Ray of hope

SUDDENLY Ethiopia is back in the news. Twenty years after the terrible famine that appalled the planet and inspired Band Aid, Bob Geldof is assembling another star-studded line-up to record a song deemed so certain to be Christmas number one the bookies have already stopped taking bets.

Was it really 20 years ago that ashen-faced BBC reporter Michael Buerk, cradling a stick-thin baby in his big hands, first told a shocked world (his report aired on a staggering 425 stations) of an impending catastrophe in which a million people would starve to death?

Is it really 20 years since Geldof and sidekick Midge Ure galvanised a motley bunch of pop prima donnas to record a slight but infuriatingly catchy anthem - Do They Know It's Christmas? - that shot to number one in 13 countries and raised £8 million in one month (November 1984) alone?

Yes it is. That's why Geldof returned to Ethiopia this autumn, along with Prime Minister Tony Blair, fellow member and founder of the Africa Commission, an organisation aimed at halting the decline in the only continent to have gone into economic reverse over the past 25 years.

It also explains why a four-disc 10-hour DVD box set of the Live Aid concerts - staged in London and Philadelphia in July 1985 and watched by an estimated 1.5 billion people on 98 per cent of the world's televisions - is being released on Monday.

With royalties, broadcasting rights and donations, Band Aid and Live Aid between them generated around £100 million. This money, according to Buerk, probably saved somewhere between one and two million lives.

Countless more lives have been saved since, as Geldof's initiative led to changes of policy in the European Union, the United Kingdom and United States.

And, as Midge Ure recently pointed out, charity was no longer seen as something only the Women's Institute did. "All of a sudden, their heroes are up there, saying 'I'm involved'."

Carrying on the good work

Now, of course, celebrity fund-raising is rife. There's Comic Relief and Children in Need, and Band Aid was simply the first in a steady stream of (often truly awful) charity records. Sometimes it seems as though the biggest threat to endangered animals is actually posed by publicity-seeking actors from the set of EastEnders.

The most iconic celebrity of them all, the late much-lamented Princess Diana, would regularly pose with children orphaned by Aids or maimed by landmines - and only recently her youngest son, Prince Harry, featured in a TV programme with children with HIV. Harry was prominent in the papers - "for carrying on his mother's good work" - the day I took the long flight from Heathrow, via Alexandria in Egypt, to Addis Ababa. Along with my Echo colleague, photographer Richard Crease, I had joined a small group of journalists on a visit to find out more about the work of VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas), and some of its British volunteers in Ethiopia.

VSO is an international development charity, founded in 1958, set up to fight poverty in some of the world's poorest countries by bringing people together to share their skills, learning and creativity.

It has 1,600 volunteers, aged between 17 and 75, including 80 in Ethiopia, a country where the figures for life expectancy (average age, 52) and infant mortality rates (over one in 10) are among the worst anywhere in the world. Two-thirds of the population of 70 million falls below Unicef's "absolute poverty" line in what remains one of the poorest nations (ranked 168, out of 173, on the United Nations Human Development Index.)

There is still a dire shortage of food, although there is a surplus in some regions and it's believed the experience of delivering aid and improved early warning systems should avert another disaster similar to 1984.

Instead VSO, in partnership with the Ethiopian government, is concentrating its efforts on two main areas - education and health, particularly HIV/Aids.

Almost two-thirds of Ethiopians are illiterate. There's a lack of teachers, materials and infrastructure.

Only half the population has access even to primary education, and, while nominally free, many families can't afford costs associated with education. Attendance is poor and drop-out rates are high, particularly among girls, in a society that has been male-dominated for centuries.

Meanwhile, the level of HIV/Aids infection is among the highest in Africa, with between two and three million people living with the virus, over half of them women.

Bed bugs in Addis

We spend our first day in Addis Ababa, a sprawling, bustling, low-rise city of some five million souls.

Members of the flight crew on the way over told us they were looking forward to a couple of days by the pool at the Hilton. There's also a Sheraton, where, it was rumoured, Mr Blair would be staying when he visited the following week.

We, meanwhile, are staying at a much more basic hotel, a favoured VSO haunt, where a room costs around £8 a night, and a meal with drinks is less than £2. Cold water trickles from the shower (if you're lucky), and sleep is hard to come by as noise continues through the night and it's difficult to breathe at such high altitude (at 2,300 metres, we're in the third-highest capital city in the world.)

Plus, there are bed bugs, and they bite, and my backside is covered with a vivid red rash. I soon realise, though, that our hotel is a mini-paradise, relatively speaking.

