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Published: August 11th 2010
Sometime around sunrise the plane began to descend through the clouds towards the dark city that lay below. I was a strung out mess of nerves and exhaustion after a frantic last week in Santiago and two overnight flights. In Chile, I had been doing a pretty good job of mentally not dealing with anything other than the present. The logistics of leaving one continent was enough. Thinking about life in Ethiopia, and what in the hell I was going to do there, wasn’t going to make leaving any smoother. Especially since, like most of the world, my mental conception of Africa is severely retarded. Let’s be honest, for most of us, Africa is a single undifferentiated entity largely associated with things we would rather not think about: slavery, AIDS, genocide, famine, apartheid, war, blood diamonds, poachers, poverty, and corruption. It’s Joe Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with a heavy dose of the horror. On the positive side of the ledger is Jane Goodall, Oldulvi Gorge, Egypt’s pyramids, Nelson Mandela and a couple of cheetahs chasing zebras across the savannah to the soundtrack of the Lion King. Maybe a few elephants. To this vast backdrop of ignorance, I could add few Ethiopian
fragments:
- Ethiopia is in the horn of Africa, which is in the northeast over by the Red Sea, Egypt, and all of the modern day pirates.
- Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity is really old school; like they claim to have the Arc of the Covenant old, and they are serious about it: revelation is history.
- Ethiopians speak Amharic, which is not Arabic. Amharic is related to the Semitic languages and has its own syllabary. Learning it will be a bitch.
- The Ethiopian imperial line traces its lineage to the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheeba, perhaps explaining why they are so serious about the Christianity. Then again, poverty tends to fuel religious fervor as well.
- Its the only African country never to have been colonized although the Italians tried.
- The last emperor, Haile Salassie, is beloved by Rastafarians and stoned college kids, but probably wasn’t really all that great a guy. He had a billion plus in Swiss bank accounts, while hundreds of thousands of ‘his people’ died of starvation.
- In 1984, there was a swollen belly, flies crawling on children, famine and the superstar ‘We are the World’ sing-a-long response. This
event was frequently cited as a reason why I should eat eggplant casserole as a 10 year old. Although ineffective at motivating a spoiled fat kid, the previous made for TV Ethiopia famine 10 years prior had been used to effectively depose the emperor Haile Salassie.
Now, however, the plane was circling the airport at Addis Ababa, and the weight of my factual resources seemed rather flimsy and inadequate. The gnawing panic of near absolute ignorance was busily setting up shop in my consciousness. The future was about to become present, and things were going to get a whole lot stranger.
The airport looked more or less like an airport, which was a good sign. The predictable bureaucratic gauntlet to get visa-ed and stamped into the country was reassuringly banal. On the other side, the baggage carousal in short order spit out bag 1, bag 2, bag 3, and finally, the cat. Smooth. Over by customs, I found Tefari from UNECA protocol. He carried the hallowed pet import documentation, vet signed and accompanied with standard EU sized passport photos (of the cat) and some weighty official stamps. These were handed over to the customs official whose incredulity at
someone importing a cat seemed to revive him temporarily from the numbing task of pretending to look at people’s bags. The combined paperwork for leaving Chile, entering France, and finally entering Ethiopia warranted a total of about 17 seconds of the customs official’s attention, a surprise considering the number of triplicate documents, trips to the veterinarian and government offices, hours, mental energy, concern, and coin that had been expended to reach this point.
Cat. Bags. Next stop, Ethiopia. Deep breaths.
Today is day 3, or maybe 4, and I am flailing my way through Ethiopian space and time:
Space: Within the Compound
Yep. We live in a compound. Two bedrooms, two baths, a front yard, and a little porch cost us 16,000 birr a month, which is around $1200US. This is absurd, but the Ethiopians clearly recognize that the faranjis, the foreigners, are opportunities not to be missed. We have running water, don’t live in a corrugated tin shack by the river, and can’t communicate, so we pay. To keep out the poor, there are bars on the windows, a 15 foot high wall, and a 20 foot high shrubbery between us and the street. Unlike
most of our neighbors, the wall is not crowned with loops of razor wire that glitter in the afternoon sun. Downright bucolic. We enter through a door in the gate, which is manned 24 hours a day by Thomas or Johannes, the guards. They smile a lot and spend their days sitting around waiting to open the door for us.
