Mercato, Ethiopia’s largest open market, wears many faces. In one corner, stalls trade in fading souvenirs that whisper of earlier times. In another, the market pulses with the daily grind of survival, where livelihoods are stitched together in the city’s most frantic heart. On the ground floor, commerce never sleeps. Above it, often behind a door that barely shuts and windows that barely exist, families retreat at night, resting in spaces built more from necessity than design, after days spent chasing just enough to get by.

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