Al's Blog #3 - Red Eyed in Addis

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Arrival

All VSOs, no matter how long or short their placement is, are required to have some in-country training. This is where you are given some basic orientation, cultural information, language training and country history, geography and politics. For long-term volunteers (6+ months) in Ethiopia it was 8 days. The short-term volunteers get at least 2 days, but they are usually whisked away to get on with the job.

We arrived at 3.30am ET on Sunday 3rd February and were met by 3 current volunteers from last September’s intake. The flight had been fine, but tedious. Remarkably my iPod batteries stood the test, which was lucky as the cabin crew insisted on showing Rush Hour 3 twice during the flight. The journey was broken by a 45 minute stop at Amman (Jordan) to refuel and drop off the Jordanian-bound passengers. No new passengers embarked but the flight crew changed and thought we’d like to watch Rush Hour 3 again. Someone mentioned that we had seen it on the London-Amman leg so the crew smiled, said they’d fix it and fast forwarded to....aha, Rush Hour 3.
Addis Airport has clearly had a few quid spent on it recently, though the budget didn’t extend to the immigration hall seats which promptly collapsed when a gang of inbound (possibly Egyptian/Sudanese) workers stood up at their end, almost dumping 3 surprised VSOs into a heap on the floor.

Very hospitably and probably to the annoyance of the line of African workers to our right, the ferenjis were fast-tracked through immigration and off to baggage collection. I had read somewhere that you were required to declare any electrical items and like a good ferenj I went looking for the forms to fill in. Much hand waving and smiling later I was ushered to a room where a tired-looking woman licked her pencil and started asking me what I had to declare. When she realised I had a battered old laptop an iPod and about $400 she gave me a look that said ‘you interrupted my buna at 4am to declare this??’ so I shrugged and joined the rest of the 30-odd fellow VSOs that had been rounded up by our 3 chaperones. “Nah mate, no one bothers with that” I was told by Gary the ever cheerful West Ham fan. Yet I later that a couple from Holland had been taxed on a scanner they had in their baggage. Maybe we just looked like scabby poor VSOs and not tourists!

Herded on to a 1950’s school bus we set off for the two hotels that VSO typically use for ICT - the Holiday something (but not, I was assured with a chuckle, The Holiday Inn) - and our hotel, the Yonas. If there was any method in the division of VSOs then I would say the couples seemed to end up in the Yonas. Whatever, several tons of global baggage was then hauled up a narrow set of stairs by 20 tired volunteers so they could get to bed at 5am for a few hours before the proposed 10am meet for breakfast at the hotel. We were on the 3rd floor and by the time we got our 63kg plus unfeasibly large hand baggage upstairs we were both panting like a robber’s dog due to the exertion at altitude, Addis is the world’s third highest capital.

The Yonas is actually a pretty nice hotel. A bit expensive if you want to have a few beers - they add 15% VAT, 10% service charge and charge more than you would normally pay for a beer. Particularly as I tend to tip if I am not sure what the local form is, in case of offending anyone. As an ex-waiter and ex-barman I feel obliged to anyway! The bathrooms were clean and tidy, they had water, western seat toilets, “soft” (toilet roll), hot showers (enjoy ‘em while you can) if you had the brains to plug the boiler in overnight, which I didn’t but luckily Sara had. Curiously every boiler in Ethiopia seems to be an Ariston, though the one currently in our house does not go on and on as per the advert; in fact it doesn’t go on at all!

Apparently the Yonas is where VSOs tend to put up their visitors when in Addis, which seems a fair shout. I think it’s about 150 birr a night (£8). To put it into perspective, my fellow IT volunteer in Assosa, Steven, has been trying to sleep in the cheapest hotel he can find. He has slept in a 5 birr (30p) hotel (I have subsequently seen it and the rooms) but there are rumours of a 2 birr/night one which he has been itching (quite literally I don’t doubt) to try.

So we flopped into bed to snatch 5 hours kip before breakfast but typically you can never sleep. The excitement of being away, long travel mixed with a few in-flight beers & wine, unfamiliar surroundings - and larium - all helped ward off any hope of restful slumber. Mixed with barking dogs, traffic, car horns, Addis’s general all-night party noise and bright sunshine at 6.30am, meant we stumbled down for breakfast red-eyed and spaced-out.