Ethiopia is extreme, from the freezing Simian Mountains, up to 4,600 metres high, to the Dankai Desert, 150 metres below sea level, where the temperature can soar to 60 degrees Centigrade.

We're very lucky - in Addis it's warm (low 20s) and sunny, and our visit coincides with Meskel, "Finding of the True Cross", a major Christian festival in a deeply religious country, and hundreds of thousands of people converge on the city's biggest square for several hours of celebrations.

We're right at the heart of the all-singing, all-dancing, vibrantly colourful action, which ends with a spectacular bonfire.

The government doesn't miss the chance to get a vital message across to such a huge crowd - even the prime minister himself, Meles Zenawi, is here to press home the HIV/Aids message.

I'd expected the next day's drive down to Awassa, six or seven hours south, to be steep and perhaps scary, but the straight and narrow asphalt road is in surprisingly good condition (although sections look as though they're about to collapse into the deep ravines cut in the red earth by flash floods) as we gradually drop to a much warmer, less hectic and, worryingly, more malarial way of life.

We set out early, at 5am, before the build-up of the choking traffic jams, largely consisting of battered old blue Lada taxis. Instead, the seemingly never-ending outskirts of Addis are already teeming with people walking - or, if they're in a hurry, running. Some carry heavy loads, bundled up in rags and tied to poles. Others herd animals. Children play with rudimentary toys, such as sticks with a tiny pair of pram wheels nailed at the bottom.

As the sun rises, so does the steam from men peeing quite openly at the side of the road. Bleary-eyed women emerge from huts made of rusty corrugated iron. Not far from the palatial British Embassy, surrounded by a high impenetrable wall, entire families crawl from beneath cardboard beds on the pavement.

The poverty is everywhere and unavoidable, thumping you right between the eyes, as our Toyota Landcruiser speeds through the dusty pot-holed city streets. Eventually, though, we're in the countryside - and the Great Rift Valley, the so-called "Cradle of Civilisation", stretches before us.

Creating a stir

It was here, in 1974, that the fossilised remains of "Lucy", our oldest known ancestor, were discovered - but I'm thinking there must have been more going on when she was around, roughly 3.5 million years ago, than there is today.

The landscape is lush and green, dotted with acacia and eucalyptus trees, mountains and lakes shimmering in the heat haze. There's an occasional cow or goat, but no apparent sign of human life. We're only a few miles from the big city, a few minutes in the car, but it might as well be a different planet.

This isn't what I'd expected Ethiopia to be like. I recall those images of two decades ago - hordes of big-eyed children with swollen empty bellies, helpless and bewildered in a scorched desert; Geldof snarling "Give us yer money!" on live TV (a line, incidentally, that also featured the dreaded f-word and would later appear in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations).

And I think how convenient it must have been for the news readers and headline writers that a million people were reckoned to have perished in the great famine - it trips so much more easily off the tongue, after all, than 996,542, or 1,003,769. Then I suppose when you're dealing with death and destruction on such a mind-boggling scale, well, it must be impossible to get the statistics spot on - and a million's such a nice round number.

We stop because Richard wants to take a picture of the deserted and starkly beautiful countryside. I think how peaceful it is as I clamber out and take a drink of water. Then, out of nowhere, a young boy strides towards us, smiling and pointing at my water bottle, signalling he wants a swig.

He's soon joined by another boy, then some more. Along come some girls, shyer and quieter, followed by their parents and grandparents. Within a couple of minutes we're surrounded by a crowd of maybe 30 people, all smiling for Richard's camera, their beaming faces even more radiant when he shows them the near-instant images on his digital screen.

My untrained eyes pick out the previously hidden mud huts in the middle distance, camouflaged by the terrain, with their little cactus-fenced enclosures of crops and animals.

The girls still don't say much, but the boys pester us for pencils, sweets, water, money. The adults just watch and smile. Our driver, a city slicker, wearily winds up the car windows and unwraps another toffee. He must have made this journey dozens of times, and he's used to country kids hassling ferenji (foreigners).

It's a novel and disconcerting experience, though, for this particular ferenji. Should I give the kids some money? After all, what's a few birr between new-found friends?

Cruel to be kind

I decide to keep my grubby money in my pocket, and when I see, in the rear-view mirror as we drive hurriedly away, the near-riot that ensues following Richard's gift of a packet of Polo mints, I'm glad that I did.

Wendi, an Ethiopian volunteer travelling with us, explains why he thinks it's not such a good idea to give to beggars: "If every time a car full of ferenji pulls up the children can expect hand-outs, then how do you expect those children to bother going to school, or eventually work for a living?"

