October 24, 2:00pm, Minneapolis-St. Paul. The Final Chapter (Thank God):
Was still thinking about those Dutch stewardesses. The way they’d announce over the intercom in thick accents:
“Passenger Rothson, flying to Nairobi, you are delaying the flight. Report to gate G6 immediately. We will unload your luggage.” Just like that. So smooth, so coldblooded, so final. It gave me the shivers. Yow.
Enroute to Minneapolis-St.Paul, most all of the passengers on the airplane were white Americans. Geeze, what a shocking difference! Almost everyone has a ‘don’t talk to me’ glare on their face. They all look miserable, almost without exception. Wow, are these my people? I sit next to a particularly sour-looking old woman, who doesn’t make eye contact. I sit thinking for a few minutes about how much friendlier the Africans were, and then decided it just can’t be true. I strike up a conversation, something I usually avoid on a plane in case you’re next to a nutjob in disguise, and discover that the old bag is actually returning from a two-week Kenyan safari. Although not exactly my cup of tea, she does turn out to be nice and fairly agreeable, and I discover that her son was one of the principal researchers who recently discovered those bacteria living in pores in rocks buried hundreds of meters under the earth’s surface. Interesting. So, behind that crabby veneer, perhaps most of these Americans are actually nice people. I think there’s just a general self-consciousness, insecurity, a fear of what other people are thinking about them, or just a fear of everyone else in general, that seems to have appeared over that Ethiopian openness that I’ve become accustomed to. “Please be aware the National Security Administration has raised the Terror Alert to Orange. Be especially vigilant for suspicious looking persons.” Code Orange? What the hell does that mean? I always get pissed off when I hear that announcement. Living in fear, no shit.
Now that I’m back in Anglo-Saxon land, I admit there are some very good looking people here too. But not that many. And those that aren’t good looking are REALLY not good looking. I mean, there’s just a general … physical (and mental?) unhealthiness that was not present on my corner of the Dark Continent. Quickly surveying the facial expressions of all the people sitting around me as I type this, I’m inclined to call this the Dark Continent. Goodness, smile a bit, people. And for the first time in five weeks, I’m seeing people again who are really, and I mean REALLY, into themselves. Didn’t ever see that on this trip. And now, it’s so shocking and stands out so sharply, these people seem wacko to me. Crazier than the raving lunatics who would jog down the middle of Ethio-China Road shouting jibberish with their eyes rolled back in their heads. They may have been completely insane, but at least they still seemed human. Some of these folks wandering around the Minneapolis Airport seem, well… wrong. I mean, what happened to that African humanity they were born with? Now they’re plastic Barbies, spinning themselves tighter and tighter into a stinking web of egotism and insecurity and selfishness and ridiculousness. And it’s scary! I was thinking back to that first night, when I rolled into the airport in Addis, and walked out into a sea of black faces, an unfamiliar city on an unfamiliar continent in an unfamiliar culture, with no idea what Dr. Shimeles looked like or what the hell was going to happen to me. I laughed at myself, looking back on that first step into Africa, at how silly and terrified I was those first days. It had changed SO much in those five weeks there… I had learned so, so very much… including that most of my fears were totally unfounded. But even those first steps into the chaotic Ethiopian night, were nowhere near as frightening as my first steps back in my country. It’s a strange feeling. Maybe there were also demons in Ethiopia, but I just didn’t know how to see them, what to look for. But here, after being away and getting perspective on a few things, I do know what to look for, and it’s like a hard slap in the face. Yes, I’m back amongst my people… and they have some serious issues.
But not everyone here is crazy, you’ll be happy to know. And, in case I was missing my black friends, I discovered that Minneapolis is, strangely, the largest reservoir of immigrated Ethiopians outside of Washington DC… and I think 90% of them work in this airport. Shim told me just to say something to myself in Amharic, and every airport working in the joint will turn and stare at you. And he was absolutely right. Ha! Kind of fun… a bit of a pleasant transition back onto the Planet of the Palefaces.
And other good news: We have a BEAUTIFUL country. Really! We are truly blessed to live on this continent. It could be that it’s spent a lot less time being used and abused by humans, but… I don’t think that’s it. It’s just… well, looking out the window as we dropped down through Ottowa toward the Twin Cities, I couldn’t help thinking that John Adams had been right about this Land of Plenty, this New World Paradise. I was trying not to be sentimental, either, but … this part of the planet is just so amazingly gorgeous. (!!!) And after traveling, and seeing that it’s not like that everywhere else, and understanding that the beautiful continent we’ve inherited is unique, and special, and (I hate to say it, but…) in a lot of ways, environmentally speaking, better than other countries and continents… It just drives it home like a hard cowboy boot up the ass that we cannot fuck this country up the way we seem prepared to. We CAN’T let ourselves come to an equilibrium with the other nations of the world… we can do better because we have something better, we must do better, because… because… if we don’t, it’d be such a bloody global tragedy! I know that my preference for North America is a personal opinion, and plenty biased, but no matter how objective I try to be, looking down on those winding blue rivers and Great Lakes and thick North Woods and golden-scarlet hardwoods and farmers’ fields and ranchers’ pastures and frost-capped hills and the city parks mixed in among beautiful old brick houses and boulevards lined with thick elms and maples, I couldn’t help feeling very, very grateful to have been born in a country that could fit me in and still have room to be wild and clean and scenic and inspirational and… perfect. And a feeling of hope washed over me, looking down out of the smudgy window at all that harmony, city and wilderness, spreading out below me. We still have the chance, we still have the time, we can do it: Americans can preserve what is the best part of their heritage, and live in symphony with it, can for the preservation of our own unique American-ness learn to give up those old ideals of dominance over nature and exchange them for ideals of coexistence… if only we can come to a universal respect for what we have, and for what could become of it if we act shortsightedly and selfishly. Perhaps all of us should travel the world, just a little bit… if not to uncover the mysteries of foreign cultures and distant lands, to reveal the nature of ourselves and our country, to gain perspective on what is right with us and what is wrong… To understand the way that we teeter precariously in the earth’s balance.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Amsterdam Schipol, 6:15am, October 24:
I’m happy to report that five weeks in Ethiopia have cured me of a bad case of negrophobia which was festering for 24 years in Montana, Land of Diversity. After wandering into the airport alone (with a bit of trepidation and sadness… bye Shimeles! Sniff!) I made it to the departure gate and noticed with no small degree of disgust that the white farenges had completely segregated themselves into one half of the seating area, leaving the smaller group of Ethiopian travelers to do their thing on one long row of benches along the opposite wall. Should I go sit with the sour-faced Frenchies, Germans, Dutchers and pot-bellied tourists from Memphis? Boooooor-ing! I backed up, walked down and around to the far side of the room and along the bench full of happy, chatty Ethiopians, and sat down on the one unoccupied seat. After squeezing all that I could out of my few memorized Amharic phrases, I was cheerfully talking and laughing with several nice women and making faces at the unbelievably cute little girls next to me who decided to sing me nursery rhymes in Orominya. What fun! With immense satisfaction I watched out of the corner of my eye as my milky-skinned counterparts glared at me silently from across the room. I love these people! (Ethiopians) They’re so warm, and beautiful, and good-natured… And where else can you get a marriage proposal after five minutes of pleasant conversation?
