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Nothing symbolizes this nation's true grit better than the mountain retreat of Nakfa. There the near defeated rebel troops hewed out miles of rock trenches with bayonets and survived for 10 years beneath the shelling of the Ethiopian army. It still takes 10 hours in a four-wheel to drive the 137 miles from the capital over rugged mountain tracks. But Nakfa is a place of veneration akin to Valley Forge. "It reminds us forever of our resistance," says Zacharias, a teacher at the new technical school. The national emblem is the camel that carried supplies to Nakfa; the country's new currency, introduced in November to replace the Ethiopian birr, is called the nakfa. Despite Nakfa's 9,000-ft.-high chill and barren soil, the government is determined to turn this inhospitable locale into a regional magnet.
Many of the 10,000 current residents moved into their first concrete buildings just this year. Helping replace the city's tin huts are young people doing their national service. Every Eritrean male is required to spend six months in the army and 12 more working on rehabilitation projects. Up here, some are also planting trees to revive the blighted landscape. "I like doing it," says 24-year-old Daniel. "I teach people how to do things, and that is a way to develop our country fast."
In his blacksmith shop in the busy market town of Keren, Fikad Ghoitom explains the national attitude: show me, don't tell me; ingenuity applied to example; homegrown know-how. Fikad's brother saw a wood-cutting machine in an English magazine and forged one out of scrap metal. Down in the artisans' suq in Asmara, men in blue overalls don masks cut from cardboard to weld new pots from old oil tins and cooking braziers from rusted rods. The clang, hammer, sizzle of makeshift industry are everywhere as boys flatten old iron bars for their brothers to beat into new shovels.
Eritreans are extraordinarily dedicated to the public welfare. Doctors living abroad came back during the war as volunteer medics and still visit for six-month stints. Former fighters who went into the civil service took no pay for three years.
This is not Africa, people will tell you in Eritrea. What they mean is that the country is astonishingly free of the social plagues that taint much of the continent. There is no tribalism or sectarian division here. National pride supersedes loyalties to nine main ethnic groups, at least 10 languages, Islam and Christianity, in part the consequence of the rebels' insistence on mixing everyone together in its army units and now in national-service teams.
Egalitarianism is ingrained, reinforced in the days when army officers wore no insignia of their rank on their shoulders.