"The dreams we all had which sparkled for a short while in the hot sun of Eritrea"
By sally tarbox on 11 December 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
Justin Hill went out to Eritrea as a volunteer aid worker in 1996. The country had just emerged from thirty years of conflict with neighbouring Ethiopia, and Hill writes of the aftermath: the damaged buildings but far more importantly a damaged people. Countless deaths; people with horrifying tales to tell; and a sense of malaise as the long fought-for and dreamed-of independent Eritrea fails to materialise.
As former fighters get the top jobs, there remains a sense that conflict is something to aspire to; warfare remains a glorious state.
Hill's account concludes with his evacuation as war starts to break out anew...
Having read two accounts of Eritrea in the 30s by Italian doctor/ administrator Alberto Denti di Pirajno (qv), which portrayed a rather magical place, it was sad to read Hill's contrasting its time as an Italian colony with the country today:

"The Italian aristocrat Duke Denti di Pirajno had reported lions here in the 1930s; and I saw a village called Elephant Water- but all the big game was long gone. The war had seen to that; when soldiers weren't killing each other they turned their guns on the wildlife around them. They'd left the land barren: dust and stones, devastated by a virulent plague of human beings."

A beautiful country but a seemingly hopeless situation.
B/w photos. ( )

Account of working in Eritrea after independence. Conveys beauty of Asmara, and impact of civil war on the people met by (British) expat. Quick read (with pictures!). ( )