As I tried to board, the scanning machine beeped and the woman told me I’d have to have my bag searched. Ok, all my luggage was searched when I entered the airport, and my carry on was searched again when I went into the departure area, but I waited patiently for a guard to come. Well, I noticed that of several hundred people getting on the flight, I was the only one waiting to be searched. Just my luck. Then the guard came up and told me to leave my carry on there and to follow him. Uh-oh. We walked out of the departure area, down the hall, then through a security door, down a long flight of cement stairs, and through another door right out onto the tarmac, and into a chaotic mass of conveyor belts and trucks and shouting security personnel, and over to a scanning machine where I saw one of the big duffels laying on its side. Must be the mast. They already threw a fit about that one at the entrance to the airport. I opened the bag and took out the mast, and was correct in that they wanted to inspect it. Admittedly, I’m sure it looks like some sort of rifle through the x-ray scanner. I opened it up but this time, it was too loud all around me to be able to properly explain the purpose of the mast, and the military guys who were going through the unit looked extremely skeptical. Then they found the case of machined pins which fit into the steel monuments, and I knew right away they thought they were bullets. God, you should have seen their eyes bulge. But I stayed very friendly and non-chalant, and after a bit of scrutinizing my face for signs of terrorist-sympathy, they let me pack it up again and sent me back up to the gate. The flight was actually, I won’t say painless, but not so bad as I’d feared. I was sitting next to a nice Ethiopian girl about my age who was returning to study in Toronto after visiting her family in Addis for a few months. I felt like sleeping almost as soon as we took off, but the seat was spectacularly uncomfortable and I writhed in agony, trying to find some position where I could doze off without experiencing muscle spasms in my neck and back. Impossible. I felt miserable and my eyes started getting puffy from the dry air and lack of sleep. Then my body passed some sort of discomfort threshold and flipped an emergency switch, and I fell into the strangest, deepest sleep. I woke up from time to time, but it felt like looking out at the world from within a coma… my medulla oblongata felt like it had turned to lead, and the dirty motor oil was back and sloshing behind my optic nerves. The stewards served me several meals, but I could only look at them from where I had slumped into my seat… I was physically unable to move a muscle toward it. And had I not been so inclined to give myself to sleep, it would have been a rather scary feeling. However, after slumbering like this on and off for about five hours, I woke up and felt better, and had some food and the next thing I knew we were landing in pre-dawn Amsterdam.
I savored the way the flight attendants in their blue KLM skirts and funny hats made the announcements in rich, thick Netherlands Dutch. The glorious way they gave guttural passion to words like ‘glaamstuumbrringste’ was making me horny, and I decided that if all Dutch girls are as unbearably sexy as the KLM flight attendants, I would turn in my geology texts and dedicate myself to the art of Dutch seduction. Even as I type this, some invisible (but surely delicious) Dutch vixen is announcing in an erotic voice that ‘denterguurning der flichsatch goombinhaanink vis blartinhuusenving’… Ooh, I love it when you talk dirty to me… don’t stop, don’t stop!
Amazing how sad I felt to be leaving Addis when all I did for the past month was bitch in my journal about how eager I was to get the hell out of there and come home. Suddenly, everything seemed so inviting… the smell of shiro cooking somewhere, the friendly girls and laughing black faces, the chaos of the markets and flickering lights, the vast neighborhoods of mud-metal shanties that were pitch dark in the cool highland night air, except for corrugated tin roofs reflecting a bit of moonlight… I thought of Shimeles, and Mimo and Hewit and Root, and briefly felt agonized that I wasn’t back in Shimeles’ apartment talking with them, and sleeping on Shim’s couch for another day of adventure in that crazy capital. But the feeling is fading soon enough. It was high time for me to make my departure. And I’m glad to know I felt that way at the end… it’s true, for the past few weeks, everything had gone so right, and so well… Shim did his very best to insure that I would miss Ethiopia when he left, and (though I was still darn eager to leave) he succeeded, I’m quite sure. I think I’ll be happy to go back, after I’ve had at least a half-year’s recuperation. Ah, silly farenj. Mountains, I’m coming home to you. Wild skies and grey snowy twilight, I’m coming back, I’m yours, if you’ll just embrace me and let me slip into your desolate, unfeeling arms. So blissfully, so joyfully, so much right where I belong.
Now, let’s go tour the Amsterdam Airport! There’s a museum here, did you know that? And cigarette boxes that exclaim it great red letters, SMOKING KILLS YOUR BABY. And Dutch porn. Does it feature KLM flight attendants? I’ll have to check it out. (Just kidding, mom!)
I only wish that my carry-ons were lighter. I packed every heavy item I could into my Kelty so that I wouldn’t have to cough up millions for overweight luggage, and it worked… only a few pounds over, and a manageable $50 fine. But it means that walking around the shops and hallways makes my shoulders ache, and this damn laptop, I’m certain, is if nothing else, the heaviest one on the market. Damn thing feels like one of Moses’ stone tablets, or a block of Danakil salt. It’s supposed to have no moving parts, and thus be very impact resistant, but I haven’t dropped it yet, so I’ve not been able to test that one. However, I’m sure that it is theft-resistant. Any schmuck who tried to snatch this thing from me and run would have his arm drop off before he made it a hundred yards. Wow, it’s seven o’clock and still dark outside. I guess I’m not on the equator any more. I forgot about that part of winter in the northern latitudes. Well, a third of my return trip is over, and I’m in a damn good mood. Hope this lasts. I wonder how bloodshot my eyes will be when I finally stumble off that plane into the cold Missoula night? Oh, that will be sweet! How I miss my family, and my girlfriend, and Mr. Hans and company. It eased a little toward the end, as I made a few friends abroad… but only a little.
Final note: not impressed with the security measures. The mast unit is an obvious security concern. I mean, it looks quite a bit like a disassembled elephant gun. But I easily made it onto the airplane with both a nail clippers and enough anti-worm suspension liquid to make a neat little avaquinone bomb. And nobody even asked to look in my backpack which contains three receivers and two bipods and one sat-phone and by God, if I was in charge of scanning backpacks for suspicious materials, I’ve have the bomb squad interrogating me in the dungeon right now. Not good enough, guys… gotta do better, or one of these times someone’s going to start clipping their toenails at 39,000 feet. Very worrisome.
Maybe one more entry in Minneapolis? If the battery holds out?
I’m happy to report that five weeks in Ethiopia have cured me of a bad case of negrophobia which was festering for 24 years in Montana, Land of Diversity. After wandering into the airport alone (with a bit of trepidation and sadness… bye Shimeles! Sniff!) I made it to the departure gate and noticed with no small degree of disgust that the white farenges had completely segregated themselves into one half of the seating area, leaving the smaller group of Ethiopian travelers to do their thing on one long row of benches along the opposite wall. Should I go sit with the sour-faced Frenchies, Germans, Dutchers and pot-bellied tourists from Memphis? Boooooor-ing! I backed up, walked down and around to the far side of the room and along the bench full of happy, chatty Ethiopians, and sat down on the one unoccupied seat. After squeezing all that I could out of my few memorized Amharic phrases, I was cheerfully talking and laughing with several nice women and making faces at the unbelievably cute little girls next to me who decided to sing me nursery rhymes in Orominya. What fun! With immense satisfaction I watched out of the corner of my eye as my milky-skinned counterparts glared at me silently from across the room. I love these people! (Ethiopians) They’re so warm, and beautiful, and good-natured… And where else can you get a marriage proposal after five minutes of pleasant conversation?
