Ethiopian dreaming of a new dreamtime

This year I have been privileged to work with the Indigenous community of the Top End. It has prompted many long and frustrating discussions of the issues this community faces and ideas for tackling them.  Often it is cyclic and unfortunately futile. Many others far more eloquent, learned and experienced than me have tried.

How can you think about health when you don’t have access to basic education? Why would you talk about education without secure employment opportunities?  If a job is important, why does no one older that you have one? How could you possibly want a job in a white fella’s world after all they put you through? So there are land rights and centrelink payments to sustain tradition but how do cultural song and dance look in a haze of smoke and grog and violence? The same smoke and grog and violence contributing to such detrimental health outcomes.

This is an oversimplification but at some point the cycle must be broken and what is exceedingly obvious up here is a lack of personal responsibility and how that engenders a lack of empowerment. How do you have a dreamtime without dreaming?

I was fortunate to travel to Ethiopia with Entwine, a young Jewish humanitarian organisation focused on the renewal of at risk Jewish communities and international development projects. What struck me most about Ethiopia was the profound poverty, with no middle or upper class to provide any contrast. Then there were the muted colours of the surroundscape, significantly different from the palate of the Lion King and my parents’ childhoods. But, despite the poverty and the subdued colours, the people had the ability to dream ever so vividly.

There was the sixteen-year-old boy who dreamed of being an engineer because he loved to draw and create. I had lunch in the most interesting building on a hill in Lalibela that was crafted by two young Ethiopian architects who once upon a time were sixteen-year-old boys who too loved to draw and create. The building was owned and run by an eccentric Scottish lady of Mrs Doubtfire ilk who escaped the Glaswegian clamor, exchanging it for a tiny piece of her own peace.

 There were the women of microfinance projects and those who are scholarship recipients who look forward to a vastly different tomorrow to the ones they initially imagined. Many are the first in their families to have those educational opportunities. Many face resistance from the fathers and husbands in their lives. The empowering of these women has enabled their families and communities to flourish, inspiring younger generations of women. O how fantastic this would be for the women of the Territory.

My tour guide Terry dreamed of running his own hotel. The foundations have been laid but the process long, unimaginable poverty renders it slow. However his eyes lit up when he described the balconies where visitors would enjoy their beers and the warm hospitality he would afford. He shared endless Ethiopian fables for most part I didn’t understand but savoured the passion in which he shared.

You see dreams of young children with tuberculosis crooked spines who longed to stand tall and the dreams of their very dedicated doctor who moved mountains to ensure their newly straightened postures match their unassailable spirit.

I watched dreams of young Ethiopian girls in the airport boarding their first flight. How endearing it was to show them how to take their first step on an escalator. The pure exhilaration of that first step and enjoying it repeatedly as you go up and down accompanying each one on their first escalator journey. The little dreams in life.

There was the young French couple on my flight that became a family as they brought home their six-month old baby Ethiopian girl. She no doubt will dream a very different future now. I wish her a future like the girl on our trip who too was adopted and after growing up with siblings with various disabilities has dedicated her life to improving the lives of people like her siblings.

And there are the visitors who come to dream. I met a remarkable group of young professionals each hoping that each step they take is transformative and somehow heals the damage of the previous. 

And there is me, a transplanted soul, unsure of what exactly to do next, also wondering what will happen to this community of lost dreamers.