04/16/2006

Dispatch from Ethiopia

Forests, mountains and streams

BY MARK LIVENGOOD
Special to the Record-Eagle

Special to the Record-Eagle
Hussein Deko, a guide for the community-based ecotourism project of the Integrated Forest Management Project in Dodola, Ethiopia, and the Bale Mountains.

Livengood

For more information about the author and links to other dispatches from Ethiopia, see our Dispatches from Ethiopia page.

SHASHEMENE, Ethiopia — About 150 miles due south of Addis Ababa — the sprawling capital of Ethiopia — on the floor of the Great Rift Valley, slouches Shashemene, a city of 52,000 residents.

It's a dusty crossroads town primarily known for two things: It's the center of the country's Rastafarian community, and a transportation hub for roads in various conditions.

From the depot ringed with juice bars and small restaurants called "hoteela," you can catch a bus heading south into the desert toward the Kenyan border, or one traveling east into the southeastern highlands near the towns of Dodola and Dinsho.

Early one Monday morning in March, with utility poles in Shashemene capped with vultures alert for fresh road kill, the loaded bus chugged east into the heart of the Oromiya Region. Past arrow-straight, government-owned eucalyptus forests, through the town of Kofele where teenage boys played ping-pong or foosball on tables set up along the rock-studded road, the bus traveled the same route as Isuzu cargo trucks loaded with nearly everything: red and blue plastic jerry cans piled 10 feet high; a herd of goats; sacks of grain or stacks of sugarcane.

Ecotourism South of Dodola

After three hours and 50 rough miles, the bus reached Dodola, population 20,000, on the northwestern flank of the Bale (BAH-lay) Mountains. Originally formed by a series of volcanic activities, the mountains rise from the surrounding highlands, ranging from about 8,200 feet to 14,360 feet at the summit of Tullu Deemtu.

Nearly 930 square miles of the massif are preserved within Bale Mountains National Park. Altitude changes divide the mountain block into five zones, each with distinctive vegetation and animals: the northern grasslands; the northern woodlands; the heather moorlands; the Afro-alpine moorlands, home of the endemic giant mole rat; and the dense Harenna forest that spreads out 8000 feet below the treeless Sanetti Plateau.

The forests and moorlands of the Bale Mountains outside of the national park have been the focus of a conservation project undertaken jointly by the Ethiopian and German governments since 1995.

A report written by a forestry consultant and an official with the Oromiya Natural Resources Development and Environmental Protection Authority said the mission of the Integrated Forest Management Project (IFMP) is to "develop a feasible forest conservation approach, which is within the implementation capacity of the community and the government."

This approach, called "participatory forestry," is grounded in natural-resource management by groups of 30 locals responsible for managing about 900 acres. They, in turn, are granted exclusive user rights to that tract.

Such a grassroots approach is intended to conserve Ethiopia's remaining forests, which once blanketed upwards of 35 percent of the country, but now cover just over 2 percent.

One important component of the IFMP is what Hussein Deko calls "community-based ecotourism."

Hussein, 26, and from the nearby village of Lensho, is a guide who works out of the IFMP office in Dodola. Trained as a local naturalist and a kind of cultural intermediary who speaks English, Amharic, and Oromifa, the local language, he has been leading tourists into the Bale mountains for the past two years.

Depending on the visitors' interests and abilities, trekking trips last up to 10 days, with nights spent in mountain huts owned and operated by a local family.

The scale of tourism, and its impact on natural resources and local culture, remains manageable; Hussein figures that about 1400 people trekked in northwestern Bale in 2005.

Income is given directly to the local people who facilitate the trek: guides, horsemen and the hut keepers. Hussein said that of the 35 Ethiopian birr ($4 U.S.) one pays for a night in one of the five huts, five goes to the local government, 10 goes to a fund earmarked for hut maintenance and 20 goes to the hut keeper and his or her family.

Thus, the region's forests provide an alternative source of income for local people that promotes conservation of natural resources.

In the Web River Gorge near Dinsho

The road that climbs east over the mountains from Dodola to the village of Dinsho took a toll on at least one cargo truck. On the outskirts of Dinsho sat a large, orange vehicle once bound for Somalia, but now with its engine spread out in silvery chunks on the grass as two mechanics worked to rebuild the motor.

The bus stopped near the Wolf's Den Café. Inside, a young man watching satellite television reported that there is a man named Taha Adem in Dinsho to see about the local rivers.

For the past 28 of his 46 years, Taha has been the person primarily responsible for monitoring the rivers that tumble north out of the scrubby highlands of the park: the Web, the Denka, the Shaya and the Tegona, among others.

In addition to his responsibilities as an employee of the Ministry of Agriculture, Taha works as the area's main private fishing guide, leading anglers from all over the world to choice spots for brown and rainbow trout stocked in the rivers shortly after the park was established in 1969.

Working as a guide supplements Taha's government salary, about 300 birr ($35) a month, he said. Nearly three decades of official and unofficial river-related duties built a deep store of knowledge; Taha knows the rivers of Bale like no one else.

On three consecutive days, Taha, his son, Nure Taha, 22, and I fish contiguous segments of the Web River, which runs deep in a gorge it carved through volcanic rock about an hour's slow ride on horseback across the high plains northwest of Dinsho.

The gorge is full of wildlife. One afternoon we glimpsed a hyena in full stride headed downstream. These stretches, below the Web waterfall and the river's confluence with the Denka, host a population of rainbows that congregate in sluggish pools of translucent, olive-colored water. The water flows shallow over crusty lava connecting the pools, bringing food to trout in the 12- to 15-inch range.

Each morning we netted just enough fish for a riverside lunch, and carefully released the afternoon's catch back into the Web. It is Taha's wish, Nure translated for his father, that the Bale rivers and the trout fishery are conserved for future generations.

On my last night in Dinsho, Taha and I talked with Abdurhman Wariwo, acting Deputy Warden of the park. Both men said the rivers of Bale have been ignored by locals and researchers, who focused their efforts primarily on the mammals and raptors of the high Afro-alpine moorlands. So Abdurhman has been working on a proposal to initiate a trout conservation project on the Web and Denka Rivers.

Working with Zegeye Kibret, the park's environmental educator, Taha and the community, Abdurhman envisions a comprehensive project that encompasses educational programming in local schools about the rivers; reforestation of parts of the watershed; increasing awareness about the impacts of agricultural pesticide runoff; survey research; and construction of a concrete basin where people can wash clothes without rinsing detergents directly into the Web.

The price tag for the two-year project is about $30,000 — a noteworthy sum in most places, but perhaps particularly in Ethiopia where the gross national income per capita in 2004 was $110. The source of funding for the project has yet to be determined.