Blogs from Addis Ababa, Addis Ababa Region, Ethiopia, Africa - page 11

Geo: 9.02274, 38.7468... read more

Ruta writing...It is always fun to see the joy that donations bring. Here are photos from the distribution of donations of shoes and socks from my colleagues in Accenture. Upon seeing some of our past pictures from Ethiopia, on their own initiative, Rob and Beth organized a shoe collection drive. They gathered sports shoes, cleats and baby shoes. These children live in tin shacks in our area or they basically live on the streets. Shoes are a tremendous gift to them, particularly now that the rainy season has started. The rain comes down in buckets and the weather can get quite chilly. The streets turn into thick, mucky mud, and slogging around with shoes with holes, or with flip flops or in bare feet is not pleasant. I am sure that new shoes make a huge ... read more

Kovas writing… It was a tough day at my summer job teaching at the Somalian School. On my way home, my head hurt, and I was physically tired. As a taxi finally arrived, I got into the front seat and waited to get to my destination. Our taxi driver stopped at the side of the road to drop off a few people. Since there was a parked car in front of him, he had to veer into the left lane of traffic. This caused an argument with a big, yellow truck full of rocks that was behind. In retaliation, the driver of the truck threw water into the window of our line-taxi van. No fair! The water hit me too. The driver, furious with the truck driver, finished getting into the left lane but then parked ... read more

Just some observations... Traveling on the other side of the world shows you how things can be so different then what we are use too and also shows you how many things are exactly the same. These are just a few observations that I found interesting. Bottles… glass returnable bottles that some of us remember from our youth. (You actually need a bottle opener to open them). They are totally recyclable and they do not litter the streets since you get money back on each bottle. Why did we change that system here in the developed world? It just seems to be more earth friendly to reuse the bottles over and over then for plastic bottles and cans end up in a land fills somewhere??? Just worth noting! Water in the hotel in Africa was the ... read more

Black Lion The largest hospital in all of Ethiopia is Black Lion. I again was granted unlimited access to video and photograph the conditions of this public facility. Black Lion is the last referral hospital in Ethiopia, if your illness requires more care then what they can offer, the next place you will go is Nairobi, Kenya and from there to South Africa. This hospital sees approximately 370,000- 400,000 patients a year but the exact number is not known. They have 800 beds, with 130 specialists, 50 non-teaching doctors. This is the largest teaching hospital for the University of Addis Medical School in Ethiopia, so there are about 350 Residents and 600 Interns. The emergency department sees around 80,000 patients a year and they just started a new trauma unit in the recent months. This hospital ... read more