trailer world issue One 2009

Issue One 2009 31 Hope on wheels Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, suffers from poverty, hunger and a desolate infrastructure. Truck transport is the pulse that keeps the emaciated East African country alive. Laye Nebolute has hit the jackpot. The father of ﬁve has one of the most cov- eted jobs in his home country Ethiopia. He is a truck driver. Every day, Laye climbs in behind the worn-out steering wheel of his ancient Fiat truck and drives. Hundreds of kilometres across dusty tracks, past mighty mountain ranges and meanly peasant settle- ments with what look like Mediaeval wells. Truck drivers have a high standing among the population of 82 million people living here on the Horn of Africa. In this country still plagued by crop failure and famine, they keep the rural population supplied with the most important foodstuﬀs and chronically lacking medicines; on the return journey, they often bring patients to the next hospital which is often far away. Truck drivers bring life to the people and are rewarded with the gratitude of the simple rural population. Laye is about 32 years old – no-one knows exactly how old he is – and has been driving around Africa’s tenth largest country in all directions for the last ﬁve years. Compared to the destitute rural population, he earns a small fortune. The proud truck driver earns up to 3,000 Birr (around 210 Euro) every month. With an average annual income of just about 500 Euro each, truck drivers here are among the top earners. Depending on their religion, they thank God or Allah for the privilege of sitting behind the wheel. Social advancement is what many young men like Laye hope for from sitting behind the steer- ing wheel of a truck. Most of these trucks are far older than their drivers. In a country where more than half of the population is undernourished, it is a great privilege to be able to provide his family with one square meal a day. To do so, Laye, who only went to school for four years, gladly ac- cepts the daily rigours of his job. A job with a danger component, if the driver strays too far from the unsurfaced dirt tracks. Twice already he has been forced to pay high tolls by highly armed warriors in the lawless no- man’s land of the more than 70 diﬀerent tri- bal territories, just because he had stopped to mend a puncture. The drivers know that not to pay up would be a fatal mistake ... Ethiopia’s geological position on an eleva- ted mountain plain gives most of the coun- try an amazingly mild climate. But famines causedbydroughtanddisastrousﬂoodsgnaw at the country and its people year after year. One major problem in this country where coﬀee originates from is its lack of any trans- port infrastructure. Since the civil war with Eritrea and the subsequent secession, Ethio- pia is cut oﬀ from the sea without a function- ing sea port. Trucks are now responsible for transporting all goods on the road network covering more than 33,000 kilometres. Only about 4,000 kilometres of this net- work are properly surfaced: all other roads get swallowed up by mud and debris in every rainy season. The rural population is then often left up to its own devices for weeks at a time. The already diﬃcult atmosphere is made even worse by the permanent danger from the hated neighbouring country Eritrea which seceded from the Ethiopian mother country in the mid ‘90s: an armed conﬂict can break out between the warring sister na- tions at any time. For truck drivers like Laye and their cus- tomers, journeys through the border regions to Eritrea or Somalia always entail an impon- derable risk. Far away from the capital city, tribal leaders use their Kalashnikovs to con- trol the traﬃc. Major accidents of exhausted truck drivers with their dramatically over- loaded trucks and trailers are unfortunately part of the daily agenda. Men, machines and animals meet head to head on the roads by day and night, where the archaic law of the strongest prevails. With their job “on the lorries”, the African drivers have to cope above all with techni- cal problems. Flat tyres and faulty brakes Photo:Kienberger Hunger caused by war and drought Trafﬁc control with the riﬂe International

trailer world issue One 2009

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