As I tried to board, the scanning machine beeped and the woman told me I’d have to have my bag searched. Ok, all my luggage was searched when I entered the airport, and my carry on was searched again when I went into the departure area, but I waited patiently for a guard to come. Well, I noticed that of several hundred people getting on the flight, I was the only one waiting to be searched. Just my luck. Then the guard came up and told me to leave my carry on there and to follow him. Uh-oh. We walked out of the departure area, down the hall, then through a security door, down a long flight of cement stairs, and through another door right out onto the tarmac, and into a chaotic mass of conveyor belts and trucks and shouting security personnel, and over to a scanning machine where I saw one of the big duffels laying on its side. Must be the mast. They already threw a fit about that one at the entrance to the airport. I opened the bag and took out the mast, and was correct in that they wanted to inspect it. Admittedly, I’m sure it looks like some sort of rifle through the x-ray scanner. I opened it up but this time, it was too loud all around me to be able to properly explain the purpose of the mast, and the military guys who were going through the unit looked extremely skeptical. Then they found the case of machined pins which fit into the steel monuments, and I knew right away they thought they were bullets. God, you should have seen their eyes bulge. But I stayed very friendly and non-chalant, and after a bit of scrutinizing my face for signs of terrorist-sympathy, they let me pack it up again and sent me back up to the gate. The flight was actually, I won’t say painless, but not so bad as I’d feared. I was sitting next to a nice Ethiopian girl about my age who was returning to study in Toronto after visiting her family in Addis for a few months. I felt like sleeping almost as soon as we took off, but the seat was spectacularly uncomfortable and I writhed in agony, trying to find some position where I could doze off without experiencing muscle spasms in my neck and back. Impossible. I felt miserable and my eyes started getting puffy from the dry air and lack of sleep. Then my body passed some sort of discomfort threshold and flipped an emergency switch, and I fell into the strangest, deepest sleep. I woke up from time to time, but it felt like looking out at the world from within a coma… my medulla oblongata felt like it had turned to lead, and the dirty motor oil was back and sloshing behind my optic nerves. The stewards served me several meals, but I could only look at them from where I had slumped into my seat… I was physically unable to move a muscle toward it. And had I not been so inclined to give myself to sleep, it would have been a rather scary feeling. However, after slumbering like this on and off for about five hours, I woke up and felt better, and had some food and the next thing I knew we were landing in pre-dawn Amsterdam.
I savored the way the flight attendants in their blue KLM skirts and funny hats made the announcements in rich, thick Netherlands Dutch. The glorious way they gave guttural passion to words like ‘glaamstuumbrringste’ was making me horny, and I decided that if all Dutch girls are as unbearably sexy as the KLM flight attendants, I would turn in my geology texts and dedicate myself to the art of Dutch seduction. Even as I type this, some invisible (but surely delicious) Dutch vixen is announcing in an erotic voice that ‘denterguurning der flichsatch goombinhaanink vis blartinhuusenving’… Ooh, I love it when you talk dirty to me… don’t stop, don’t stop!
Amazing how sad I felt to be leaving Addis when all I did for the past month was bitch in my journal about how eager I was to get the hell out of there and come home. Suddenly, everything seemed so inviting… the smell of shiro cooking somewhere, the friendly girls and laughing black faces, the chaos of the markets and flickering lights, the vast neighborhoods of mud-metal shanties that were pitch dark in the cool highland night air, except for corrugated tin roofs reflecting a bit of moonlight… I thought of Shimeles, and Mimo and Hewit and Root, and briefly felt agonized that I wasn’t back in Shimeles’ apartment talking with them, and sleeping on Shim’s couch for another day of adventure in that crazy capital. But the feeling is fading soon enough. It was high time for me to make my departure. And I’m glad to know I felt that way at the end… it’s true, for the past few weeks, everything had gone so right, and so well… Shim did his very best to insure that I would miss Ethiopia when he left, and (though I was still darn eager to leave) he succeeded, I’m quite sure. I think I’ll be happy to go back, after I’ve had at least a half-year’s recuperation. Ah, silly farenj. Mountains, I’m coming home to you. Wild skies and grey snowy twilight, I’m coming back, I’m yours, if you’ll just embrace me and let me slip into your desolate, unfeeling arms. So blissfully, so joyfully, so much right where I belong.
Now, let’s go tour the Amsterdam Airport! There’s a museum here, did you know that? And cigarette boxes that exclaim it great red letters, SMOKING KILLS YOUR BABY. And Dutch porn. Does it feature KLM flight attendants? I’ll have to check it out. (Just kidding, mom!)
I only wish that my carry-ons were lighter. I packed every heavy item I could into my Kelty so that I wouldn’t have to cough up millions for overweight luggage, and it worked… only a few pounds over, and a manageable $50 fine. But it means that walking around the shops and hallways makes my shoulders ache, and this damn laptop, I’m certain, is if nothing else, the heaviest one on the market. Damn thing feels like one of Moses’ stone tablets, or a block of Danakil salt. It’s supposed to have no moving parts, and thus be very impact resistant, but I haven’t dropped it yet, so I’ve not been able to test that one. However, I’m sure that it is theft-resistant. Any schmuck who tried to snatch this thing from me and run would have his arm drop off before he made it a hundred yards. Wow, it’s seven o’clock and still dark outside. I guess I’m not on the equator any more. I forgot about that part of winter in the northern latitudes. Well, a third of my return trip is over, and I’m in a damn good mood. Hope this lasts. I wonder how bloodshot my eyes will be when I finally stumble off that plane into the cold Missoula night? Oh, that will be sweet! How I miss my family, and my girlfriend, and Mr. Hans and company. It eased a little toward the end, as I made a few friends abroad… but only a little.
Final note: not impressed with the security measures. The mast unit is an obvious security concern. I mean, it looks quite a bit like a disassembled elephant gun. But I easily made it onto the airplane with both a nail clippers and enough anti-worm suspension liquid to make a neat little avaquinone bomb. And nobody even asked to look in my backpack which contains three receivers and two bipods and one sat-phone and by God, if I was in charge of scanning backpacks for suspicious materials, I’ve have the bomb squad interrogating me in the dungeon right now. Not good enough, guys… gotta do better, or one of these times someone’s going to start clipping their toenails at 39,000 feet. Very worrisome.
Maybe one more entry in Minneapolis? If the battery holds out?
Office of Gatieyeh, Addis Ababa, 3:00pm, October 23:
Amazing how time seems to drag on longer and longer the closer I come to my departure date. Wrapping up loose ends: Said most of my goodbyes, finished up swapping and organizing data at the Observatory, wrapped up my money and receipts, photocopied the site logs, ate kifo (raw this time!), ripped some of Shimeles’ CDs (though we’ve listened to them so many damn times I think I’ll scream if I ever hear those songs again)… Only things left are to buy an anti-worm drug (gotta watch out for that raw kitfo) and figure out how the hell I’m going to get home with three full GPS units (I only came with two) plus all my souvenirs and assorted hodgepodge. I think that extra baggage costs about $25 per pound for international flights. Can you believe that?? So if I have a 36 pound box… Shit! My plan: to dismantle all the units, and take the heaviest parts (receivers, satellite dishes, bi-pods, masts) and try to put them in my one little carry-on Kelty backpack. Can I get away with this?? Unlikely. Plus, I’ll probably be stopped at every airport terminal and strip-searched when they find all those suspicious electronics in my bag. But I’d do almost anything to avoid having to cough up $400 (well, I’ve only got $364!) just to send one extra box back with me. Stress, stress. Need to get to the airport a bit early, me thinks. But once I get my fanny end on that plane, I know the euphoria will set in. And then the air sickness, and fatigue, and body odor, and fuzzy-teeth feeling, and the bloodshot eyes… But it doesn’t matter. Becks will be gone for my full first week back, and my Friday class is cancelled, so… Oh Joyous Joy of Joys!!! – I’m going HIKING! And Biking, and Boating, and Camping, and Loafing… (insert gleeful grin here). There’s only the horribly long flight home, and the anxiousness about what chaos awaits me there, that could detract from this blissful moment… but hell, let’s be honest: I’M SO HAPPY TO BE GOING HOME!!!