In addition to the guards, it is imperative to have help. Help is named Al-maz. Monday to Friday, she lives in the quarters out back, cooks, and cleans. Needless to say, shuffling around the house while someone crawls on hands and knees across the floor polishing the wood is horribly uncomfortable, but Al-maz is not an option. Seriously, Not possible. Not only does she come with the house (we are her third tenants), she pays the bills. Without Al-maz, this would not happen because time matters.
Time:
And in Ethiopia, time works differently. And not differently like Chile, where, ha ha, people arrive late. Differently like 12:00 is 6:00 and 6:00 is 12:00. Everyone seems to agree on the general organizational structure of monday through sunday, but not so with the hour, date, month, or year. In
Ethiopia, time actually makes more sense. The sun rises. One hour later, it’s 1:00 in the morning. Two hours later, it’s 2:00. Around 12:00, the sun sets. One hour later, it’s 1:00 at night. This system works so well because of the proximity of the Equator and the consistency of the hour of sunrise and sunset.
The calendar was taken from the Egyptian Coptics: 12 months of thirty days and then a 13th with the change. Add a Julian leap year, and it all works out. The problem is that the Ethiopia year begins on what I am probably going to keep calling September 11th, so there is a wee little problem with synchronicity. It is now either the 11th month, ‘ham-le’, or perhaps the 12th, ‘neu-ha-se. The date is anyone’s guess. Of course, the bills inconsiderately follow the Ethiopian calendar, so Al-maz is indispensable. The upside of the calendar is that Ethiopia fell outside the shadow of Rome, so the calendar doesn’t reflect the whims of Julian or Gregory. Consequently, I think it is 2003, which by my reckoning means I am back under thirty.
Space: Beyond the compound
Our street runs between two huge ones,
Bole Bole and Bole Tele, that lead toward the center. They have other names, but just to make things more fun, there are not really any street names, or a given street has different names depending where you are on it, or there is a name on the street sign that was put up to keep the African Union in town, but no one uses it or knows it. All of which means if you are not from here and intimately familiar with local landmarks, you don’t know where the hell you are. We are apparently very close to the tele-communications office, so we are on Bole Tele. A little up the road is Bole Atlas, which is obviously the area near the Atlas Hotel. Yesterday, I followed Bole Bole, which is a different street altogether from the aforementioned Bole, until I reached Meskal Square. At this great sea of concrete redolent of diesel and hazy with exhaust, I was turned back by the 15 lanes, yes no shit, 15 lanes of traffic. Beyond this moat lays the city center. Perhaps this weekend.
Addis Ababa means ‘new flower’ in Amharic, and though that name might have made some sense
in the 19th century when the city was founded, today it seems like a bit of twisted irony. Addis, or to be fair, the little of it that I have seen, is ugly as hell. Every place that isn’t hidden behind a gate, an impenetrable shrub, a wall and razor wire looks run down, weary, washed out, faded and a little like a 70s strip mall cross bred with an industrial park and subsequently given over to the ravages of a particularly virulent strain of time’s best wear and tear. Most, but certainly not all, of the architecture is the single story variety and looks rather like it was thrown together with wire, cement, some plastic, a little corrugated tin roofing, a couple rubber bands and faith. Interspersed are multi-storied buildings intent on celebrating the aesthetic of soviet era block construction. Many in various states of construction are covered in wood scaffolding exoskeletons. Finally, a finishing glaze of pollution has been generously applied to suppress all but the most unruly tones. It is up to the fruit and vegetable stands, the ubiquitous blue collective minibuses and taxis, and the people on the street to add splashes of color.
The
people are a kaleidoscope of incomprehensibility. Pitch black to pale brown. Women with white things thrown over their heads or wrapped in swirling layers of gaudy loud fabrics. The occasional turban. macramé skull caps. Burkhas. Ladies with crosses tattooed on their foreheads. Suits. And the ginormous fussilioni cork screw afroed super chic. The faces and dress are most assuredly a map of the people and the country, but even if I could read it, it would be difficult. My attention is usually at least half directed at avoiding the pockets of ‘shoeshine misters’ that clog the sidewalk and the cloud of kids that circle me chanting ‘gum’, ‘shoes’, ‘mister’ and ‘hungry’. Clearly there is no trouble identifying what tribe I am from. So this will take some getting used to, but like most things, in six months it will be ‘normal‘.
Also, we can’t find cat food. After throwing up the hamburger oat mixture 6 times this afternoon, Bobo got the duck pate. I am sure if that continues, he at least, will find acculturation quite desirable.
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Mark
non-member comment
Walls
No barbed wire? At least smash some bottles and cement them to the top of your fortress walls! Crazy Americans. Hope we can visit.