Miseries behind some Ethiopian beauties 

Ethiopian women are truly among the most beautiful in Africa, so dazzling that few men suppress the urge to take a second look. But behind that beauty lies a barrage of miseries that force them to endure inhumane treatment both at home and abroad, CHARLES MUSONDA Zambia Daily Mail reports:

THE Boeing 787 majestically imposes its huge frame at Kenneth Kaunda International Airport in readiness for take-off on a bright Sunday afternoon (May 19, 2013). Its immaculate design and gigantic stature give a sense of perfection and anticipation of a pleasant flight to the capital city of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa.

Alongside other passengers, colleagues and I in the Zambian media crew assigned to cover the recently held 21st African Union Heads of State and Government summit, jump on the Ethiopian Airlines plane dubbed ‘Dreamliner’.

After five hours in the air, the Dreamliner safely lands at Bole International Airport, one of the busiest, if not the busiest, airports in Africa. This is where, five days later, I would come face to face with appalling hardships Ethiopian women encounter in foreign lands, where they trek for greener pastures after failing to contain tormenting poverty at home.

May 20, 2013, was a non-working day but just for accreditation formalities for covering the summit and three days later, I again find myself at Bole International Airport. This time I am neither arriving nor departing but a fully accredited journalist plying my pen pushing trade in a foreign land, covering the arrival of President Sata, which took a bit longer than earlier expected.

The air around the airport is lively with restaurants and coffee cafes packed with local army and police officers, security personnel and delegates to the AU summit, and ordinary citizens munching a variety of traditional foods amid sweet melodies of Ethiopian music. Some local army officers are seen imbibing locally brewed lagers like Bedele, Meta, and Saint George.

While waiting for the President’s arrival, my colleague Kaiko Namusa from the Times of Zambia and I decided to take a stroll around the airport in the company of our shuttle driver identified as Yaled. But a few minutes later, the sight of a frail looking and wearied young woman, talking to officers from the National Intelligence Security Services (NISS), catches my attention.

Coming out of the arriving passengers’ terminal with a plastic bag containing only a half taken soft drink and damaged flip flops, passport in hand and without any footwear on, my journalistic instinct rings bells in me that something is definitely wrong with this poor woman. I then poke my nose for news into her conversation with the NISS officers.

With my little, if any, understanding of Amharic (Ethiopia’s official language), I decide to let her finish with the officers before quizzing her through my now freely acquired interpreter Yared.

A peep into the tired and hungry lady’s passport reveals that her name is Aysha Aman Fata, born in 1987, and migrated to Saudi Arabia to work as a housemaid three years ago.

“All these years my boss was not paying me and at one time she burnt me with boiling water after I made some mistakes in the house work. She really abused me until she threw me out. Now I have been thrown out of Saudi Arabia, I don’t have relatives here (Addis Ababa), I haven’t eaten anything and I don’t have any money,” Aysha says as she struggles to hold back tears.

Being familiar with such incidences, Yared asks Aysha if she has any contacts after which she unfolds a tattered piece of paper and gives him a certain number and after the call goes through, he hands her his mobile phone. After the phone conversation, she hands him back the phone with a tinge of a smile.

According to Yaled, Aysha has at least managed to contact her relatives but they are in the rural parts of the country and it would take some time before they meet and take her back to the village.

My ‘interpreter’ then tells me that if I am interested in such stories, it would take me one year to weave the information I can gather in one day because the number of deportees arriving from Saudi Arabia and the larger middle East fairly equates that of the women leaving the country to endure the same hardships.

“Most of these girls come from rural parts of the country, where there is extreme poverty and some of them have never seen electricity in their lives. The first time they see electricity is when they come to Addis Ababa…You find that even just switching on a bulb is a problem and so when they go to either Qatar or Saudi Arabia, the people who employ them as housemaids in those countries really get upset with their ignorance and this is why most of them end up being abused and later deported without anything,” he says adding “these who return are even lucky because others end up being killed.”

True to his word, a few minutes later, we meet another woman identified as Kemila Abe with tears streaming down her cheeks as she dashes to the departure terminal. Yaled stops and asks her what the matter is but she just mutters a few words in Amharic and proceeds.

“She is saying that she has missed her flight to Qatar after travelling over 400 kilometres from her home village to Addis Ababa.”

Asked how such women afford air tickets, my companion explains that most of them sell family livestock like cattle, sheep, and goats but that due to poor communication facilities in some rural parts of Ethiopia, they are not aware of the rough experience awaiting them until they get there. He says even the local media and authorities allegedly gloss over such stories.

Next, we meet an 18-year-old girl identified as Musi, from Hodia, also headed for Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Clutching only a passport and small bag, Musi is not interested in talking to us as she is busy looking for the right departure gate.

Just before going back to our waiting point, we meet another woman just deported from Saudi Arabia and she refuses to identify herself on grounds that she is confused by what she has gone through. Like many others, she has flown between four and six hours on an empty stomach without any money and she only has a small bag containing few personal effects.

However, she is lucky in that her relatives have already travelled from Arsi and are at Bole to welcome her from her misadventure.

Back home, stereotyped thinking, social taboos, and discriminatory laws are still haunting Ethiopian women with a number of them facing major obstacles.

This is why some scrupulous individuals have taken advantage of the situation to establish brothels and recruit young girls, mostly university and college students, who come from poor backgrounds in rural areas and face hurdles in making ends meet in Addis Ababa.

According to a source, one such individual operates right in the heart of Addis Ababa and dupes ‘clients’, especially foreigners, into parting away with huge sums of money by overpricing beverages and offering them girls for free upon footing the bill. This is because in Ethiopia, the common practice is to order the drink first and get the bill later.

Additionally, other women bear the brunt of poverty by selling coffee in the slums dotted in between modern buildings on the streets of Addis Ababa. Some survive on selling chat, a local stimulant plant that most men chew. Though this plant has drugging effects, it is legally recognised and considered a lesser evil than marijuana.

As for the young men and boys, their commonest way of survival is cleaning shoes at almost every corner of the city.

Most people do not polish shoes when leaving home and they rely on the services of the shoe cleaners, who move about with polish, brushes, and small pieces of cloth and water tins, which they expertly use to clean the shoes.

Before leaving for Addis Ababa, one of my colleagues at the office told me about the astonishing beauty of Ethiopian women and I zealously looked forward to meeting one of them but after learning of their plight, my zeal waned and before long I only thought of one thing about them – to bring out the hardships some of them go through.