It's a good point, I tell myself. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. And when we eventually arrive at Awassa and meet Michela Norman, a former Poole High School science teacher who has just completed her first year in the physics department at the local teacher training college, her philosophy is simple.

"I don't give," she says. "But I've got a good friend, Kath, way out in Dilla, and she gives every time, because it makes life easier for her."

Michela sees her job as her way of helping Ethiopia rebuild for the future. Instead of encouraging a dependency culture, she's helping to train teachers to go out into the countryside, get girls into education and eventually get the country back on its feet. Like all VSO volunteers, she's here because the host nation wants her to be: and she's working towards making Ethiopia self-sufficient, hopefully removing the need for more volunteers like herself... and yet more hand-outs.

A freelance photographer travelling with us, a laid-back Dutch guy (is there any other kind?) called Patrick, is an old Africa hand. He doesn't give to beggars either, but every so often he'll gather together a group of kids in the area of Addis where he lives and treat them to a meal at a local restaurant.

"The food is so cheap, to me anyway, and at least that way I'll know that they're getting something to eat, rather than spending money on khat (an amphetamine-like stimulant, made from the leaves of a bush increasingly being planted instead of the traditional staple, coffee, because it's more lucrative).

"I'll invite maybe 20 kids along, and perhaps 40 will turn up, but I'll explain to them I'm only paying for 20 meals and that's it. They're all dressed in rags, but they'll all wash their hands, and shake my hand and say thanks.

"Then they'll eat the food so fast you can hardly believe your eyes!"

African sunset

On the way back to Addis we stop again - Richard wants to shoot the dramatic sunset. Some boys emerge from the rapidly fading light. I notice their clothes, handed down and patched up until they're almost transparent; bad teeth, stained blue because of the poor quality of the water; and the sticky streams of snot oozing from their snuffling noses.

They want to sell us toy buses and lorries, hewn from old bricks, with little wheels held on by rusty old nails. They start by asking 10 birr, about 60 pence, almost enough to buy a full breakfast at our hotel back in Addis. They know it's outrageous and way too much, but they also know we're loaded and possibly a soft touch.

As soon as I say no, they drop the price to five birr. I know they'll take two, or even one, but what's the difference to me between six pence and 12? Eventually, as much to stop them hassling me as anything else, I buy a bus from one of the boys and hand over the full 10 birr.

He's delighted, of course, but the other kids are crestfallen. They obviously don't share their takings - the reviled Mengistu regime not only landed the country in a whole heap of trouble, but gave Communism a bad name.

Even though I thought I was doing the right thing, I can't help feeling bad. Why did I buy from that boy? Did he remind me perhaps of my own son, who's about the same age? I don't know, but, to invert an old phrase, you take your choice and you pay your money.

I remember an earlier conversation with an Irish management adviser, Tricia Donnelly, working in Awassa. I'd asked what her philosophy was, and she said: "I don't really have one. Basically, if I see someone, and they touch something inside me, then I'll usually give. I'm a sucker for young mums with babies."

So as we head for the restaurant and we're pestered by a couple of boys ("Please mister, me very hungry, you, you give"), and I see what I presume to be their mothers looking on from a nearby doorway, I make a snap decision not to give in. They might well be hungry, but they seem like a couple of chancers to me, picking on big nave ferenji.

Later, though, as the temperature drops and we make our way back to another largely sleepless night at the hotel, a young woman holding a baby taps at the taxi window. There's desperation in her eyes and voice, and I know they'll be sleeping on the cold streets, so I press a couple of dirty birr into her soft grimy palm. In Tricia's words, the mother and child touched something inside me - although what I'd handed over was a fraction of what I'll give my own children to spend on pick and mix sweets at the corner shop back home.

Does that make me a mean person? Not necessarily. Does it make life easier for that woman and her baby? In the short-term, maybe a little; long-term, almost certainly not. But when I get back to Britain I'll only drink Fair Trade coffee, because it might keep her child off khat.

What Ethiopia needs - and remember, this is their official government line - is people with the relevant skills, commitment and time.

Increasingly, VSO is recruiting middle-aged couples whose children have grown up and left home. People my age, perhaps a little older. The typical volunteer is experienced and compassionate, maybe with a bit of an edge, certainly not a patronising do-gooder with a sentimental chocolate-box Third World image.

The selection process is rigorous - there's little point in sending people out to Africa only for them to decide they don't like the food, or it's too hot, and they want to come straight back home.

But what the volunteers are finding is that they are increasingly able to make a difference. They really can help make the world a better place.

For more information about VSO, call 020 8780 7500 or visit www.vso.org.uk

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