Flight of the maids

Addis Ababa to Dubai: 10 Feb. 2011

At this stage I've had some memorable experiences travelling from one country to the next, including:

• sitting at the front of a speed boat watching flying fish as I sped from Belize to Honduras;
• getting a motorized canoe across a river that separates Mexico and Guatemala; and
• bussing it high across the Andes from Argentina to Chile.

Now to add to that list I have "flying first class in an airplane full of women from Addis Ababa to Dubai".

A taxi to the airport in Addis would have cost about five euro, but after a month in Ethiopia I couldn't pay such a high price for anything (100 birr, which is roughly five euro, is the largest note they have in Ethiopia). So instead I took a "line taxi" (a mini bus that drives a specific route picking up and dropping off people along the way) for €0.15, and then walked the remaining 1km into the airport - a bargain! I joined the check-in queue and quickly realised that there were about 200 young women ahead of me, and not a single other guy. When I had checked-in and was sitting at the gate, one of the Ethiopian Airlines staff came up to me and the handful of other men on the flight and swapped our economy bording passess for first class. The large, comfortable seat with leg room, and the champagne and steak dinner served on a fine white table cloth was a big step up from the smelly, packed line taxi that I took to the airport.

While I was enjoying this luxury I asked the man next to me (all the men on the flight were in the first couple of rows) about all the women on the flight. He said they are all Muslim girls (about a third of Ethiopians are Muslim) who were going to work as maids in rich Muslim houses in the UAE. He called it the modern version of slavery given what he heard about how they are treated.

Obviously this took the gloss off my first class experience. Thinking about the inequalities in the world is certainly a threat to enjoying a holiday in Africa, like when hearing that a room in the Sheraton Hotel in Addis can cost US$500 per night when Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world.

But since I had never flown first class before, I decided to just ask for more wine and then I sat back to watch 127 Hours - it turned out that a film about a guy cutting off this own arm was the perfect distraction from the world's problems.