As the teacher calls on the raised hand in an Addis Abeba University classroom, the frustrated student begins, “Chewing khat is my culture, and you shouldn't prohibit me from using it!” As students berated each other back and forth about khat, the teacher ended the class and everyone walked away with the same consensus on the adverse effects.

As the room began to disperse and the instructor left, another consensus was reached. Most of the people in that room had used khat at least once with few admitting that they were regular users. Ethiopians have a way of not speaking about the difficult conversations that are necessary to be had. A study in 2018 on the prevalence and predictors of khat chewing among Ethiopian university students found that more than one in five students has chewed khat.

The numbers and the people tell different stories. People want to tell us what we want to hear, while numbers shed light on the patterns of what we do, not just what we say.

At the National Museum of Ethiopia, while visiting the oldest human remains, the well-informed guide shows groups around as he declares, “But I don't believe in it. We are a religious country.”

In the same line of thinking, this year, Lucy (Australopithecus), the main attraction at the museum was on a peace and love tour of Ethiopia. The tour was intended to strengthen the unity of our nation. Yet it begs the question, is this a uniting tour for a conservative country with the majority of people who believe in creationism?

Having expended no effort to confront these identity disparities, we continue to simply mimic what has been left behind through generations while struggling to add on new thinking. We fight personal and national strife that does not belong to us.

As published in the Ethiopian Journal of Social Sciences, depression is a rapidly growing health problem in the country, yet we have not created a term stronger than the equivalent of boredom in our national language.

We have some of the richest cultural heritages in Ethiopia, and yet we learn very little about it.