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,
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