So, on the first complete day of my stay in Ethiopia we made a trip to this market, called 'Merkato'. It was a pretty intense experience - I guess the average guy from the west, like me, is simply more accustomed to taking some cheese out of the fridge in a supermarket than to inspecting the eyes of a live quicken when he needs some food. Still, that's precisely the point of traveling, so it was a very enjoyable stay at this market. Some impressions:
One man's trash is another man's resource - recycling is one of the major businesses at the 'Merkato', not unlike similar places in for example India; also involving quite a lot of manual labor. I guess that's a pretty obvious consequence of the prevalent consumerism of 'the west', plus of course middle/upper class people in all countries - lots of everything gets bought, lots of everything gets thrown away, resources (metal, paper, etc.) become available cheaply from scrap, so it's worth doing recyling. Personally I even think that those recyling shops keep cities alive and (relatively) healthy - otherwise they would probably get smothered under all the rubbish they produce every day.
In the next picture: Marco negotiating the price for 100 tons of iron. He wants to build a ship by himself. I told him it's not such a good idea. He finally agreed (and bought aluminium instead).
Show us your knife ...
Women selling vegetables.
That's quite an amusing picture - delieveries from USAID (I guess it was canola oil) recycled into sieves.
The US, recycled.
She found a chicken that pleased her...
... but no worries, there are still some left for you and me:
Lots of impressions, I had a sound sleep that night!
1 comment:
nice blog.............
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