That’s not to say that I didn’t have a wonderful time here my last two days in Addis: Shimeles and I stayed very busy taking care of our final business, and I spent yesterday morning hanging out with Shim and Dr. Tigistu and Dr. Alias, and Teddy as well, who showed up and tagged along, for which I was very thankful. Dr. Alias is sort of the Anti-Shimeles, Shim’s counterpart from the Observatory who’s working with Ebinger’s team (I really don’t want to call our groups rivals… it’s just that there seems to have been some animosity over who’s ‘turf’ this part of the Ethiopian Rift is… ridiculous really… and I hate to think that Dr. Alias has to watch what he says around me because our bosses are in some sort of scientific tussle.) Anyway, he is a delightful man, and I really enjoyed talking with him over coffee and lunch. Shim took me to a coffee joint in Piazza called Tomoca… my God, what a coffee-lover’s wet dream! Beans of all different shades, from white to black-brown, were displayed across the counter, each from a different coffee region in Ethiopia, each with a distinct flavor and scent. The place smelled heavenly, and the aroma of coffee seemed to have worked itself into the beautiful old carved-oak walls so that they radiated a dark, pungent aura. We bought two kilos of Harar Coffee, from the northern Somali province… cream colored beans which become a strong dark brown when ground up, and smelling almost too strong for me to handle… and rumored to be the very best. Almost makes me want to become a regular addict.
Root called and told Shimeles to drop me off in Piazza to meet her: her mom was preparing dinner at her house, and I’d go with her and then spend the night there. I think Shim was relieved at the opportunity to be rid of me for a night, and made the drop-off, though it felt to me like a bad time to be fooling around in the suburbs… I had SO MUCH to do still, including making a call to Becky, in which I had hoped Shimeles would participate. But much more so, I was thinking ‘Great, now I’ll be trapped at her place far from town, and will have to fend off Root with a stick, all the while pulling out my hair about the things I’ve put off for the last day…’ But I met her on the sidewalk, and she didn’t try to be romantic at all… took me around to introduce me to her friends in the Mercato, and then took me shopping for jewelry as promised. We joined up with her nice friend Cuba (looked Cuban, too), and I really had a fantastic time. The Mercato was a blast… I don’t think I’d go there alone, but only because I wouldn’t get fair prices and would probably be trailing a battalion of beggars and street kids, not because I’d fear for my safety. You can find anything and everything in Mercato… and cheap! I mean, the thing is a friggin’ yard sale about five miles wide, and since I was in the mood to shop, I was having a blast. Cuba and Root were fun companions, and we wandered all over the place just browsing for souvenirs… I didn’t buy too much because I was almost out of money, but Root was wonderfully nice and bought a few things for me to give to Halle when I ran out of Birr… I really had to admire the way she accepted how I felt about her and was a great sport about it. Damn nice girl, I have to say. Walked and talked for a bit, said bye to Cuba, and wedged myself into the back of one of the ‘blue donkeys’ with Root and she took me back to Shim’s apartment and said goodnight, although I could tell she was sad about it. We said goodnight and I thanked her profusely, and she hopped in a bus and headed home, sans Lewis. I actually felt a little pang of regret that she hadn’t protested harder (oh egotistical self!) but I was damn glad that the whole affair had been peacefully averted and knew that her self-restraint meant we could actually continue to be friends, which made me happy.
I felt very good about staying in almost immediately, as I started to attack the pile of things to do. Was well into writing thank you notes, when the key turned in the door, and in walked Shimeles, followed by a good-looking middle-aged woman in an evening gown. The surprised halt. The confused look. Me thinking, oh shit. Shim, ever the gentleman, said, ‘Lewis! Ah, what happened? I thought you’d be with Root tonight?’ …
Pause while I stutter a jumbled excuse.
‘Oh well, never mind! I’m glad you’re here! Did you have a good night in the Mercato?’ I had to bless the man, he didn’t skip a beat and his voice was loud and happy. I could just discern the very well-veiled hint of disappointment in his eyes. I asked if I should make myself disappear for the next few hours, but Shim said, oh, of course not! And sat down on the couch with me and motioned for the woman, who looked extremely put off. They went into the bedroom, but after only about fifteen minutes, she walked out and Shim said she wanted him to take her home and if I wanted to go out with him for a special dinner at a secret place he knew. Datebuster. Oooh, feeling very guilty right now. But, actually, my date with Shimeles was really nice, and we went to a little hidden-away place for doro wat, or something-wat, and it was quite fantastically tasty. Good conversation, and then we went home and chatted and watched Borat for a while and laughed and laughed until Shim fell asleep and Mimi came in with Missee. And I felt actually quite glad that I’d chased that other girl away and had him to myself for our last night together in Addis.
Time is ticking by. I don’t know where Gatieyeh is, (I’ve never met him, he owns a construction firm and is one of Shimeles’s best friends. He was the one we drove all the way into Aftera for, to check on one of his machines) but we’re still in his office and I’m still letting myself worry about the baggage. What if I have no choice but to send an extra box… and maybe one of my bags will be overweight too… and my $364 doesn’t cover the cost? Ooh, Becky will be pissed if I have to leave one of the units here for Shimeles to send. I’d be tarred and feathered. Really should have located the KLM office to check out the details yesterday. Well, I’ll just have to cross my fingers, take my anti-worm medicine, and hope for the best. Will be saying my farewell to Shim and walking into the terminal and living off Clif bars in only about four hours. Five weeks… Four hours. Why does it seem even more now like an eternity than it did at the beginning? Oh lord, for my home, home, home!
Amazing how time seems to drag on longer and longer the closer I come to my departure date. Wrapping up loose ends: Said most of my goodbyes, finished up swapping and organizing data at the Observatory, wrapped up my money and receipts, photocopied the site logs, ate kifo (raw this time!), ripped some of Shimeles’ CDs (though we’ve listened to them so many damn times I think I’ll scream if I ever hear those songs again)… Only things left are to buy an anti-worm drug (gotta watch out for that raw kitfo) and figure out how the hell I’m going to get home with three full GPS units (I only came with two) plus all my souvenirs and assorted hodgepodge. I think that extra baggage costs about $25 per pound for international flights. Can you believe that?? So if I have a 36 pound box… Shit! My plan: to dismantle all the units, and take the heaviest parts (receivers, satellite dishes, bi-pods, masts) and try to put them in my one little carry-on Kelty backpack. Can I get away with this?? Unlikely. Plus, I’ll probably be stopped at every airport terminal and strip-searched when they find all those suspicious electronics in my bag. But I’d do almost anything to avoid having to cough up $400 (well, I’ve only got $364!) just to send one extra box back with me. Stress, stress. Need to get to the airport a bit early, me thinks. But once I get my fanny end on that plane, I know the euphoria will set in. And then the air sickness, and fatigue, and body odor, and fuzzy-teeth feeling, and the bloodshot eyes… But it doesn’t matter. Becks will be gone for my full first week back, and my Friday class is cancelled, so… Oh Joyous Joy of Joys!!! – I’m going HIKING! And Biking, and Boating, and Camping, and Loafing… (insert gleeful grin here). There’s only the horribly long flight home, and the anxiousness about what chaos awaits me there, that could detract from this blissful moment… but hell, let’s be honest: I’M SO HAPPY TO BE GOING HOME!!!
