Continued from the previous post where we've been looking at the Ethopian community of Awra Amba.


According to an Action Aid report men and women in Awra Amba take turns cooking, baking, weaving, baby sitting and anything else that needs doing ... even on days dictated by religions to be set aside from work.

Now Action Aid is looking into ways to "replicate their working habit and other beneficial cultures among the wider communities ... ".

And why not? Every NGO worth its salt ... and not totally committed to its own longevity over and above all other considerations ... should be giving long and hard thought on how the system in Awra Amba can be set up in other places and fostered.

This amazingly successful society was created by one man who had been paying attention since childhood, asking questions and wondering about the arbitraty and counter-productive 'rules' that appeared to keep life mired in the sticky mud of complacency and made progress all but impossible.

"My mother woke up long before it was dawn and started to mill grains. My father never helped her. He rather slept until late in the morning. I questioned why things should go this way but nobody had the answer. I kept on inquiring into these and other unacceptable practices for which no one had the answers."

With nineteen others, the adult Zumra Nuru set up this experimental community of Awra Amba in the 1980s, and today it's the focus of government officials, NGOs, religious leaders and the international media.

"I was completely captivated by my visit to the community," says Ambassador Tim Clarke, head of the European Union delegation to Ethiopia. "I regard it as the model for the world community on how gender issues should be treated. I have come across nothing else like it anywhere in Africa – and indeed the world. I am using it to inspire the work of my office here on gender mainstreaming and empowerment of women."

If one man can start set up a Utopia in Ethiopia, just think of the possibilities on a grander scale!

The trick, of course, is to get around those who hang on to their power by their fingernails. They will insist it can not, should not, must not, be done, that gender equality is evil, that education for all is impossible, that dividing is the only way to conquer and that conquering is what it's all about.

On days when it all seems so hopeless, so frustrating, so frighteningly predictable, the fact that Awra Amba exists brings a true ray of sunshine to the bleakness.

Imagine a tiny expansion of the word created by this Ethiopian farmer and a few of his friends ... ripples of only a few miles to start with -- say, fifty. Imagine five years of all within that extra 50-mile radius fed, educated, hopeful.

In another five years, a hundred miles, then another hundred, then five hundred. How many decades would it take for all of Northeastern Africa to be self-sustaining, productive, secure?

And now imagine Northeastern Africa if nothing like that happens. Think Somalia. Think Sudan.

It can be done, and since it has been done by an Ethiopian farmer and a few of his friends, the proof is there that none of us are powerless.


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