Poverty

I know I promised (for those of you who actually read this) an update on my Saturday adventure, but I think I’ll wait to write/post pictures from our day trip. I also want to blog about our 4^th of July celebrations in Addis (if you could call them that), but I’ll try to do that tonight.

On a more serious note, I wanted to write about the poverty and homelessness in Addis. Everywhere I look I see beggars and homeless individuals in the street.  You can’t go a mile without having someone approach your car and ask for money, food, anything. What really gets to me is when I see women approach the car with a small child and say “Sister” to me and put their hand to their mouth asking for food. Young children walk in between cars in traffic asking for money. Disabled and crippled individuals struggle to make their way to the cars begging for change. If it doesn’t pull at your heart to see this, I’m not sure you’re human.

As a white person in Africa, I feel that they expect me to give money to them. Sure, I’m better off, but that doesn’t mean I have lots of money to just hand out.  Leaving a restaurant with a take-away box is hard, because they point to it and ask for it. They don’t know if we have money in our pockets, but they know we are carrying some food. A few weeks ago, another intern (Brett) and I went to lunch one day at Chicken Hut. We had an extra chicken thigh, so we boxed it up and handed to a homeless man sitting outside of the church near our office. He seemed grateful.

I feel bad when I see someone who is clearly disabled…or a mother with a small child, but as a student trying to support myself in Ethiopia and maintain an apartment in Alabama; it’s hard to just hand out money constantly. And while I know it’s just cents, cents add up to dollars.

So what I’ve decided to do before I leave, is to go through the clothes/shoes that I brought to Addis, and donate items to a church or organization that will give the items to people who need them. I can’t make a difference in someone’s life by giving them 30 cents when the approach my window, but I can help by giving them a pair of shoes, or a skirt, or a jacket to wear in the rain.