.

The goal is to build a spring protection system there just like in the earlier village. There are several such springs and they’ll all be getting the same system.

Then we walked up the steep hill (imagine carrying 5 gallons of water up that hill!) and we walked to the school.

There are 4 school blocks there (a school block in one building with four classrooms, it’s pretty standard here). But this school held 2700 or more kids. The building was mud with a dirt floor. Some class rooms had some minimal furniture, others were just dirt. If the child wanted to sit on something, he had to bring in his own rock.

It was pretty depressing. 2700 kids in four crumbling buildings.

We took photos, we taped, we talked, all the while surrounded by a thousand people, all staring like we’d just fallen out of a space ship… Which we kinda did.

I don’t think they see many people from the outside world here. They live a good couple hours from the nearest tiny town along rough dirt roads. So we were a bit of a scene. The half dozen Land Cruisers loaded up with local dignitaries and us four Glimmer people. Probably the only white people for 500 miles around in any direction.

I could hear some chanting and horns on the other side of one of the buildings and we wandered out to a scene of total controlled chaos/joy. There were probably a thousand people all cheering and singing and a section of 20 or so chairs set up under a rough tent. They invited us to sit and there were a series of speeches, more singing, more chanting, more horns and more speeches. At one point, they presented us with an ox and 20 lbs of butter wrapped in banana leaves.

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PROLOGUE TO THE BURBAX STORY.

So today I ran into a kid from Burbax. He was the one that carried around my machinco (the instrument I bought in Burbax). He said the boy I bought the instrument from took the $60 I paid him and and ran into Gondar and got drunk. No wonder his mother was so pissed off. Well, I had a MoPac and The Blue Suburbans tshirt with me for just such an occasion, and I gave it to him to give to the mother. NOT the son that drank up his profits. Hopefully that all worked out smoothly. That was quite the scene.

ONE DOLLAR BEER IN THE BEST JOINT IN TOWN.

So this hotel is the best joint in Burbax. It’s really nice by about any standard. Older, but nice. And I’m sitting with this million dollar view drinking the local beer (Dasher).

Two beers, served by a genteel waiter, came to 22Birr. That’s less than two dollars… total.

How can you beat that?

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SUNDAY, OCT 4.
HEADING BACK TO ADDIS.

The drive through Gondar on a Sunday morning was interesting. Not much traffic but a LOT of people draped in white, walking to church. I’ve yet to get into an Ethiopian church, but it’s on my agenda. There are churches everywhere. And each city has its own unique cross. The Gondar cross is so decorated you can barely see the cross and it unique to Gondar.

More Impressions.

I like Ethiopians. I know its wrong to generalize anyone, but as a rule, I just like these people. They are gracious, kind, gentle and quiet. When you get out to the countryside, they are quite stoic, but it’s very easy to get a smile out of even the toughest village elder. And the kids are only a half second away from a laugh or a smile. I don’t think I’ve EVER seen so many people walking around with a smile on their face.

Ethiopia needs good PR.

Seriously.

When you think about this country, what comes to mind?

Vast deserts full of starving babies covered in flies and drenched in misery, right?

Yeah, me too.

But when you get here, sure it’s got that third world look of crumbling infrastructure and a lot of rusted corregated tin and mud walls, but there are crops growing everywhere and everyone is a half second away from a big smile.

And everywhere you look the earth is putting on a show. It’s like the planet is saying “yeah, the people who live here are poor but look at the bonus they’re getting by living here….”

You’d have a very hard time finding a place more naturally beautiful and no tourists here to suck it up.

I’ve only come across a few tourists here. Some Germans at the hotel and on this flight and a few stragglers up in the Simians. Other than that, we’re about the only westerners (pale skin overfed types) anywhere.

That goes back to that “Ethiopia needs good PR” problem.

Who wants to go to a country full of starving babies drenched in misery and covered in flies?

Nobody really.

But listen up. It’s not like that.

Overall, the people here are physically beautiful. Compare them to a random sampling of Americans and you’d want to sit next to the Ethiopian on a crowded plane for a ten hour flight.

They are smaller and not fat. I wont say “thin” because then you’ll go back to that Starving Baby thing.

They are what Americans probably looked like a hundred years ago, long before the age of supersized burger meals and 500 channels on TV.

We look fat and sick, they look fit and trim. Sounds wrong eh? This country full of misery and flies looks healthier than my land of plenty but I swear that’s the case.

OK. I will make one concession on the flies.

There ARE flies. Bazillions of the little bastards. They’re everywhere. The more rural the area, the more livestock, the more flies.

You really understand the use of those stylin horse hair fly swisher things you see the village chief carry around. I bought three of them. They’re cool as hell.

They are heavy copper with hand decoration around the handle and a long clump of horse tail on the end. They work too. With a slight flick of the wrist, it scares off the flies for a few seconds and you look WAY cool when you do it.

But it’s a guy thing. Women don’t get them. And it’s not just ANY guy you see carrying them in the villages. It’s usually a village elder. One of those older gentlemen dressed in his finest (from a suit, to the thick white shawl, or usually both). If you want to see who to talk to about any village affair, find the guy with the long horsehair fly swisher thingy. He’s the El Jefe Grande. He’s the boss. NOBODY else carries one.

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Thursday… Noon Frankfurt time. 4:47 according to my computer which never left Austin time.

