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Published: September 15th 2010
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There are over 85 million Ethiopians; seventy-five percent live on the equivalent of $2US a day. While ‘lives on’ and ‘earn’ may be quantitatively different, the guards, Tomas and Johannes, are not making a lot of trips to the bank. The security company is paid 3600 birr ($266US) monthly. Tomas and Johannes take home 350 birr each (less than $30US). Anyone paying attention to all the numbers swirling about may have realized that the economic reality for most, including these two, is ghastly. As Ethiopia is designated a ‘hardship post’, the UN pays a security subsidy to keep the poor at bay. What is left of this slush fund after paying the company, we funnel to the guards. This may indeed be ‘skewing local wages’, but I think that is just foreigner talk for life-sucks-for-you, deal-with-it. Anyone familiar with minimum wage, or the Republican party, has probably heard some euphemistic equivalent.
In addition to ‘holiday bonuses’, another means of getting UN security funds to ‘trickle down’ to the guards is to pay them each an additional 300 birr per month to moonlight as ‘gardeners’. I’d assumed this was just a blatant attempt to buy loyalty on the cheap and that
gardening would entail little more than cutting the small patch of grass with the hedge clippers once every couple of weeks. However, once the agreement was made that we would continue the gardening ‘service’, the gardening began in earnest. There are evidently different ideas about what tending a garden entails. My opinion is that things grow and you, more or less, leave them to it; dead head a few flowers now and then; if there is space, plant something. Let nature be chaotic and do a little unnatural selection by picking at the invasive grasses during the long hours of the unemployed day. A low maintenance operation where the heavy hand of human order is restrained. When I arrived, the front lawn was bordered by differing levels and textures of greenery, many hinting at future flowering.
Then the gardening began. This was gardening Hiroshima style. According to mysterious criteria, certain plants were deemed ‘keepable’ and spared, everything else faced the final solution. Tomas viciously attacked the earth with a pick axe in an afternoon reminiscent of Sherman’s march to the sea. What wasn’t hacked into submission was simply just razed to the ground. The ground, mostly a dense reddish
clay, was then turned over to bury anything that had the audacity to remain standing.
Attempts to slow the onslaught were futile. “Wa Raj! Teru No!”, which I must be very wrong about, but I thought meant ‘Stop! It is good!‘ was met with smiles. The hacking continued unabated. Horrified, but powerless to stop the wanton destruction, I fled inside. By the end of the day, the remaining greenery huddled pathetically amongst the roiled clumpy claying wasteland.
To stay the hand of future vengeful gardening, I have been collecting, rooting and/or seeding things in a random collection of bottles, jars and aluminum trays on the front porch. Perhaps the sight of vulnerable seedlings protected by flimsy walls of plastic water bottles cut in half will stall the berserker fury of annihilation that anything with the impudence to grow back will surely provoke. The front porch is, consequently, beginning to look like the window of a kindergarten during science class. This biology for beginners project is greatly facilitated by gardeners in other compounds who evidently hack away with equal enthusiasm and then heap the remains along the road. These curbside seed banks also offer large chunks of plants that
I scavenge, carry home, and try to root. As compound people, i.e. foreigners, rarely, if ever, wander the neighborhood on foot, forays to gather bits of vegetation cause much confusion. Guards, in general, have absolutely nothing to do all day, so they sit in front of their respective compounds and eye this bizarre behavior curiously.
As is often the case, the problem is compounded by linguistic ineptitude and differing perceptions. The guards likely equate enthusiasm and visible results with earning their gardening wage, which for them, is pretty important, whereas I would be happy to pay them not to do a bi-monthly Jack the Ripper on everything green. Conveying that with the 12 words I know in Amharic and the 12 words they know in English, however, is challenging. Another complication is my presence in the garden may be interpreted as dissatisfaction with their work, which I am, but for the opposite reason they assume. Ethiopia exports millions of flowers every year, but puttering about the garden for enjoyment may be an alien concept. The bitch about culture is that if you cannot talk to people, it is almost impossible to suss out the cultural norms and/or convey acceptable
alternatives.
Though we seem to have reached a detente, the tender shoots on the porch poke out of their little pots and look timorously toward the guard house fearing the return of the Reaper. I share their fear.
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Karen Bachman
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Priceless
Terrific. Of course the gardener thought he was digging up weed!!!!! When do you get to plant your kindergarten project. Have the reaper do it and then he will know that those are not weeds!!!!!!! lol