Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a concept, known throughout Africa by various names, which means, “a person is a person through other people.” With a Western focus on independence, this complete dependence, even for one’s own definition of oneself, can be bewildering as a concept, and as a practice, daunting. As an occupational therapist, the implications for daily life are many. It encompasses one’s identity, the roles one fulfills, the daily responsibilities, and time management. It affects whether one fulfills one’s dreams, and what those dreams are. Westerners tend to strongly self identify as individuals and to see their role as distinct within the context of the snippet of history they are on this earth. Not so for many Africans, as Breyten Breytenbach so eloquently describes in his novel Memory of Snow and of Dust:

An African doesn’t normally experience the need to explain. He simply is the way he is, though he may well pretend to be different, or someone else, in an attempt to fool you. Why is this so? Maybe it is because the African even now still grows up secure in a larger family context where sharing is a matter-of-fact, everyday practice, in that there’s an absence of having to fight those closest to you for survival, of having to claw your way to the top, maybe because there still is an open-ended communication with the environment, animals and natural phenomena have histories and characteristics and personalities too, even when the surroundings are hostile you fit in, you are not isolated, you are not the master, maybe because there is an unbroken chain linking past to future, the dead are standing with wise eyes just beyond the glow of the fire, maybe because rationality has not been isolated and favoured the way it has been elsewhere in the world, there is an easier and more complete flow of sentiments too, less watertight dykes between heart and mind and liver; maybe because there is simply not such an insurmountable demarcation between ‘reality’ and ‘illusion’ and ‘magic.’ (p. 103)

After a 40 kilometer trek down a dirt road filled with potholes and arriving in a small village of single room mud huts without electricity or running water, I had a budding migraine, however my guide to Blue Nile Falls beamed with pride in his tradition and community as he told me, “We are not rich, but we have no stress. We have our community and that is everything to us.”

Here are some photos from the environment including people, animals, and natural phenomena which shape this particular community:

Returning from market. Near Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

 3 day old donkey with his mother. Near Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

 Crocodile. Blue Nile, Ethiopia

Crossing the Blue Nile, on the way home from school. Near Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

Returning from market. Blue Nile Falls, Ethiopia

Blue Nile Falls, Ethiopia

A family at home. Near Bahir Dar, Ethiopia