Thousands in Ethiopia work in broiling heat in exchange for grain.

• Author: Isaac, Jeanette

Slowly they descend in the pre-dawn darknes from the villages in the mountains where live. Young and old, men, women, and children walk for miles over the parched earth toward the windswept plains of Mekele, the capital of Tigre province, in northeren Ethiopia. By 6:30 a.m. over 3,000 peasants have gathered to begin the day's work of building a dam.

The project has been organized by the Government's Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC) and is called Food-for-Work. Anyone who turns up and works from 7 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon receives three kilos of grain in exchange. The Government hopes to build dams all across the country. The project co-ordinator for RRC explains: "Forty-six dams were planned for Tigre alone in 1987, but we did not have enough food, so only 12 dams will be completed before the next rain". The grain for the Food for Work project is supplied by the World Food Programme of the United Nations, using food contributions given by numerous donor countries.

Although supervisors are dispersed among the crowd at the dam site at Gereb Habia, everyone already seems to know exactly what to do. The men have brought picks and shovels to break up the baked earth and some have even brought their oxen from their homes for ploughing. While some women carry stones in cloth bags and painstakingly build a 10-metre high wall, others, like human conveyor belts, fetch water in earthenware pots and laboriously carry the heavy load up-hill to mix with the loosened earth. At the same time, another group, including children, walks barefoot back and forth along the wall to help compress the soil.

Like building the pyramids

"It's an incredible sight, like the building of the pyramids", says Prof Richard Pankhurst, a wellknown historian on Ethiopia. "All they have is their hands, their fate and their determination to survive"

By 9:30 it's already beginning to get hot and by noon the temperature has climbed to 100 degrees F. Some of the workers find it difficult to continue with their task. One woman who is pregnant cannot carry on any longer and has to stop. Another, about 70 years old, faints from the heat. Later, it is decided that they will receive their day's allotment of grain in any case.

Unlike 1984, most of the work, however, continues...