Report on Permaculture Training in Dembe Dollo, Western Ethiopia (Part 1)

It was the beginning of June this year and we were off on another exciting permaculture adventure in Ethiopia. This time we would be heading into the west.

I was contacted last year by Gemma Pilcher, an Australian lady who supports a small food security project run by some Catholic nuns from Daughters of Charity, in Dembe Dollo, a fair-sized town way out in the east of the country near the Sudan/South Sudan borders. Gemma wanted us to do a PDC training for a group of community members from the community surrounding the project. She organised the funding for the program and put us in touch with the project administrator, Sister Kefa. They wanted to organise the program to help improve food security and self reliance in food production for the community. The area suffers from food shortages and some even starve during parts of the year when there is no produce from the land.

The Oromo people in this area mostly can’t speak Amharic, the national language, so having some local facilitators to help with the community training program seemed important. I therefore proposed that the Sisters select two promising individuals from the community who could speak English (or Amharic) and send them for training with us in Konso. They would do a full PDC and gain enough technical knowledge of the background theory, practical techniques and design methods to be able to co-facilitate on the community training in the local language, Oromiffa, back in Dembe Dollo. So the sisters sent Hamba and Dame, two graduates of Agricultural Science from Jima University, who took the training with us in December and then returned home with a site design for the food security project.

Following this it was decided we would come to Dembe Dollo to do the community training there in the second half of June this year. We agreed on a materials list of all the things we would need for the training; stationary, tools, consumable materials etc., and divided them into materials that should be locally sourced, which the Sisters should prepare, and those we could bring with us from Konso, Addis Ababa or anywhere else along the way to Dembe Dollo.

On the 8th of June we had just finished a community training with the Ethiopian Red Cross Society at our site, in Konso. We then had to rush 600km up to Addis Ababa, buy all this stuff, load it all into the car and trek 700km into the east of the country along a route we had never been before. It was challenging, but also really exciting. The training was due to start on Monday the 17th of June. We loaded up some materials in Konso — clay bricks, pre-made compost, etc. — and headed up to Addis via Awassa, buying the rest of what we needed as we went.

We got to Addis on Friday 14th of June, picked up some stationary, a few buckets and sieves and then struck out along the new asphalt road east. We passed Ambo, famous for its naturally sparkling spring water, and headed on into the green and fertile highlands of the east. It was cold, cloudy, foggy and rainy by turns. We felt were heading into a very different land compared to the south. I brought along Bahirudin, a relative of my wife who’d worked for us for two years in Konso. He’d done two PDCs with us previously. He had found another relative, Jamal, living and working in Dembe Dollo who came along with us for the ride, and to show us the way in case we got lost!

Bahrudin, my wife and Jamal are silties, a Southern Semitic ethnic group that claim routes going back to Arab ancestry, at some vague time in the past, when they settled the highlands 200km south from Addis Ababa. It’s an area that has become very heavily populated. The silties are good farmers, growing a mix of Enset, grains and cash crops. But the land appears to have been deforested and farmed with the plough for a long, long time and the rolling escarpments are becoming heavily scarred with rills and canyons as the natural fertility makes its annual rain-season pilgrimage to Egypt, never to return.

Though the silties have a great farming system, there are big gaps in it with respect to long term sustainability, and the population has gone way beyond what the land can support with their current techniques. Trade has always been the preserve of the Muslims in Ethiopia anyway and the silties are naturally inclined to it. The result is that every household in my wife’s village has sent six to ten kids to set up a grocery shop or a small cafe somewhere around the country and so it’s generally pretty easy to find a kinsman to help us find our way around in whichever far flung town we should happen to end up in!

Anyway, getting back to Dembe Dollo…. So, as we trudged along the road eastwards from Addis we saw the usual decline in living standards one observes as you go more and more remote from the capital city in this part of the world. Relatively good asphalt roads become cranky old roads, become dirt roads, become eroded gullies and rocky tracks. Houses transition from cement block and concrete foundation to mud walls and dirt floor, with rusty old tin roofs, to just grass huts.

Dembe Dollo is in a highland area in a part of the country that has previously been far less populated than the highlands generally are, and consequently still has plenty of remnant Afro-Montane forests intact. These forests often have coffee planted into the understory, making them commercially productive for the people living there without having to be cleared, which is much better than what seems to happen in most places — the forests just being cleared for grain agriculture, charcoal and plantations of Eucalyptus.

