A bit like Fulham?

In the background, the Sheraton Hotel. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The poshest place in town…possibly in the country. Owned by the richest man in the country who’s half Ethiopian and half Yemeni. He’s also one of the richest men in Saudi Arabia…more wonga than the entire Bin Laden family. He reckons he can throw billions into Ethiopia and turn it into a progressive African economy.

In the foreground is a local Addis neighbourhood where corrugated steel roofs are de rigeur and entire families live in spaces 4m x 4m on around $70 a month. If you’re lucky. The road on the way down to the Sheraton is smooth, paved, marked by security checkpoints to keep out the undesirables. The roads in the neighbourhood are patted down through years of footfall and litter where you’re asked to “drop a note” if you want to photograph anything. Which is only fair if you’re gonna gawp at the poor people.

At its height, up to 26 Indian cotton farmers a day were drinking pesticides to take themselves out of debt. The cycle of death and debt, pesticides and penury, starts off by farmers approaching loan sharks to front them the money to buy cotton seeds and the chemicals to tend their crops. Due to the failed monsoons, this year’s crop turned up rather crap. The majority of farmers are young – early twenties. And the debt accumulates as quickly as the dark thoughts that compel these young people to drink the very thing that took them into this deficit.

I’m cutting a little teaser which I intend to take out on the streets of London tomorrow asking shoppers what lovely cottony bargains they managed to bag ahead of this festive season. (If I got my shit together, I’d be filming the lights on Oxford St being switched on…but Oxford St + Boris Johnson + twinkly Christmas lights + Jim Carey + thousands of swine flu ridden Londoners and tourists = me rather being stabbed in the vagina).

The teaser will feature a suicide widow, a man who tried to kill himself in the fields, and a man who sells pesticides for a living. The salesman, when asked whether he felt bad about what he did, replied with something along the lines of “Yeah but it’s a job innit?”

So I plan to head out into the jungle of Calle Oxford to doorstep unwitting shoppers…and hopefully get kicked out of / barred / sent to the Topshop jail (yes there is one, ask me later about this).

Will then cut it into a little taster tape I plan to take with me to the Sheffield DocFest on Friday.

Theeeeeeen…it’s full steam ahead for an exhibition I may or may not have a little hand in with some friends at the Truman Brewery in London. It’s called Signs of Revolt and looks at activist and protest art from Seattle in 1999 to Copenhagen 2009.

Participants range from David Gentlemen, Adbusters, kennardphillipps, Guy Smallman, Jess Hurd –  a kind of who’s who of the thorns in the Metropolitan Police’s side.

And theeeeeeeen…it’s off to Ethiopia. It’s a junket of some sort, though a very loose one where I’m given a lot of freedom to find the stories I want to find. I’m thinking of things outside the “hey check this it’s a starving black kid” angle. If you know of any outfit or outlet that would want something out of the Kingdom of Ethiop, drop me a line. I know quite a few news outfits are currently trawling the starving black kids route ahead of the eco summit in Copenhagen. Which is fine. It’s the newsroom bread and butter. But Ethiopia is a country that eats sour bread as its staple and is possibly where we’d find the origin of the human species (apart from Charles Darwin’s bookshelf). There’s a lot more in that land which I’d like to find in the week I’m there.

There’s more planned for when I get back from the sand and starvation but that’s for a later note.