That’s not to say that I didn’t have a wonderful time here my last two days in Addis: Shimeles and I stayed very busy taking care of our final business, and I spent yesterday morning hanging out with Shim and Dr. Tigistu and Dr. Alias, and Teddy as well, who showed up and tagged along, for which I was very thankful. Dr. Alias is sort of the Anti-Shimeles, Shim’s counterpart from the Observatory who’s working with Ebinger’s team (I really don’t want to call our groups rivals… it’s just that there seems to have been some animosity over who’s ‘turf’ this part of the Ethiopian Rift is… ridiculous really… and I hate to think that Dr. Alias has to watch what he says around me because our bosses are in some sort of scientific tussle.) Anyway, he is a delightful man, and I really enjoyed talking with him over coffee and lunch. Shim took me to a coffee joint in Piazza called Tomoca… my God, what a coffee-lover’s wet dream! Beans of all different shades, from white to black-brown, were displayed across the counter, each from a different coffee region in Ethiopia, each with a distinct flavor and scent. The place smelled heavenly, and the aroma of coffee seemed to have worked itself into the beautiful old carved-oak walls so that they radiated a dark, pungent aura. We bought two kilos of Harar Coffee, from the northern Somali province… cream colored beans which become a strong dark brown when ground up, and smelling almost too strong for me to handle… and rumored to be the very best. Almost makes me want to become a regular addict.
Root called and told Shimeles to drop me off in Piazza to meet her: her mom was preparing dinner at her house, and I’d go with her and then spend the night there. I think Shim was relieved at the opportunity to be rid of me for a night, and made the drop-off, though it felt to me like a bad time to be fooling around in the suburbs… I had SO MUCH to do still, including making a call to Becky, in which I had hoped Shimeles would participate. But much more so, I was thinking ‘Great, now I’ll be trapped at her place far from town, and will have to fend off Root with a stick, all the while pulling out my hair about the things I’ve put off for the last day…’ But I met her on the sidewalk, and she didn’t try to be romantic at all… took me around to introduce me to her friends in the Mercato, and then took me shopping for jewelry as promised. We joined up with her nice friend Cuba (looked Cuban, too), and I really had a fantastic time. The Mercato was a blast… I don’t think I’d go there alone, but only because I wouldn’t get fair prices and would probably be trailing a battalion of beggars and street kids, not because I’d fear for my safety. You can find anything and everything in Mercato… and cheap! I mean, the thing is a friggin’ yard sale about five miles wide, and since I was in the mood to shop, I was having a blast. Cuba and Root were fun companions, and we wandered all over the place just browsing for souvenirs… I didn’t buy too much because I was almost out of money, but Root was wonderfully nice and bought a few things for me to give to Halle when I ran out of Birr… I really had to admire the way she accepted how I felt about her and was a great sport about it. Damn nice girl, I have to say. Walked and talked for a bit, said bye to Cuba, and wedged myself into the back of one of the ‘blue donkeys’ with Root and she took me back to Shim’s apartment and said goodnight, although I could tell she was sad about it. We said goodnight and I thanked her profusely, and she hopped in a bus and headed home, sans Lewis. I actually felt a little pang of regret that she hadn’t protested harder (oh egotistical self!) but I was damn glad that the whole affair had been peacefully averted and knew that her self-restraint meant we could actually continue to be friends, which made me happy.
I felt very good about staying in almost immediately, as I started to attack the pile of things to do. Was well into writing thank you notes, when the key turned in the door, and in walked Shimeles, followed by a good-looking middle-aged woman in an evening gown. The surprised halt. The confused look. Me thinking, oh shit. Shim, ever the gentleman, said, ‘Lewis! Ah, what happened? I thought you’d be with Root tonight?’ …
Pause while I stutter a jumbled excuse.
‘Oh well, never mind! I’m glad you’re here! Did you have a good night in the Mercato?’ I had to bless the man, he didn’t skip a beat and his voice was loud and happy. I could just discern the very well-veiled hint of disappointment in his eyes. I asked if I should make myself disappear for the next few hours, but Shim said, oh, of course not! And sat down on the couch with me and motioned for the woman, who looked extremely put off. They went into the bedroom, but after only about fifteen minutes, she walked out and Shim said she wanted him to take her home and if I wanted to go out with him for a special dinner at a secret place he knew. Datebuster. Oooh, feeling very guilty right now. But, actually, my date with Shimeles was really nice, and we went to a little hidden-away place for doro wat, or something-wat, and it was quite fantastically tasty. Good conversation, and then we went home and chatted and watched Borat for a while and laughed and laughed until Shim fell asleep and Mimi came in with Missee. And I felt actually quite glad that I’d chased that other girl away and had him to myself for our last night together in Addis.
Time is ticking by. I don’t know where Gatieyeh is, (I’ve never met him, he owns a construction firm and is one of Shimeles’s best friends. He was the one we drove all the way into Aftera for, to check on one of his machines) but we’re still in his office and I’m still letting myself worry about the baggage. What if I have no choice but to send an extra box… and maybe one of my bags will be overweight too… and my $364 doesn’t cover the cost? Ooh, Becky will be pissed if I have to leave one of the units here for Shimeles to send. I’d be tarred and feathered. Really should have located the KLM office to check out the details yesterday. Well, I’ll just have to cross my fingers, take my anti-worm medicine, and hope for the best. Will be saying my farewell to Shim and walking into the terminal and living off Clif bars in only about four hours. Five weeks… Four hours. Why does it seem even more now like an eternity than it did at the beginning? Oh lord, for my home, home, home!
Shimeles’ Apartment, 5:30pm, October 21:
I’m alone in Shimeles’ apartment, and someone has been pounding on the door and furiously punching the doorbell for a good ten minutes now, though I’m determined not to answer… which means I’m also determined not to make the slightest sound to alert the persistent door-banger of my presence. I decided that opening the door was a bad idea: if it was anyone I should open up for, they ought to know I’m here and call “Lewis” through the door. However, they’ve not uttered a word, just continue to pound away in silence. Which is a little scary, actually. But I don’t want to open the door and then have to try to deal with someone who doesn’t speak English, or who perhaps isn’t on friendly terms with Shimeles, or has no idea who I am. Which means, it’s a good time to journal!
The trip seems to be wrapping itself up pretty quickly now: back in Addis around noon today, and Shim was kind enough to offer to let me stay in his apartment instead of going back to the EDSONATRA hotel, which I greatly prefer, in addition to the fact of it saving me at least 600 Birr. That second bit is especially welcome because my money has dwindled now down to about 1500 Birr from the initial 24,000 or so, and I’m trying to conserve as best I can. But there’s also so much more to do in Shim’s apartment, it’s more comfortable, I feel more connected to everything (including Shimeles), and I have a lot more freedom. We dropped off the girls as soon as we got into town. I was getting a bit fatigued of Hewit… Even Shimeles agreed that ‘she’s a bit retarded’… in that all-looks/no-brains sort of way, and I really had to agree. I’d taken quite a bit more of a liking to Root, because she seemed much more intelligent, friendly, fun, and talkative, and we’d been having a pretty good time together for the past three days, chatting and shopping and singing songs, and she was being a real sport helping me with my Amharic. I told her that I’d call her so we could go shopping at the Mercato, Africa’s biggest open market (everyone tells me that I really shouldn’t go there alone), and go to Piazza and visit her mom’s house out in the suburbs, but I’m not sure I will. I like her, but I think I may be done wandering around Addis on this trip, and I think I’d just like to take it easy, take care of all the loose ends, and call it good. Additionally, I’m certain she’s taken a shine to me, and Ethiopian notions of relationships seem to be rather different from what I’m used to: ‘I have a girlfriend’ doesn’t really seem to mean anything, and after a while, retreating from determined advances gets a bit tiring. But it would be a lot more fun to explore the city with her. I dunno, I’ll see if I get bored, or desperate for more souvenirs.
