Green Awassa Update
The Arts Remain the Best Conduit for Positive Social Change in Ethiopia
by David Schein, ACP Founder

This past June, during my sixth trip to Awassa in as many years this past June, I was amazed at the changes. From feeding 35 street kids in a tent in the backyard of a private house in 2001, the Awassa Children’s Center now provides 60 children full time and has completed the building of a vocational training center. The Awassa Youth Campus, formed last year, has its own compound in the middle of town.

However, the effects of overpopulation and poverty in the country as a whole in the same time period have taken their toll in the form of deforestation. Nearly all Ethiopians cook with wood and are consuming the trees at an alarming rate. Every day, Ethiopian women scour the countryside for fuel and walk miles with bundles of twigs. Erosion, flooding and drought are major consequences, which in turn increase the environmental degradation and further contribute to the risk of famine.

I saw the creep of deforestation for myself- since I began visiting Awassa, the trees have been vanishing from the hills around the Awassa Children’s Center. Thus, the Awassa Children’s Project (ACP) jumped at the opportunity to foster a collaboration between the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont (UVM), local officials and business people, and key stake-holders from government and the academic sector at the Awassa Children’s Center. In June, seven UVM graduate students and three faculty members met with American and African ecologists in an ecological focus group to discuss solutions to deforestation in the Lake Awassa basin as part of the Green Awassa Project. In addition to examining the problem of deforestation, the Green Awassa study group proposed solutions to make Awassa green and more energy efficient. The One Love Theater was chosen as the main vector for educating the people of Awassa about the use of sustainable fuels.

While the study group meetings took place, I worked with One Love to create a pilot Green Awassa show to serve as a template for additional shows about sustainable fuels to be developed by One Love on an ongoing basis for the coming years. After seven years of constantly performing and creating shows, the members of the One Love Theatre have become proficient, accomplished artists. We worked fast, while having fun, and in four days, we came up with material that we performed in a soccer field for the audience of Gund experts and townsfolk from Awassa.

The show incorporated mime performance by the troupe, and was full of comedy and pathos in a Brechtian tradition. The action was driven by two charcoal sellers and two women who staggered under incredible burdens of wood. The climax was when the performers burned down their twig house because they had run out of cooking wood, while they sang, “we can't go on like this, how will we live?” At the end, the charcoal sellers went green, selling competing stoves- one that uses wood more efficiently, and one that uses biogas. As they tried to outdo each other, they were interrupted by a cow, who barges in to sell dung, competing with the stove sellers.

It was a great beginning, and since June, One Love has embellished and expanded on the material.

While we worked on the show, the environmental expert focus group developed plans to further the Green Awassa Project. A committee was formed in Awassa to coordinate green programs, and this fall, a team of graduate students and faculty at UVM are writing grants to a variety of foundations to implement the ideas generated during the meetings in June, including:

• A grant for the Awassa Children’s Center to build and subsidize the purchase of fuel-efficient wood stoves for the people of Awassa

• A grant to convert cow and human waste at the Center to electricity

• A grant to bring qualified college graduates from Awassa to study Public Administration at the University of Vermont

• A grant to fund the Green Awassa Steering Committee, a step toward the formation of a new NGO in Awassa: Green Awassa, Inc.

• An application to the World Bank for carbon credits that will pay for the reforestation of the Lake Awassa basin

• A grant for the One Love Theater to create and deliver shows about sustainable fuels on an ongoing basis.

ACP’s German partners have also joined the effort by supporting programs that promote tree planting and stove production. We are incredibly encouraged by the synergy taking place in all of these efforts regarding the environment in Awassa. Through the collaboration with the Gund Institute to energize the Green Awassa movement, we see confirmation that the Arts are a marvelous conduit for positive social change.

Thank you for your support of the Awassa Children’s Project that allows us to strive for a Green Awassa and Ethiopia.