So many thoughts. So many ideas. So many impressions. I’m on the plane from Frankfurt to Houston right now, somewhere over the UK.

Left Dawro District in southern Ethiopia yesterday morning around six. It was iffy. The day before something hit me. I got weak and tired and burned out. Had to go back to the hotel and lay down. Stayed in bed for a good 14 hours under the mosquito net. At first, I assumed I had malaria. I was weak and hot. The rest of the group came back and we talked about getting a doc over to the hotel. I figured I’d wait till morning. I was prepared to sit it out in the hotel for a couple days and bump my fight back if I did have malaria. We were best buddies with the guy we referred lovingly to as El Jefe Grande. He was the district manager, the Governor if you will. His office was close to the hotel and he was the guy that ran everything in the district. Everything went through him and when he showed up in a village in his suit and pink shirt, everyone took notice.

Well, he went everywhere with us and attended all the events and gave speeches everywhere we went. Great guy to have on your side if you’re stuck in a six dollar a night hotel, 8 hours of dirt road, to the nearest real city. I wasn’t worried. If I did have malaria, El Jefe would see to it I got the best treatment they had.

Whatever that was. I had no desire to go to the hospital. I’d visited it earlier in the day. What I liked best were the black and yellow birds building hanging nests in the trees. Otherwise, it was pretty dismal by western standards.

I was ready to take it on in my six dollar a night hotel. No hot water. No TV. Sometimes no water period. But the view was nice. While we commiserated on the lack of hot water, we joked about dreaming of an EIGHT dollar a night hotel.

As it turns out, it wasn’t malaria. I slept well that night and woke up feeling a little bleary but ready to hit the road.

And it was quite a road. Over eight hours to Addis. First half was through the mountains over dirt roads.

So imagine driving from Houston to Oklahoma… first half on winding dirt roads full of big rocks, holes, streams, people, goats, cattle, sheep, old people on horses, young kids etc.

Then add another 4 hours on paved roads with all the above in great abundance.

Driving there is a unique experience.

But I couldn’t imagine doing it with a culture OTHER than that in Ethiopia.

When we pulled up to a bus or truck we’d honk a couple short beeps, he’d wave us past when it was clear. No matter what the situation, wandering cows in the road, herd of goats being led by a four year old shepard or a crowd of school kids, everyone smiled and waved. I never ONCE saw someone angry on the road.

These people are a rare breed.

I’m no ethnic studies master, but here are some of my observations. I could be totally wrong, but my instincts are usually pretty good.

1. Ethiopia’s countryside hasn’t changed much in the last couple thousand years.
2. They developed an ongoing sustainable lifestyle long before any of the modern countries were a glimmer in the founding fathers eyes.
3. The culture is pure. It’s not been melded into a dozen dominant cultures. The Europeans didn’t come take over and try to turn the locals into pets.
4. Ethiopia has been a Christian country (for the most part) for close to 1800 years, so missionaries didn’t feel an overwhelming urge to change everything up.
5. There isn’t a huge disparity between rich and poor. Everyone is poor. They all share with each other. They all grow their own food. They make their own homes. They celebrate with each other. They share joy and sadness. They aren’t working for The Man.

They are poor, but I think they’re one of the richest cultures I’ve ever seen. I think in 500 years, Ethiopia will be operating smoothly and the rest of the developed world will be a mangled mess. Imagine how us superpowers will shred ourselves. And I can see Ethiopia just plugging along, raising their own bananas, coffee, teff, goats and oxen and doing just fine.

Maybe I’m totally off base here, but these guys have something going for them.

Then why do we bother messing with them?

They need some basic things. Water for one. It’s around five grand to dig a well and build a big cement hand pump so they can bring up the days water, clean and safe. One pump can keep a couple hundred families healthy.

Schools. These kids are working from the time they can walk. It’s not unusual to see a tiny three year old standing in a field with a stick in one hand, tending a herd of goats and cattle. They never complain. They have no toys, no bikes, nothing. A ball would be homemade with scraps of dirty clothing sewn together.So the opportunity to go to school between their work would be welcome. I heard no issues about kids not wanting to go. In fact, the crude schools were way overcrowded.

The old syle schools are made of mud and sticks with a tin roof. Floor is dirt and oftern desks and chairs wold beformed up out of the dirt as well. The windows were holes in the walls that could have frayed tin nailed down or left open.

That was it. And many schoolrooms had no mud seats, they were just open mud floorspace. Students had to fnid a rock outside to sit on.

The modern Glimmer built schoolblocks are cememt brcick affairs. Four rooms to a block. Each room has a blackboard, wall of tall windows (real glass windows than can open and close). The formula works and they build the same school blocks around the country. We visited many of these new schools and were greeted like total dignitaries. Huge crowds showed up, ceremonies, dancing, We were presented ox, goats, big head sized wads of homemade butter wrapped in banana leaves, we got scarves, blankets and full ceremonial garb and a decorated stick you either hit people with or just show to prove you’re El Jefe Grande.

The other thing they need is health clinics. They don’t look much different than the school blocks but with some equipment and medicine. We visited an operational clinic on the way back up from Dawro and there was a young girl in there with malaria. It was pretty hard for all of us. She was maybe three with her mother, father and sisters, fanning her and caring over her. She lay limp, eyes rolled back, totally nonresponsive.

As I learned more about malaria, I was really glad my little hint of illness was nothing like what she was going through.

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