Shim is out on what sounds to be a frantic round of last-minute social engagements, before he jumps back into his professional duties with both feet. The poor guy sounds so horribly busy all the time, I’ll be looking forward to his visit to Montana in December, when hopefully he’ll have enough time of his own that I can show him around and have a little fun.
Addis. A funny place. I was walking down the street in the Bank district on Bole Road, big glass-faced high-rises on either side. I was making my way through a sea of business suits on the sidewalk, and was thinking to myself that in a way, it had a good bit of a Manhattan feel to it, and abruptly I came up behind a smartly dressed fellow with a briefcase in one hand and a wooly sheep riding on his shoulders. Judging by the lack of reaction from the other pedestrians, this was a perfectly normal occurrence, and even the sheep seemed quite content to be carried along in such a way behind the man’s head, and was just looking around, quite contentedly. I walked behind him for a while, just savoring the feel of walking nonchalantly next to a man in a business suit with a sheep, and eventually increased my speed to pass him. At that precise moment, he turned to shout at a taxi, and the sheep and I met in an awkward kiss for a brief instant before I reeled away and the sheep ‘baaaa’d’ in humiliation. Soft lips, though.
Last night was a very nice, Ethiopian-feeling experience. I bring it up, not just because I should, but because Shim brought to my attention that he’d tried very hard to make sure that my experiences here were authentic, and that I saw and lived the real Ethiopia, not a tourist-friendly façade. And he’s quite right about that: from the very moment I stepped off the plane, he steered me well clear of the haunts of the euro-tourists and wealthy vacationers. Throughout, I’ve seen hardly a single other farenj, yet I’m sure the country’s crawling with them. We ate at the same places the locals eat, slept where they slept, mingled and conversed and spent our time with the common lower class folk far more than any big-wigs or hot shots, though to do so would have been quite easy. We’ve snuck down back alleys and given rides to hitch-hikers and bartered and begged our way into places that most tourists don’t even know exist. He’s helped me put my finger on the artery of each of the places we’ve visited, so that I can feel its throb and pulse, and come just a little closer to understanding it… (though falling in love with it, like Shim, is honestly quite another matter)… But he’s been my protector and entertainer and guide and chauffer and coworker and good friend, and for all that I really owe him an enormous thank-you. Which, since I’m still not much good at rolling gurshas, I’m not entirely certain how to express adequately. However, I digressed very far from last night. After a long nap to finally clear what felt like dirty motor oil out of my cranial cavity, we ventured out into the delightfully cool night air of Debre Markos. It was a large small-town… just the right size for me to really enjoy, and after sleeping away the afternoon I was in the right mood to enjoy it. All the constant driving has left me feeling rather under-the-weather most of the time: atrophied muscles, frequent headaches, and a general depression and moodiness which comes and goes (and as you can probably tell, often finds its release in many of my journal entries)… but the general happiness which is a regular feature of my normal Missoulian mood has for the most part evaporated and only comes in little fits and bursts… My mood now for the most part characterized by what I would call my best effort to be good-natured about my struggle to survive the duration of my field campaign. My energy and motivation was at an all-time low on the Bahir Dar trip, and while I can say that I did have a fairly good time, I also struggled quite a bit to keep my chin up. So again, I’ve diverged quite a bit from the story I’m trying to tell, but I wanted to explain the necessity of the afternoon nap to clear that heavy brain-sludge puddling behind my eyeballs. I had talked my way out of lunch yesterday too, and for that my stomach had sincerely thanked me. After miraculously talking my way out of dinner as well, I was feeling really quite good, the food in my stomach having a chance to digest for the first time in a month, and my intestines dealing with what I would consider to be, at last, a normal amount of input. My heartburn cleared up, and that alone brought me enough joy to be a bit giddy.
Shimeles was leading us to a ‘secret’ location, and we had a nice walk through the evening streets of Debre Markos, past the women crouched over little glowing beds of coals and roasting ears of corn and various types of grains and barleys. We sampled all of them, and laughed and joked as we made our way off the main drag and deeper into a residential neighborhood, the street lit occasionally with the light from a little grocery stall or music shop. We enlisted the help of a 10-year-old girl to help us find our desired location, (I thought at the time it was a restaurant) and I was a bit surprised when she finally led us through a darkened doorway in a stick fence on a dark and seemingly abandoned street. In through a door to a little shabby parlor, quite empty except for two narrow benches and an even narrower table down the length between them. Peeling pink paint on the mud-brick walls and the whole room dimly lit by a single flickering bulb.
We sat down and the hostess, a young girl probably around seventeen or eighteen brought us strange and wonderful glass beakers, obviously homemade, with rough engravings of the Lion of Judah, and narrow and variously tilted necks… roughly the size of a grapefruit and looking a bit like something that would be found in an alchemist’s laboratory a few centuries earlier. The serving girl (quite shy, I thought, until Root informed me that she was in fact a literal servant girl, and was forbidden to talk to guests unless directly spoken to) filled our beakers with a honey-colored liquid from a big metallic kettle, and Shimeles invited me to drink. Tejj, an ancient local specialty, a honey-wine which, in the days before the revolution and the Derg, was often kept in a family for several generations while it aged, much like wines in old Italy. A toast! To a completed campaign, a job well-done, and a wonderful time! I drank- glug, glug, glug came the liquid through the neck of the flask… and goodness, it was quite delicious! Not really anything like anything I’ve tasted before (which is something I can say about most of the food and drink I’ve tried here in Ethiopia) but for a curious readership, I’ll say that it most closely approximated a good hard cider, with a bit of fermented bite and fizz, and more of a honey taste than apple… but nothing really at all like the mead I’ve had at home. I liked it quite a bit (a lot more than the ground-corn moonshine Arake of two nights previous, or the liquorice liqueur (Cuho) I tasted in Robe) and found it fairly light and easy to drink. The owner of the bar came in, an older woman with faded ceremonial tattooed bands around her neck, and though conversation was slow at first, Shimeles’ never-failing humor eventually warmed everyone up into loud laughter and conversation, of which I was occasionally a part when someone filled me in or made me the butt of a joke… but it was very pleasant just to sit there and listen to the rise and fall of the Amharic phrases bandied about, and the loud laughter, which was contagious and filled the room with a nice warmth that was added to by the mellow tejj. After three flask-fulls I was feeling a bit tipsy, and we paid (virtually beans!) and exchanged goodbyes and goodnights, and headed back for the hotel. I gave Root a short piggy-back ride which resulted in the entire neighborhood coming out onto the street to watch us in disbelief and laugh hysterically. I guess it is pretty funny to see an Ethiopian riding a farenji home, and we both laughed along. Even with Root’s help, my Amharic was still atrocious, only a step above non-existent, and I was thinking about how so many of the interactions I’d shared with local villagers, in every part of the country, had been conversations between them and Shimeles, carried out in Amharic and for the most part un-translated and uncomprehendable to me. Yet it rarely made me uncomfortable, and I enjoyed just being allowed to be privy to that sort of friendly connection, listening to the way the language was spoken, and watching the faces interact though expressions that I’d never paid all that much attention to before. It was rather how I imagined a handshake would start to feel to someone who became blind. It was fun to experience communication in a new way… and yes, occasionally Shimeles would translate some part of the conversation for me, and I would make an attempt to speak in Amharic and for a few brief seconds be a part of it all, before moving resignedly back to the sidelines again.
