Dinner with Sahlu

Greetings from Fairfield Connecticut where we are staying with friends on our way North, fleeing the heat and humidity of Washington in summer. Our ultimate destination is a week of camping in Acadia National Park, a camper and hiker's paradise. We will see how camping food and exercise is for the diet.

Before leaving we had my good friend Sahlu Haile over for dinner during his short trip to Washington for meetings with our mutual friend Heather D'Agnes. Sahlu and Heather are teaming up to support integrated population-health-environment development efforts in Ethiopia and East Africa more generally from their respective positions at the Packard Foundation and US Agency for International Development. It was wonderful for Sahlu to meet the family and tell Sofie, Emma, and Erik about Ethiopia

It was Sahlu who got me to Ethiopia the first time when he invited me, Heather, and our good friend and colleague Roger-Mark De Souza over early last year for a conference and study tour. The attached picture was from that trip that went south of Addis Ababa into the Rift Valley to see the magnificent (but often shrinking) lakes. The national parks in this area have tremendous scenery yet tremendous challenges as well. There are often more people, cattle, and crops in the parks than wildlife, the reality of a terribly poor country. I wrote "Seeing is Believing" about this trip south of Addis for our blog last year that starts...

The vista of Ethiopia’s ancient Rift Valley, speckled with shimmering lakes, stretches before me as our motorized caravan heads south from Lake Langano, part of a study tour on population- health-environment issues organized by the Packard Foundation. Sadly, the country’s unrelenting poverty and insecurity are as breathtaking as the view—Ethiopia currently ranks 170 out of 177 countries on the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Index. These numbers become quite personal when child after child sprints alongside the truck, looking for any morsel. Here, I don’t need to read between the lines of endless reports to see the country’s severe population, health, and environment challenges—they are visible in the protruding ribcages of the cattle and the barren eroding terraces in the nation’s rural highlands.