In Ethiopia with a Mule by Dervla Murphy

Author:Dervla Murphy [Dervla Murphy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780600680
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2012-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

This evening the Bank Director and the provincial Chief of Telecommunications took me to a tej-beit beyond the town centre. On our way we passed the market-place, where a public gallows dominates the scene. It is still used regularly and my companions pointed it out with pride, as an indication of how efficiently Law and Order are maintained in modern Ethiopia.

27 January

Today I met a compatriot, Nancy O’Brien, who is in charge of the Maternity Department at Gondar’s WHO-run Public Health College. We lunched together, and I spent the afternoon at her clinic, later visiting the hospital – which is not free, or adequately equipped, but is much less dirty and appears to be more efficiently run than a comparable institution would be in India. Mothers are allowed to stay with their sick children, as they wouldn’t bring them otherwise.

Unlike most peasant communities the highlanders have no traditional village midwives. Instead a woman-friend comes in to deliver the baby, as a neighbourly act of kindness, and even in Gondar, where medical aid is so close, it will be sought, during difficult confinements, only after the sun had set three times since the labour-pains began – if it is sought at all.

In Asmara and here I have been told, both by Western medical workers and educated Ethiopians, that almost 100 per cent of highland peasant girls have their clitoris excised at the age of eight or nine. The operation is performed by an elderly woman ‘expert’, who uses some crude cutting instrument, but strangely enough complications rarely follow. Highland men are convinced that excision helps to keep women faithful, though a UN seminar on the subject, held in Addis Ababa in December 1960, pronounced that the operation does not diminish a woman’s sexual pleasure, but can cause severe pain during intercourse. The Western-educated Ethiopians with whom I have discussed the subject were agreed that highland women are much less responsive than European or American women. As one of them put it – ‘Ethiopian men don’t know the difference, but in fact they’re biting off their noses to spite their faces.’ Which observation tempted me to amend the old saying, but since it seemed best to keep the conversation on a scientific level I resisted the temptation.

Ethiopia’s foreign modernisers hope eventually to establish a network of rural Health Centres, staffed by young Ethiopians, which will provide not only treatment for minor ailments but elementary instruction on the isolation of contagious diseases, sanitation and personal hygiene. It would be ridiculous for me to judge the progress made so far on the basis of the Health Centres I’ve seen; but unfortunately none of the Public Health College students with whom I’ve spoken during the past three days gives me any reason to think that either Dawit or Asmare is exceptional. In addition to the difficulty of recruiting intelligent young men, this project is hampered by the highlanders’ resistance to change and by the influence of the debtaras, whose income would decrease if Western-trained medical advisers gained the people’s confidence.

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