You know, I never mentioned about how, in Debre Markos two days before last, northbound on our way to Bahir Dar, we also went out and found that little house which served the Arake, and that was really an interesting glimpse into the local culture. I guess almost every home in the city (and the region, for that matter) brews their own alcohol… clear or golden, depending on whether the corn or grain is toasted first… and sells it in the home at night for a tiny bit of supplementary income. I don’t think this is something that tourists ever do, or know anything about, for that matter. But if you walk off the main drag and into the poor (i.e. real) part of town after dark, you’ll notice that almost every little mud and sheet-metal shanty has the door thrown open and the family is sitting inside chatting quietly under a flickering lantern or candle, a little homemade shelf of various glass bottles behind them filled with their very own homebrew distillate available to any passer-by who desires a drink. And though you’re served veritable shots (we even went so far as to light ours on fire) which are, though greatly different in taste, quite similar in quality to whiskey… the price is only about 0.30 Birr per shot… or about 3 American cents. It was really just this: we walked right into a family’s home, (these weren’t business people and this wasn’t a business) though we could have chosen any home to enter, as they were all open, and asked them to serve us for a tiny fee. As we were about to leave, two other fellows came in and asked for some Shiro, and the hostess dutifully prepared it for them, and I bet it cost them about 1 Birr. But this was just the reality of a place where everybody has to do anything they can to make a little money. Every home is open to visitors, every night, though of course no one may visit for several days… simply because there is the chance that someone will come in and spend one or two Birr, and thus it’s a service that no family can afford not to offer. But I sort of liked the way that, well, every house was open to you. Perhaps the reason was monetary, but still, it gave the whole village a very welcoming feel. If you want a cup of tea, no door is closed to you. But yeah, damn that moonshine burned going down. Shimeles swears it’s a medicine for about 36 different ills, including a cure for every kind of stomach worm. Not much of a surprise there, considering the way my belly felt scorched for a few hours afterward.
Root accompanied me to the Debre Markos market yesterday also, and we found a fabric stall I liked a lot, and I entertained the young owner of the shop for about half an hour while I made him pull down just about every blanket and scarf from the front of his shop and agonized over which color of blanket looked best with which pattern, before finally dropping 180 Birr on what I figured was about 200 dollars worth of nice fabrics. I know I could have gotten much fancier ones at the Entoto Market in Addis, but it would have at least doubled or tripled the price, and more so, I wasn’t sure I’d find the time to visit the market in Addis on my last two days. Root also had some fantastic silver earrings, which she swore were extremely cheap if you shopped in the Mercato in Addis, but if I don’t end up wandering there with her, I think I may just check out a place I heard of in the Piazza. There was one set, with beautiful engraved-silver peacocks, that were admittedly huge, but very beautiful.
I was just thinking (I’m scouring my brain now, trying to write about any old thing that’s happened, before I wrap up this journal and publish it for general consumption) about a little schoolboy in Bahir Dar who, seeing me stalled on the street, walked up and quite bravely and confidently asked me in good English where I was from. I replied America, and he asked me my name, and I asked his, but was reluctant to continue the conversation because I knew that all interactions like this end in some demand for money, and there’s something about that which still rankles me, even after five weeks here, even in the knowledge that it’s really a cultural standard: if any service is given, including conversation or advice, repayment is expected. Anyway, he was cute, in tattered purple school pants and dirty little backpack, and spoke incredible English for someone his age. He also maintained that he spoke Somali, Sudanese, and German.
“Have you ever been to Sudan, Mister?”
“Ah, yes, Khartoum…” I exaggerated the airplane’s layover, and then stepped into an internet cafe after Shimeles, hoping to lose the kid. The café was packed, though, and we came back out. The kid asked Shimeles if we were looking for a good internet café, and they launched into Amharic, but I followed that most internet cafes charged escalated farengi prices. He sounded very authoritative, and led us into a tall building and up several flights of stairs and through a bank office to a little copy center with computers, and then sat and waited in a chair while Shimeles and I checked our email… and indeed, it was probably the cheapest internet in Ethiopia. Shim then whispered to me that he wanted to repay the little fellow, but that he hated to give kids money, so we’d take him for cake and a soda at the snack café next door, and the kid seemed completely satisfied with this arrangement… in fact, it seemed like business as usual to him. We sat down, and I asked him to get me another of whatever he wanted. Yellow cake. And I ordered a coffee. Shimeles became engaged immediately in a conversation with a couple who turned out to be the owners of the café (always making connections, that’s Shimeles) and meanwhile I chatted amiably with the little guy, found him quite agreeable, in second grade and full of big ideas and new knowledge… and was a little sad to see him go when we wished him well and drove off.
Lots of stories like that…
Such friendly people in every town, if you can just relax a bit, let down your guard, give it a little effort. Wish I could speak a bit of Amharic, so I wouldn’t be such easy prey for someone with bad intentions… But then, I’m not sure I met anyone with bad intentions on this whole trip, er, outside the Afar… Crime and scam just doesn’t seem the norm in this country. Which has been a wonderful discovery. I feel incredibly at ease around the Ethiopians now, a huge change from when I stepped off the plane clutching my bags, expecting to be hustled like at the Tangier port.
In a few months time, what will my impressions be? Will I be missing the chilly green highlands, with the shepherds wrapped in their woolen shawls, the snap of whips, men trotting by on ornamented horses and mules, chilly grey rain clouds… Or sweet southern bananas, boars and zebras, Nile Perch, kids swarming the car crying ‘farenji, farenji!!’ Hot springs, snowy mountains, pretty girls, honey wine? Cheap food, cheap clothing, strange vegetation, smiling gap-toothed faces, mud huts and candlelight under the stars? So many little joys to take away from here… Yet somehow, it seems there’s something else, some… connection, some sort of critical interaction with the people or the place that’s been missing from my trip, and I don’t know that it will appear to me with time. But maybe… I can see myself making better friends on the following visits. Shimeles, Teddy and Root, I’ve become quite close to… and there are other potential friends as well, friendships which only need a bit more time and perhaps some improved language skills on my part to develop: Doctor Tigustu, Ingdiyeh and Helen, Barukat, Brookeh down at the Robe Observatory, Hewitt at the Jovial hair salon, Kestet and Daniel at the Edsonatra… who knows what others?? Is that what was missing? Or is there something even more basic, something that’s grown into me as I’ve grown in a certain place all my life, that I can no longer be happily separated from? Questions, questions… we’ll see.
While we were taking those sharp corners today on the way back to Addis at kamikaze speed, I was squinting down the highway until the road blurred into a grey river, and I was imagining myself plummeting down it in my kayak, boofing off the big drops, punching through those lateral waves slamming in from the side, getting worked upsidedown in the big holes and waiting it out before rolling upright… What a nerd.
