In the coop outside Michael Redda’s North Austin home live nearly a dozen homing pigeons. Redda, 47, has driven the pigeons as far as 65 miles away before releasing them to the skies — and, to his delight, they are back in the coop by the time he arrives home.
Raising the pigeons is a hobby he inherited from his father and grandfather, and you can’t help but think those birds serve as a metaphor for someone whose mind is never far from home.
Redda was born and raised in Ethiopia. Even as he spends his weekdays in a cubicle at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, helping sort out some of the state’s most slippery water issues, many of his nights and weekends are spent helping his native land cope with an enormous water project of its own.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam could remake a region long devastated by a string of misfortunes. And just as Redda has turned a life informed by natural disaster in his native country into one dedicated to water resources in some of Texas’ most contentious river basins, he is trying to apply the lessons he has learned in Texas to an examination of the dam.
At the TCEQ, Redda works on the state programs that oversee water issues in the Rio Grande, South Texas and the Concho and Brazos basins, all of which have seen their share of finger-pointing among cities, farmers and industry as resources have grown more valuable, especially during drought.
He is a company man: At a recent interview he wore a blue polo shirt carrying the motto Take Care of Texas — the state’s conservation awareness program — and he proudly showed off a 2011 plaque recognizing his dedication to his job.
But in his off time, his mind turns 8,500 miles away, to water issues in Ethiopia, the land in which he grew up. He is volunteering his time to do technical review for the giant dam project.
Redda grew up in Addis Ababa, the seventh of eight children, the son of a lawyer who belonged to the university-educated elite. In the capital, he was largely insulated from the famine with which Ethiopia is so often associated — but his parents hailed from the hard-hit north, and he witnessed desperate dignitaries from the nation’s hinterlands being resettled in the city.
In the early and mid-1980s, hundreds of thousands died as Ethiopia became a byword for despair and hunger.
“The shortage of water killed people,” he said, but the political situation exacerbated matters.
One ghoulish expression common during those years among the Communist military junta bent on starving its regional enemies: “To kill the fish, dry out the sea.”
From his experience in Ethiopia, Redda said, with some understatement: “I know how complicated, how politicized water can be.”
Eventually, in the late 1990s, as he was working on natural resources projects in the northern part of the country and violent border disputes with neighboring Eritrea were underway — “I would see the cluster bombs drop, the mushroom clouds, the earth shaking,” he said — he left for India for a master’s degree program.
He had grown up with a deep-seated interest in the U.S. and, in particular, with a far-flung affection for Texas. Among his fond memories in an otherwise dark time was seeing the 1982 Willie Nelson film “Barbarosa” — with Nelson on the run from the law — and learning the lyrics to Kenny Rogers songs.
“It’s a great privilege to come to the U.S.,” Redda says.
And so in 2003 he arrived in Texas for a doctoral program in Arlington, working his way up to a dissertation about the performance of sewage treatment plants.
“He’s just a very gracious, grateful person who’s had some hard times but has survived,” said Andrew Kruzic, a civil engineering professor who served as his dissertation supervisor.
Redda said that Ethiopians in the diaspora — he said there are as many as 5,000 in greater Austin — typically get involved with their home country one way or the other.
For him, that’s chiefly meant helping with the dam, which is under construction on the Blue Nile River. It is slated to be the largest hydroelectric plant in Africa, with a reservoir behind it capable of storing at least 20 times the amount of water that lakes Travis and Buchanan, the chief reservoirs of Central Texas, can impound.
In some obvious ways, there are fundamental differences between the two regions. Water consumption in much of Ethiopia has been around 10 gallons per person per day — even less in rural areas. In parts of Texas, where homeowners freely water their lawns and splash about in their own swimming pools, it can be 200 gallons per person per day.
Divvying up the water that will be impounded by the dam has already been the subject of intense regional debate, and environmental groups have said the dam will flood miles and miles of forest and displace thousands of people.
Consulting with fellow ex-pats in Arizona, Los Angeles and Atlanta, and with officials in Ethiopia, Redda is applying some of the lessons he’s learned helping manage Texas’ own contentious waterways as he considers the political and social effects.
“Joining the TCEQ is the top of the world for me,” he said. “This is something I want to transmit to the world, about how environmental management works.”
Source: mystatesman.com/
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