Breakfast at the hotel included a brief orientation (nearest cash point - only two ATMs in the whole of Addis accept Ferenji cards - nearest market and where to get water) plus an introduction to the pace of life and service at the Yonas. It is all very friendly but you have to get ‘down to speed’. After a week in country I just went with the flow when a breakfast of toast, fruit juice and one coffee took over an hour from ordering to payment. After all, it’s hot, just take your time, no need to rush. In fact we later found out that on many occasions ingredients ran out - like the milk for ‘buna ba watat’ (coffee with milk) - so the chef just pops along to the shops to buy some more. Everything is just more relaxed. I can feel my blood pressure slowly coming down. As they say here - in-sha-lah (if God wills it).

Shola Market

So it’s Sunday. We are all fresh-faced new VSOs in country. Let’s go for a walk! About 10 of us set off up the main road towards Shola Market. There is a bigger market in Addis, though I have yet to go. That said, Shola seems pretty big to me. Walking in the road to avoid the vendors with goods spread out on the rocky pavements we passed up and back down a wide road, lined both sides with small, colourful one-story wooden shops, adorned with an untidy array of dusty items, piled, hung and nailed to the walls to maximise the display area. Many of the stalls sold the same items so you had bag shops, shoe shops, mattress shops, fabric shops and so on. I was delighted to see a huge number of Arsenal shirts sported by the Addis faithful, though curiously Fabregas & Van Persie seem to be the flavour of the month. Adebayor, Eboue, Toure etc just didn’t feature, even though they are great African players? The man Terry Henry appeared on a few older shirts and even the odd up-to-date Barcelona shirt and my subsequent conversations with Ethiopian fans of good football suggested that Thierry is much loved and much missed over here.

The stalls on the left hand side of the street stretched back towards more covered shops, deeper in; each corridor disappearing into the gloom and what we discovered later during ICT was a whole city block of market stalls, some covered, some open, with walkways criss-crossing between areas. As a group of lily-white ferenjis we attracted a fair few stares and “Hey You”, “Ferenji” calls. No doubt the word was being passed around that the ferenjis were in town and $ signs were spinning in front of eyes.

Apart from one brave soul, we walked up the main street and then back, not venturing any deeper into the main market. I think his trip was one of necessity as he had been smart enough to pack light and was running out of underpants. Unfortunately buying underpants does not feature heavily under the ‘At The Market’ section of the Lonely Planet guide book and no one had given us the essential Amharic for “do you sell size 36 men’s underpants”. We saw him later looking worried so I guess he was weighing up his options for the next week (inside-out, back-to-front or commando).

The rest of us found a cafe and amused the waiter trying to order coffee & say “Thank You” in pigeon Amharic. It is ama-saga-nalu, which is a bit of a mouthful when you are used to saying “Ta”. You are expected to say thanks during such a transaction, though you don’t say please, which seems a bit strange to us Brits. There is a word for it - we asked in ICT language training, but it is not necessary and probably only serves to confuse the poor vendor or waiter as they try to deconstruct your badly intoned jumble of syllables into something vaguely recognisable from the menu!

VSO Ethiopia (VSOE) Office - Addis Ababa

At 2pm we were due to meet back at the Yonas to be guided to the VSO office in Addis on Haya Hulet. About 15 minutes walk up the main street in the opposite direction from Shola Market the route took us alongside one of Addis’s busy main roads. Although the tarmac on the roads was fine, the pavements are somewhat of a challenge on a busy thoroughfare, particularly as Ethiopians like to plant small boulders down in the street as makeshift chairs, which are left in situ when the sitter has finished his sit. If you try and window shop as well as walk you are likely to end up in a storm drain or sitting on the lap of a shoeshine boy. There is an art to walking in Addis and it takes practice.

Safely negotiating the first stretch we reached the main junction at Haya Hulet. Up until a year or two ago none of the streets in Addis had a name, but to celebrate a meeting in Addis of the African Union all the streets were given names. VSO Ethiopia is on Togo street, though by all accounts if you use any of the new names taxi drivers haven’t a clue where you mean. You use the old street name of Haya Hulet, which means “22” in Amharic - the 22 refers to the bus route that the number 22 bus takes across Addis.

