ETHIOPIA: Reckless abandon seems the order of the day when residents of Addis Ababa cross the streets of the Ethiopian capital, as Deaglán de Bréadún found
Inequality bites. There you are having a very ordinary meal in an Addis Ababa hotel when someone mentions that the scraps will be collected afterwards from the trash cans and sold to the poor in the streets. Suddenly a run-of-the- mill culinary experience is spiced with guilt.
Ethiopia and guilt are virtually synonymous for Westerners. Live Aid, after all, was inspired by television footage of an Ethiopian famine. It's better to use the indefinite article, "an", because there may always be another one around the corner.
So when I decided to take the afternoon off in Addis and behave like a tourist instead of a journalist, it was not a guilt-free exercise.
Why are you going to the National Museum when there are people dying out there?
Even on the way, there are heart-rending sights. Undernourished city-dwellers dressed in rags sit in the afternoon sun with a handful of fly-blown vegetables or trinkets spread out for sale in front of them.
Most affecting of all is the sight of disabled Ethiopians as they make their way through the streets. One young man used a sapling as a kind of pogo-stick, hopping through the crowd on one leg, the other leg dangling uselessly behind him. A prosthetic leg would seem a distant pipe-dream but at least he should have a proper crutch.
Another one-legged man had a pair of cheap flip-flops, one for his good leg, the other clutched in his right hand.
Crouching over, he made his way along, crablike, in a series of hand-and-leg movements. He couldn't have been more than 26 or 27 and one wondered what brutal but casual incident, a car reversing or a truck turning a corner, blighted his life in this way.
If indeed it was a motor accident, one should not necessarily blame the driver. In Addis, as elsewhere in Ethiopia, jaywalking is a national pastime. Pedestrians in Ireland can do strange things but here they walk out into the traffic as though they believe themselves immortal and the cars and trucks to be made of cardboard and not steel.
Unbelievably, the worst offenders are men with limps, who hobble across the street with total disregard for oncoming vehicles, as though determined to win their next contest with the internal combustion engine.
There are probably as many goats as cars in Addis. Goat- owners, too, need to bring their animals safely across the street. String and rope are either ineffective or in short supply, because I saw several goat- owners walking their beasts across multi-lane highways on their front legs, with a rear hoof in each hand for steering purposes.
Ethiopia has been on the brink of tragedy for so long that it is good to report some positive developments.
Comparatively normal politics is the order of the day, a welcome relief after the horrific military dictatorship run by a Stalinist-type junta known as the Dergue ("committee"), which was overthrown in 1991.
During the Dergue's reign of terror, student oppositionists were shot and their bodies dumped on the streets of Addis, but families had to pay for the price of the bullets if they wished to claim their loved ones.
Surprisingly, there is a portrait of the Dergue leader, Colonel Mengistu, still on display in the National Museum, although pride of place inevitably goes to his predecessor as head of state, Emperor Haile Selassie, who became something of a cult figure revered by the late Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae singer, and other Rastafarians.
The real prize at the museum though, outshining even Haile Selassie's throne - so enormous for such a diminutive person - is downstairs in the archaeological section. Make your way to the Lucy Room and there she is, a mere bag of bones but also an extraordinary link with the history of humankind.
The story goes that the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, was playing when they found the partial skeleton known officially as Australopithecus afarensis during an excavation in north-east Ethiopia in 1974. But when you look at her bones, arrayed in a glass case, it doesn't take much to imagine them as diamonds winking in a midnight sky.
It was a spectacular find. Lucy is all of 3.2 million years old and just over a metre in height but her significance is that although she had a brain smaller than that of a chimpanzee, she had no tail and walked upright on two legs. This makes her, as someone said, "the grandmother of humankind".
It's a moving and even exhilarating experience to be so close to this tangible link with the distant past. The Ethiopians call her Dinknesh, an Amharic- language word that means, "You Are Wonderful".
Cole Porter himself couldn't have put it better. But reflecting on the sight of so many disabled people hobbling through the streets of Addis Ababa, wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone in the world today had the capacity to walk upright, even if it meant spending money on prosthetic limbs or surgery?
Not a bad aim as we enter the new millennium. We should carry on the work that Lucy started.