To Irob, after a decade

Starting December 12/12/2018 I will be visiting Irob woreda (North Eastern Tigray) for a week after long years of absence. It is a trip that stirs “thoughts, feelings, memories and interpretations evoked by a landscape". For most people, receiving education and jobs in their birth place is a luck unrealized, hence a need for changing places is inevitable. And yet, this displacement is defeated by place attachment even for someone with strong cosmopolitan dispositions. That is the reason why place lives in memories. While I am free from place identity, I am highly vulnerable to place attachment. Space and Place bonds are created primarily out of our childhood experience.

The purpose of my travel is not only to visit families and speak to some school children, but it is primarily to experience positive emotions associated with the people and landscape. Even a rugged places like the Irob, rarely associated with aesthetic appreciation, has a power to take you back in time, sort of a time machine. Those “insignificant” moments still have a place in my memories. I still remember where exactly I lost my new pen that cold morning traveling to school to Adaga village when I was 11 years old. I also remember the sponsor of that pen: my uncle. I also know where he got the money to pay for it:food for work project. And I also know how hard it was to replace it.

In addition to the bourgeoisie motive of finding self in the environmental past, I am also visiting the place for developmental purpose. Through Family Service Association, (FSA), ― local civil society organization―we are intending to support few families in difficult situation and assist selected schools to access educational materials and strengthening school clubs. It is to be recalled that FSA is already supporting few girls to continue their college education.

I hope to produce more reports of my travel, and I encourage feedback from readers to suggests topics and issues that should deserve a writer’s attention.

(photo: from the net)