We headed onwards, a few hundred yards up from the junction, past a dusty football pitch on the left and the drinking haunt of VSOs - the Pride Bar, until behind an iron gate, just back off the street sat the 3-story VSO office. As it was Sunday most of the office areas were deserted but outside reception on the ground floor is a map of Ethiopia and pins marking the location of each VSO volunteer in country linked to passport-sized photos of their faces. We all huddled around to see where we were heading in relation to Addis.

Split into 2 groups we spent the first 30 minutes meeting Patricia the Country Director for VSO E, who introduced herself and we did likewise, saying where we were going and what we were expecting to do. Patricia seemed to know all our names, was familiar with where we were going and offered us a word of encouragement or advice, which I thought was impressive, given the number of us who has just arrived.

She smiled when I explained fairly clearly and confidently what I would be doing in Assosa - I had been in touch with my new boss already - and said she would be interested to know what I thought 2 or 3 months into the job. It is common knowledge and you are warned in all the pre-departure training, that many VSO placements worldwide may not be very specific in terms of initial placement objectives and that for the first few months you are really still getting used to the country, the people and the language. You are apparently at your most effective during the last 6 months of your 2 year placement, probably when you have a clearer picture of what help you can give and have integrated into the culture and picked up some language skills.

After a coffee we moved on to a form-filling session - Embassy registration forms, Residence card applications, medical information forms etc. Then we got paid!?! Welcome to the ‘Per Diem’. Apparently, if you spend any time out of the office but ‘on the job’, either at a meeting or training course, you can expect a Per Diem payment. I guess its a bit like claiming back expenses back in the UK, although you get paid regardless of what costs you actually incur. It does run the risk of being engineered into a salary top-up mechanism. You get 60 or 80 birr a day for food and hotels, so you stay with your family and keep the money. Or you organise your calendar so to attend every possible event that qualifies for a Per Diem and collect a nice little envelope of cash at the end of the day. What a bargain!

Apparently your Per Diem amount varies depending on seniority and if it is not considered financially worthwhile to make a journey, then you don’t make it. I had been warned back on training in the UK that in many places across the developing world a budget would have to be made available for Per Diems or no-one would come to your training or your workshops! Even those that came might only be doing it for the money, not actually because they were interested in the event. A curious situation indeed but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. As VSOs we are supposed to hand back any Per Diem payments we are given once in our placements, which makes sense given the money could be better spent on an Ethiopian. Though given our monthly salary is only 1650birr (approximately £90), we might well have to take some of those Per Diems after all!

The Information Super Highway

I had prepared myself for a leap back in time to the days of 56k modems and dial-up Internet access; and had recently mourned the loss of my 20Mb cable Internet link, however it was still a shock to the system nevertheless to connect online at the VSO office.
VSO kindly provide a free service, via a little office switch connected to a dial-up or possibly broadband modem (broadband is 64k, dial-up is 56k) located in a little room at the rear of the VSO office compound in Addis. When sharing the link amongst 4 volunteers it starts to seriously creak at the seams. Everyone was keen to fire off a “have arrived safely” message back home and a stressed-out queue of volunteers fresh from zero latency broadband in the North began to form. I looked to my right at one of the experienced VSOs at his laptop and he seemed to be playing cards on it!!! Come on man, there were people queuing to send emails here! He explained that he was sending an email, but standard practice is to type in the link to hotmail, then go make a cup of tea and open up a game of solitaire while the page loads. You just get used to it. Right. As an IT professional who spends most of his day with the Internet and its driver downloads, support websites, specialist peer group forums, remote VPN access and email updates at his fingertips, not to mention evenings of online gaming and Bittorrent downloads I could foresee a very different online existence mapped out for me over the next two years. Well, I signed up for new challenges and new experiences!

Fortunately I had managed to speak to Dad in the morning having used the hotel reception telephone to call home - 70 birr for 3 minutes - so my email requirements were of secondary importance. Just to check some of the financial transactions had gone through ok and to pick up some spam. Made a mental note to resist that urge to check for emails every few hours as you become used to, both at work and at home back in the UK.

