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Rain At Last In Ethiopia!
Supercomputer forecasts for rain in drought stricken Ethiopia published exclusively on Scoop a fortnight ago (see… Scoop Images: Easter Rain In Ethiopia?) have proved correct with the first rains now beginning to fall.
The latest CNN weather forecast for Addis Ababa (See… http://cnn.com/WEATHER/html/AddisAbabaEthiopia.html) indicates rain is expected in the Ethiopian capital for the next three days.
Attached below is a link to, and the beginning of, an article from the Addis Ababa Monitor on the onset of the long awaited rains.
From… http://www.africanews.org/east/ethiopia/stories/20000425/20000425_feat3.html
The Monitor (Addis Ababa)
April 25, 2000
By Berhe W.
Aregay
Addis Ababa - The trouble with many a promise is that you are not dead certain whether they will be kept. This uncertainty perhaps explains why the onset of rains are usually received with ambivalence by farmers. I was in a small village in Eastern Shoa some days back when the first rains of the year for the area came.
Since the onset of the rain took place amidst the news of drought and imminent famine in parts of the country, I expected to see some outward manifestation of joyous emotions from the village folk, when it rained. No, people went about their everyday businesses calmly as usual.
How they felt inside, I
wouldn't know, of course. Most of us have come to take the
rain and rightly so, to be, if not exactly fickle, to at
least be very pretty much unpredictable.
It even fools
the weatherman. The weatherman's best bet seems to be
talking about the clouds.
Never mind the clouds, we long to know when it will begin to rain. We all have heard, I assume, about the story of the our late emperor, the farmer and his donkey with the drooping ears.
Oh, it isn't as bad as that today as the joke tries to have us believe, but the prediction of rain remains still far from accurate. However, the problem remains not only in the inaccuracy of prediction but that droughts are becoming more and more frequent in those areas that are known to be drought prone.
Therefore, hope and leap of faith remain essential ingredients in the increasingly uncertain occupation of farming. Gode has been the center of worldwide media attention for some weeks now.
When I saw on TV the land sucked dry by the scorching heat, and the whirlwind of dust, my first gut reaction to that was an overwhelming wish for the first definitive rainstorm to at least settle the dust down. But Mother Nature does what it does in her own good time.
For more see….
http://www.africanews.org/east/ethiopia/stories/20000425/20000425_feat3.html
Alastair Thompson
Scoop Publisher
Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.
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