This Place Will Become Home (review)

During the 1970s and 1980s, Ethiopia experienced adversity unprecedented in its modern history. War, recurrent famine, and political persecution by a ruthless military regime took the lives of countless innocent people and forced hundreds of thousands to flee to neighboring countries. By 1990, the number of Ethiopians who had fled to Sudan had risen to almost a million. Many of these refugees have slowly returned since the collapse of the military regime in 1991. Laura Hammond's This Place Will Become Home provides a captivating story about how a group of repatriated Ethiopians have reconstructed their lives and livelihoods from scratch and against all odds in a place they call Ada Bai. The book is the result of an exhaustive anthropological study that was carried out over a period of nearly two years in northwestern Ethiopia in the mid-1990s.

In the first of six chapters, Hammond provides a brief history of the civil war in Tigray and its devastating impact on the people, the land, and the economy. According to Hammond, two principal factors led thousands of Tigrayans to flee to neighboring Sudan in the 1980s. One was the escalation of the military campaign against the insurgent movement in Tigray. The other was the government's deliberate withholding of food relief to the victims of the 1984–85 famine in an effort to starve the entire Tigray population into submission.

Chapter 2 describes life in refugee camps in Sudan based on individual accounts of returnees (from Wad Kowli/Safawa camps) and reports from various secondary sources. Hammond portrays a situation in which refugees suffered from appalling material deprivation and diseases in their first two years in refugee camps. As time passed, however, their cultural background, ingenuity, and hard work, together with generous support from international relief organizations, "enable[d] them to survive, and thrive, in their new habitations" (24). Of course, while this may be true of returnees from these particular camps, it was not necessarily the case for all other refugees. Scattered in twenty-six or so camps in eastern Sudan, Ethiopian refugees were unable to move in order to realize social and economic opportunities. Nor were they allowed to become settled among their hosts or contribute their know-how and labor to Sudan's economy. Most refugees suffered from perpetual food and water shortages, inadequate shelter and sanitation, and little or no access to health services.

In subsequent chapters, Hammond examines the process by which the returnees transformed a desolate lowland area of Ada Bai into a livable community of homes, shops, and farms, with little no financial or material assistance from outside agencies. The community the returnees established, the author writes, combined features of their places of origin in pre-exile highland Tigray and of the refugee camps in Sudan, as well as innovations appropriate to their new environment. She looks closely at household strategies adopted by Ada Bai returnees to meet their basic daily necessities and to enhance the viability of their community, and then turns to a detailed discussion of birth, death, and life cycle rituals and beliefs espoused and practiced by Ada Bayans. One cannot help feeling a sense of melancholy when reading this chapter, especially regarding how Ada Bayans respond to morbidity and mortality and the indifference of health-care institutions to illness and death. Hammond writes that people routinely opt for traditional remedies to cure diseases or injuries—remedies, she says, that could harm or even cause death. Illness and death are mostly explained by spirit possession or the evil eye, or attributed to God's will. Parents become resigned to the death of their young children once they become seriously ill. Health-care workers lack compassion toward their patients, a situation painfully witnessed by Hammond in the course of her many attempts to help sick friends access health services.

The final chapter surveys the ways in which Ada Bai returnees' lives and livelihoods are linked to and affected...