A personal reflection on displacement, working poverty, and the human cost of conflict
By: Habte H.
I recently travelled back home to Ethiopia – I have made this journey many times over the years, but this time was different. This time, I saw something I had never seen before – not in scale, not in depth, not in the faces of the people I met.
I saw beggars. Not the disabled, elderly, or destitute I remembered from childhood — the ones we were taught to give alms to, the ones who had no other choice. These were healthy, able-bodied men and women. These were displaced people. I have never seen such a crowd of beggars in my life. And I could not stop asking myself: What has happened to my country?
Among those I spoke with were people who identified themselves as Amhara or Tigrayan and said they had fled violence in Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region. They described burned homes, lost farms, and communities where they could no longer live safely. These were personal accounts, which I could not independently verify. My conversations could not establish the backgrounds of everyone seeking help on the streets. But the distress before me was unmistakable. I found myself asking: What happens to a country when people who once supported themselves must depend on the mercy of strangers?
When displacement becomes poverty
Ethiopia’s poverty is often discussed through statistics. Figures help us understand the scale of hardship, but they cannot fully convey what it means to lose the foundations of an ordinary life. Displacement takes more than shelter. It can remove a family’s income, interrupt a child’s education, separate relatives, and destroy the relationships through which people find work or survive difficult times. A farmer who loses access to land cannot simply resume farming in a city. A trader who leaves behind stock, customers, and savings arrives with experience but may have little means to use it.
Some of the people I met had come to urban areas hoping to find safety and employment. Safety, however, does not automatically bring a livelihood. Without affordable accommodation, reliable assistance, or opportunities to work, survival becomes a daily struggle. For someone who once sustained a household, asking for money can carry another burden: the painful loss of independence. We see the outstretched hand. We rarely see the working life that preceded it. Their presence on the streets should trouble us. It raises a question about whether our institutions are helping displaced people rebuild their lives – or leaving them to survive wherever they can.
What further war would cost
For readers outside Ethiopia, conflict may appear as a contest between governments, armed groups, and political movements. For civilians, it reaches into the ordinary details of life: whether a road is safe, a market opens, a school remains accessible, or a family can return home. Different conflicts have different histories and responsibilities. Those distinctions matter. So does the suffering of people caught within them.
Further escalation would threaten more than lives on the battlefield. It could force additional families from their homes, disrupt food supplies, deepen insecurity, and make fragile livelihoods harder to sustain. Children can lose years of schooling. Families can exhaust their savings long before assistance arrives. Trauma can persist after fighting ends. War also damages the possibilities that once lay ahead. A child who leaves school may never return. A business destroyed in a few hours may have taken decades to build. A family scattered across unfamiliar places may struggle for years to recover its stability.
Anyone advocating a political course that may prolong or expand conflict must face these consequences honestly. What protection will civilians receive? What happens to those displaced? Who will restore their homes, schools, and livelihoods? The people already seeking help on our streets make those questions urgent.
A salary that no longer provides security
Another conversation unsettled me just as deeply. Several civil servants described the difficulty of surviving on their salaries. One expressed a painful sentiment: sometimes, they felt little better off than people begging; the difference was that they could not bring themselves to ask strangers for help. I heard exhaustion in those words.
Employment is supposed to offer some measure of security. Yet a person can report to work every day and still struggle to afford food, rent, transport, and medicine. When income fails to meet essential expenses, the appearance of stability can conceal severe hardship.
Working poverty is often less visible than street poverty. It exists behind closed doors, in postponed medical care, unpaid bills, and the calculations parents make before buying food. A household may look secure until illness, a rent increase, or another unexpected expense exposes how little protection it has. The dignity of work becomes difficult to sustain when work no longer sustains a family.
Traders I spoke with also described pressure. Some felt overwhelmed by taxation and uncertain about whether their businesses could survive. One characterised the government’s approach as taking what they earned rather than helping them remain viable.
That was a trader’s assessment, rather than evidence that every tax is unjustified. Public services require revenue. But governments should listen when people believe collection is unpredictable, burdensome, or disconnected from the services they receive. Fair taxation depends on transparency, consistency, and trust.
The distance between comfort and suffering
A troubling divide exists between those enduring hardship and those able to move through daily life without encountering it. Comfort can narrow our field of vision. We may see a person asking for money without asking what happened before that moment. We may recognise a civil servant’s job title without understanding the household insecurity beneath it.
Political loyalties can narrow our vision further. Suffering becomes easier to dismiss when acknowledging it seems inconvenient to the side we support. We question victims more readily than we question the conditions that made them vulnerable. I include myself in this challenge. Seeing suffering does not mean understanding all its causes, and compassion alone does not produce a solution. But an adequate response begins with the willingness to acknowledge what people are experiencing.
The suffering of an Amhara civilian, a Tigrayan civilian, an Oromo civilian, or anyone else deserves attention without a test of political usefulness. Recognising one community’s pain does not diminish another’s. A country cannot heal while its people are asked to defend their right to be heard.
What a serious response would require
Ethiopia needs immediate relief for people in distress, alongside sustained efforts to prevent further displacement and restore livelihoods. For displaced households, this means safe accommodation, food assistance, access to health care, and continuity of schooling. It also means opportunities to recover documents, find employment, and rebuild economic independence. Where return is possible, it must be safe and voluntary.
For working households, public debate must take the cost of essential needs seriously. Salary policy, business conditions, and social protection should be assessed against what families can actually afford. For public institutions, credibility requires listening and responding. People need accessible channels to report abuse, seek assistance, and obtain explanations. Promises should be judged by whether help reaches those who need it.
For political leaders and armed actors, civilian protection must have practical meaning. Homes, livelihoods, and public services should never be treated as expendable instruments of political struggle. These responsibilities also deserve the attention of Ethiopia’s international partners. Engagement with the country should remain attentive to people whose suffering receives little visibility. Diplomatic relationships and development programmes should be informed by the conditions families face in their daily lives.
Mercy must become responsibility
My journey was not a survey. It cannot establish national trends or resolve every contested account. It did, however, bring me face to face with people whose distress demands a response. For me, faith offers a language of hope: God has mercy. That belief also calls us to act with mercy ourselves—to listen carefully, protect the vulnerable, and refuse to become accustomed to preventable suffering.
Ethiopia is home to people who deserve to live safely, work with dignity, and raise their children with hope. Its future will depend partly on whether we can recognise their wounds without allowing political allegiance to determine whose pain matters. The question I brought back from this journey remains with me: How much suffering will we accept before protecting people becomes our shared priority?
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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