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By City of Albany, Oregon
Posted to the web on November 30, 2009 |
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November 30, 2009 (Albany, Oregon) – Albany City Manager, Wes Hare, headed to Africa over the weekend to spend three weeks volunteering in a town on the west side of Ethiopia.
Albany's city manager, Wes Hare, left, is greeted by Albany Police Cpl. Sandy Hammersley Monday afternoon at Monteith Riverpark while on a tour of the city with Mayor Chuck McLaran.
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He left for Addis Ababa, the capital, Saturday via Frankfurt and Rome. His destination was Gambella, a city of about 31,000 on the Baro River near the border with Sudan.
His voice-mail message at City Hall said he planned to be gone through Dec. 22.
Marilyn Smith, the city’s public information officer, said Hare did not expect to have cell phone or Internet connections at his destination.
He is volunteering to provide advice on municipal issues under the auspices of the International City/County Management Association, for which Hare has done similar volunteer work in other parts of the world.
Hare is using vacation time for the assignment.
Before he left he gave the city council a two-page list of possible assignments he had been given, apparently worked out for him by his Ethiopian hosts.
The list included setting up a city bus schedule and giving advice on establishing “community pay and use toilets ... to assist the poor households who cannot afford to build family toilets for themselves.”
He was also supposed “to give short on-job training for eight tax collectors of the municipality.”
Gambella has a colorful history, according to a summary available online.
The Baro is a tribute of the Nile, and for a time after 1902, Britain ran a port in Gambela for shipping coffee and other goods to Egypt.
Italy took over the area in the 1930s, but Britain retook the region during the Second World War. After the war, the Ethiopian government gradually assumed control over what had been a British colonial enclave, and for a while Sudan was in control of the place.
The city has seen civil strife and armed conflict several times since then.
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