A few months back, Desalegn Godebo’s wife descended into a feverish delirium. "It was as if she were mad, “he said, shuddering at the memory.” she was scratching me like a crazy woman." Before a new road was built through this village, Godebo would have loaded his wife onto his back and hiked six hours along narrow dirt paths to the small city of Awasa. Instead, he lifted her into a truck for the one-hour ride to town. Her condition was diagnosed as malaria and typhoid. She is well now and back home caring for their baby. The dirt-and-gravel road may look like a timeless feature of the Great Rift Valley (东非大裂谷). But it is part of a huge public road-building project that is slowly hauling one of the poorest, hungriest nations on earth into modernity. The people who live along it divide time into two eras: Before the Road and After the Road. Because of the road, people can take their sick to the hospital and their children to distant schools. Farmers like Godebo who had only their own feet or a donkey’s back for transport can now transport their crops to market. Ethiopia, an agricultural society where most farmers still live more than a half-day’s walk from roads, has been especially hobbled by their absence. Support for roads in Africa, particularly from the World Bank, is growing again after a decade of decline in the 1990s. Then the bank reduced lending for roads. Road-building is coming back in style as a way to combat rural poverty in Africa. While no one expects roads alone to end the chronic hunger faced by millions of Ethiopians or the famines that loom periodically, most development experts agree that they are a precondition for progress and are essential to the success of the Green Revolution, which produces abundance in much of Asia but bypasses Africa.