Coffee planted under indigenous forest canopy Legume tree

Remnant indigenous Afro-Montane forest

The local indigenous people in this area are the Wolega Oromos, however there have been waves of migration into the area, orchestrated by the government, who sought to utilise this fertile and empty land by shifting people from dryer, less fertile and more populated areas into Wolega. Most of these people came from Wollo in the North or Harar in East. It makes for an interesting cultural patchwork along the road. The agriculture too could be seen to change from the typical Abyssinian highland grain farming — mostly t’eff and wheat — to agro-forestry based on mango and coffee with beans. We also observed wide use of vetiver grass in this region to stabilise road banks and terraces between sloping fields. The success of vetiver in contour plantings between fields to hold soil and stabilise slopes is well known (see here and here). Its use in Ethiopia is well known also, though it does not seem to have found widespread application in the south. We pulled out some divisions along the way and we planted them at the sisters’ site. We will also try to get started with the use of vetiver in the south if we can get hold of some more propagules down there. Unfortunately I flew back to Addis and our driver let the rest of them die before I got back.

Vetiver planting to stabilise road banks

Bank formed by vetiver grass planted on contour between arable fields

So after another two days on the road we pulled into Dembe Dollo in the dark and negotiated the steep muddy gullies that pass for back streets there to get to Jamal’s house, where we put up for the night. In the morning we set off to find the sisters’ compound and were warmly received by Sister Evalyn and Sister Kefa. Then we went down to Samero, the village where the food security project is located, to check out the site where the training would be held and drop off all the materials. It was dry that day so we could reach the site by car.

Sr Kefa showed us around the compound, which comprised a kindergarden school with a feeding program for the kids and about five hectares of farmland. Within the farm part of the site there were several projects going on a dairy with some Holstein milk cattle as well as some local cattle. They also had some sheep for breeding, and a flock of 20 chickens. In addition they were running a silk worm project, which raised a type of silk moth that feeds on caster bean and cassava leaves. They were employing three women full time on that project. We saw the process of feeding and fattening the silk worm larvae until they pupate, and, when the adults emerge, collecting the cocoons, treating and weaving the silk into thread and then adult moths are placed on special cloth tassles where they lay eggs to complete the life cycle. It was an interesting system but a lot of work given the amount of income it was generating and it also seemed to use a lot of land to grow the castor bean (which is a weed on most farmlands in Ethiopia) as a mono-crop on ploughed fields.

The Samero Primary School (front entrance)

Silk Worm Project

The Dairy

While we were seeing all this the driver had been pounced on by a group of local youth who saw the opportunity to gain a quick buck by helping to offload our materials from the car. The driver made the mistake of not agreeing the price with them first. Once all the stuff was in the store they began demanding 500Birr, which is about 15 days salary for a daily labourer on a construction site in this part of the world. They’d seen the white man in the car and were expecting money to leak all over the place. Not so this time.

It was kind of an informative introduction to the community and the challenges they face. The area is incredibly fertile. Unlike siltie and the south in general, Wolega has never been heavily populated and is still much less densely populated than the south. There is much more indigenous and primary forest cover and the agricultural lands tend to be fairly recently cleared and still has much of the black forest top soil in place, making it very fertile. It has a deep, rich, dark loam soil. You couldn’t conceive of soil like that in Konso (that is where our demo site is, at Strawberry Fields Eco Lodge)! What’s more, the rainfall in the area is plentiful. It must be at least 1500mm and the temperatures are the cool montane “dega” of lands abouve 2000m — ideal for growing fruit trees such as avocado, mango, guava, custard apple, Mexican apple, etc., and of course coffee, as well as things like Enset (although they are not culturally accustomed to it).

It’s kind of depressing to see people who live in the midst of such fantastic ecological wealth hanging around with nothing better to do than try and rip-off ferenjis for a cheap buck, when they could be getting rich by growing tons and tons of food. It’s not to say they don’t face challenges. There are medical problems in the area, such as goitre, cause by iodine deficiency, and elephantitis, caused by high silica levels in the clay. There is a severe lack of water infrastructure — no tanks, guttering, piping etc. Women thus spend long hours trekking to fetch water and the cost of digging a well is beyond the means of the average household. However I was keen to show that with a bit of hard work, some new knowledge and better organisation this can and should by rights be a rich area of the country – people should not be hanging around waiting for a cheap buck, they should be getting down to growing food and prospering.

So, we were ready to go with the training program, but I’ll report on that soon… to be continued in the next instalment.

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Editor’s Note: Support the spread of permaculture and the increase of resiliency in Ethiopia, whilst having the experience of a lifetime, by taking a course at Strawberry Fields Eco-Lodge. At time of writing, the next courses for 2013 are here. For other dates, please check our course calendar.