Some volunteers were hoping to use Skype or some other voice over internet application, but they were going to be sadly disappointed as such applications are blocked by Ethiopia Telecom (ETC), who is the sole provider of Internet, land-line and mobile telecommunications. I guess they don’t want people circumventing expensive distance and international charges by using their Internet connection to make the calls.

One or two volunteers did have UK mobiles that could at least connect to the ETC network, but ours are with Virgin Mobile who has no agreement with ETC. I had checked that one out before I came. Bit of a shame as it would have been handy to at least send off a few “arrived safely” texts as well.

Finding Food

With birr burning a hole in our pockets and being as it was Ruth’s birthday a group of us set out later from the Yonas to try some traditional local food. Not as easy as you might think. The first 2 restaurants we tried only did European food, which was a bit of a shock - pizza, burgers, pasta and the like. They looked nice but we really fancied trying some of the local grub, particularly as we had has a taster of Ethiopian cooking at the St Gabriel’s Deli in Finsbury Park when Sara came with me to the Arsenal vs. Wigan game late last year.
In the end we all clustered around a few tables in the Pride Bar, drank “Jambo” (pints of draught lager) and ate shiro and injura (spicy chickpea stew on flat, chapatti-like bread). Addis gets pretty cold at night - you feel it through a fleece - and we were outside so we headed back along the main road towards the Yonas. The few bars we passed all seemed to be exclusively male occupied so rather than inflict a bunch of ferenjis and their women on them we went for a nightcap at the hotel.

The Yonas is great for watching football. Two big TVs in the main bar and even one in the dining room serve up football 24x7, thanks to a complicated arrangement of satellite control boxes, stacked precariously underneath the main TV above the door. Earlier in the day they had been showing a rerun of the Carling Cup semi-final against Spurs. The 5-1 mauling was not an experience I cared to repeat so I gave that a miss. To be fair, most of the punters in the bar looked equally glum, even though it was a recorded match and the pain had been eased somewhat by a 3-1 victory at Man City the day before.

We had left for food earlier the crowd at the Yonas watching Spurs vs. Man Utd and when we came back it was Ghana vs. Nigeria in the African Nations Cup. Oddly there seemed more interest in the Premiership games and this feeling was confirmed later by several Ethiopians who told me that the Premiership was more important than the African Nations Cup by far. Ghana won 2-1 in the background while we rounded the night off with a bottle or two of St. George beer. Dave, the Welsh rugby fan sat with a contented smile on his face having heard that his boys had done a job on England at Twickenham the day before.

A big slice of real life arrived at 10pm when the two Kenyan VSO volunteers arrived at the hotel, having just got off a flight from Nairobi. We knew they were coming and VSOE had asked other volunteers to contribute to the costs of the Kenyans to call home. Kenya was in crisis and VSO had pulled all serving volunteers out of Kenya the week before. One of the guys on my OD course had had his placement suspended due to security concerns but although I felt sorry for him and all his plans going out the window at the last minute, he was lucky. These guys were leaving family and friends back home in Kenya to an uncertain future as they came to Ethiopia to share skills with Ethiopians and help their northern neighbours develop. We asked if they needed anything but all they wanted to do was sleep. We too headed off, reminded that this is Africa and we are here to do a job. Tomorrow ICT, orientation and language training would start in earnest.

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Photos

Snoozing on a Plane
Westlife cushon comes in handy.

3.30am Arrival in Addis
60kg bags on the floor. 60kg bags under eyes.

Sara still smiling
We made it in one piece! And so did our bags.

Yonas Hotel Comfort
Park your backside on that.

The Yonas Hotel
Our home for 10 days. And probably yours if you come and visit!

First morning in Addis
Addis from our balcony.

Addis Street
Mind Your Step!

VSO Ethiopia Office
VSO HQ - Al catching a few rays. Mad dog just out of shot.

VSO Map of Ethiopia
So that's where Assosa is!

VSO Map II
Can you spot us?

VSO Garden
Patricia (the Director) with Wendy (new VSO like us).

Yonas Bar
Dave reminding Al of the Wales vs. England rugby score.

Comments

[Alemayehu Tariku]

I want to be volunteer.