Saving Stripes

Category: Rangeland management | Date: Sep 12 2009 | By: savingstripes

Tegegn picked us up at 6:30 and we were on our way for a long day on the road. Our destination was Yabello, in the south of the country – a good 600 plus kilometers from Awash. In the early morning light, we crossed back through the lava-crater landscape, climbing out of the hot lowlands and back up to the highlands towards Addis Ababa. Well before Addis, though, we turned south and back into the Rift Valley, passing a series of lakes on either side of the road. The landscape was heavily agricultural, with green fields of tef, beans, and maize.

From the lake region we climbed up into the highlands again. Here, instead of flat fields of tef, we found a rugged terrain with many fruit trees, coffee bushes, and false banana trees (the stems of the false banana, we learned, are a staple food in this area). This was the land of the Sidama people. As we passed by, young boys would come running out to sell us their various fruits. Tegegn bought some guavas, which we bit into with delight.

The houses in this area were also quite special. Some were large, round huts made of thick piles of false banana stalks and leaves. Others were square with a small veranda in front. These were adorned with geometrically patterned wooden doors and shutters, and sometimes the wood work and trim were painted in bright colors. It was, all in all, a very beautiful area. (Unfortunately, we could not get any photos as we were whizzing by on the well-paved road).

We were only about an hour from Yabello when the road finally started to descend. In a short time, we entered a much drier land, full of shrubs and grass and red, red earth. In the valleys, there were dry fields of maize and tef. This, then, was the land of the Borana people. It was somehow a familiar place – the landscape itself so much like northern Kenya – and so different at the same time with all these fields amid the grazing land. (The maize, by the way, was all dry – a failed crop, even though the rains did reach southern Ethiopia this year, unlike Kenya).

We checked into the Yabello Motel on a busy crossroads 200 km from the Kenyan border. The last hours of the day passed resting from the long drive before we ate some shiro and firfir at the motel. It was, as Tegegn called it, “watery shiro.” Overpriced, too, at 20 birr ($2).