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Ethiopia: Sleeping Rough Used to Shock Us. Not Anymore, Perhaps.
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The Daily Monitor (Addis Ababa)
OPINION
20 February 2008
Posted to the web 20 February 2008
B. Mezgebu
Addis Ababa
The only group of people who probably look up at the skies above them every night and dread any signs of impending rain, must be the homeless amongst us.
Homelessness must be the nadir in a person's life under any circumstances anywhere. Under weather conditions like that of Addis, wet for many months and chilly at nights almost all the time, it must surely be hell on earth.
I remember some decades back, a greatly-hyped visit to Ethiopia by a maverick from India. He was on a whirl-wind, grand tour of these parts of the world and he looked your typical maharishi from that part of the world. His mission: to spread the ennobling aspects of sleeping outdoors. Hail, rain, biting winds were supposed to make you physically fit and enable you to understand the cosmos better.
He gave speeches on the subject at the various college campuses. Students were eager to see the man and his family and how they spent their nights al fresco, if only to check if the man practiced what he preached. Back then, sleeping rough was considered an aberration and one hardly came in contact with it in daily life.
That must have been the reason for the keen interest people then showed. So, had the man's message taken hold? Did he get followers? Certainly. The only trouble was that almost all of the rough sleepers decades later happen to be bona fide homeless people.
One can reasonably assume that every country has its share of homeless poor. We hear they have them by the spade in America. Countries (those that try anyway) have their own way of dealing with people that live on the streets of big cities for an extended period of time. The goal is, we are told, to eliminate homelessness totally. Most of the time, however, the goal falls short and countries would be grateful if they were able to minimize it.
Many countries, both rich and poor, consider the phenomenon of homelessness, as an unflattering stigma and would do anything not be seen with it. So, come some big national holiday, the kind of holiday especially during which outsiders will be watching, governments take swift actions. When governments make their move, more often than not, it is coercive. After a while though the homeless, chased away from the boulevards of capital cities, move on to the warrens and alleyways. And before long, they go back to the boulevards.
In the recent past, an attempt was made to repatriate beggars residing in Addis to the regions of their origin. It seemed that they went back after a lot of persuasion. Will they stay put for good? That remains to be seen, of course. But it cannot be said that homelessness is on the decline in Addis as consequence of that move.
Churches and to some extent mosques are the ground zero for begging in Ethiopia. On major holidays in the churches across the city of Addis, for instant, scores, if not hundreds of beggars descend on the many churches and make their appeal for alms to the churchgoers. How many of these panhandlers are homeless? It is anybody's guess, but a good number of them would be that.
Very often, you see huddled masses of beggars at the gates of churches. What strikes one most is the pervasiveness of handicapped people. There is no doubt, from a cursory look of things in our country here; begging is a problem of sickness and physical deformity to a big extent.
Homeless people in Addis, it seems, are mostly young; in fact young boys with a spatter of young girls. Several NGOs have been involved to help in one or another way. It is fair to say that without them the problem would have been even worse. But they probably get overwhelmed by the sheer numbers from time to time.
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Is homelessness here an economic problem? A social problem? Or just a self-inflicted problem? The experts will have answers, to be sure. Whatever the causes, to ordinary people, sleeping on streets remains a heart - wrenching experience. The fact that young children make a good number makes it even more heart - breaking. None of us can have the moral high ground, as long as young people continue to sleep outside.
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