There was another knock on the door a few paragraphs back, and this time it was accompanied by my name, so I got up and answered it. Hewit and Root. Should have guessed. They already ate burgers without me, but we walked to a nearby restaurant that seems popular with the young crowd and met two other girlfriends, and I thought, ‘Shit, why did I open the door? Now I’m stuck in Girl’s Night Out, right when I thought I was rid of these two…’ Fought down the antisocial feelings, but couldn’t force myself to get in the mood to party. I just washed my clothes and am wearing my chacos and swim trunks. Don’t get much dorkier or whiter than this… If we went out, how would I get back to Shimeles’s? Would Root try to take me home and make a scene? Bought three cakes to make myself feel better, but as I hadn’t had dinner or lunch, sweets wasn’t the best idea. Took to stealing pizza crusts off a nearby table. After we left, though, it was better… just had fun being my silly self with Hewit and Root, and they seemed to reciprocate in kind. Walked around for only about half an hour, and then Root said she wanted to go home and they wished me goodnight and said to call them tomorrow or Tuesday when I want to go shopping in the Mercato. Felt better about the whole thing. Maybe I’m making up the tension with Root. Realized that I was actually quite honored that those two came all the way across the city just to hang out with me for an hour… nice to have someone in another country actually like you as a person. Feeling much better until I went for a burger at the Bole Mini. Mistake. Should have kept starving myself, or living off Clif Bars. Ouch, stomach ache. New rule: eat as little as possible from now until back home.
Enough writing for now… giant moths have invaded the apartment, and I feel like kicking back with my book, The Last King of Scotland… or watching one of Shim’s pirated DVDs. Wondering about what’s happening back home, and what the winter has in store for me there. Ciao for Now.
I’m alone in Shimeles’ apartment, and someone has been pounding on the door and furiously punching the doorbell for a good ten minutes now, though I’m determined not to answer… which means I’m also determined not to make the slightest sound to alert the persistent door-banger of my presence. I decided that opening the door was a bad idea: if it was anyone I should open up for, they ought to know I’m here and call “Lewis” through the door. However, they’ve not uttered a word, just continue to pound away in silence. Which is a little scary, actually. But I don’t want to open the door and then have to try to deal with someone who doesn’t speak English, or who perhaps isn’t on friendly terms with Shimeles, or has no idea who I am. Which means, it’s a good time to journal!
The trip seems to be wrapping itself up pretty quickly now: back in Addis around noon today, and Shim was kind enough to offer to let me stay in his apartment instead of going back to the EDSONATRA hotel, which I greatly prefer, in addition to the fact of it saving me at least 600 Birr. That second bit is especially welcome because my money has dwindled now down to about 1500 Birr from the initial 24,000 or so, and I’m trying to conserve as best I can. But there’s also so much more to do in Shim’s apartment, it’s more comfortable, I feel more connected to everything (including Shimeles), and I have a lot more freedom. We dropped off the girls as soon as we got into town. I was getting a bit fatigued of Hewit… Even Shimeles agreed that ‘she’s a bit retarded’… in that all-looks/no-brains sort of way, and I really had to agree. I’d taken quite a bit more of a liking to Root, because she seemed much more intelligent, friendly, fun, and talkative, and we’d been having a pretty good time together for the past three days, chatting and shopping and singing songs, and she was being a real sport helping me with my Amharic. I told her that I’d call her so we could go shopping at the Mercato, Africa’s biggest open market (everyone tells me that I really shouldn’t go there alone), and go to Piazza and visit her mom’s house out in the suburbs, but I’m not sure I will. I like her, but I think I may be done wandering around Addis on this trip, and I think I’d just like to take it easy, take care of all the loose ends, and call it good. Additionally, I’m certain she’s taken a shine to me, and Ethiopian notions of relationships seem to be rather different from what I’m used to: ‘I have a girlfriend’ doesn’t really seem to mean anything, and after a while, retreating from determined advances gets a bit tiring. But it would be a lot more fun to explore the city with her. I dunno, I’ll see if I get bored, or desperate for more souvenirs.
Shim is out on what sounds to be a frantic round of last-minute social engagements, before he jumps back into his professional duties with both feet. The poor guy sounds so horribly busy all the time, I’ll be looking forward to his visit to Montana in December, when hopefully he’ll have enough time of his own that I can show him around and have a little fun.
Addis. A funny place. I was walking down the street in the Bank district on Bole Road, big glass-faced high-rises on either side. I was making my way through a sea of business suits on the sidewalk, and was thinking to myself that in a way, it had a good bit of a Manhattan feel to it, and abruptly I came up behind a smartly dressed fellow with a briefcase in one hand and a wooly sheep riding on his shoulders. Judging by the lack of reaction from the other pedestrians, this was a perfectly normal occurrence, and even the sheep seemed quite content to be carried along in such a way behind the man’s head, and was just looking around, quite contentedly. I walked behind him for a while, just savoring the feel of walking nonchalantly next to a man in a business suit with a sheep, and eventually increased my speed to pass him. At that precise moment, he turned to shout at a taxi, and the sheep and I met in an awkward kiss for a brief instant before I reeled away and the sheep ‘baaaa’d’ in humiliation. Soft lips, though.
Last night was a very nice, Ethiopian-feeling experience. I bring it up, not just because I should, but because Shim brought to my attention that he’d tried very hard to make sure that my experiences here were authentic, and that I saw and lived the real Ethiopia, not a tourist-friendly façade. And he’s quite right about that: from the very moment I stepped off the plane, he steered me well clear of the haunts of the euro-tourists and wealthy vacationers. Throughout, I’ve seen hardly a single other farenj, yet I’m sure the country’s crawling with them. We ate at the same places the locals eat, slept where they slept, mingled and conversed and spent our time with the common lower class folk far more than any big-wigs or hot shots, though to do so would have been quite easy. We’ve snuck down back alleys and given rides to hitch-hikers and bartered and begged our way into places that most tourists don’t even know exist. He’s helped me put my finger on the artery of each of the places we’ve visited, so that I can feel its throb and pulse, and come just a little closer to understanding it… (though falling in love with it, like Shim, is honestly quite another matter)… But he’s been my protector and entertainer and guide and chauffer and coworker and good friend, and for all that I really owe him an enormous thank-you. Which, since I’m still not much good at rolling gurshas, I’m not entirely certain how to express adequately. However, I digressed very far from last night. After a long nap to finally clear what felt like dirty motor oil out of my cranial cavity, we ventured out into the delightfully cool night air of Debre Markos. It was a large small-town… just the right size for me to really enjoy, and after sleeping away the afternoon I was in the right mood to enjoy it. All the constant driving has left me feeling rather under-the-weather most of the time: atrophied muscles, frequent headaches, and a general depression and moodiness which comes and goes (and as you can probably tell, often finds its release in many of my journal entries)… but the general happiness which is a regular feature of my normal Missoulian mood has for the most part evaporated and only comes in little fits and bursts… My mood now for the most part characterized by what I would call my best effort to be good-natured about my struggle to survive the duration of my field campaign. My energy and motivation was at an all-time low on the Bahir Dar trip, and while I can say that I did have a fairly good time, I also struggled quite a bit to keep my chin up. So again, I’ve diverged quite a bit from the story I’m trying to tell, but I wanted to explain the necessity of the afternoon nap to clear that heavy brain-sludge puddling behind my eyeballs. I had talked my way out of lunch yesterday too, and for that my stomach had sincerely thanked me. After miraculously talking my way out of dinner as well, I was feeling really quite good, the food in my stomach having a chance to digest for the first time in a month, and my intestines dealing with what I would consider to be, at last, a normal amount of input. My heartburn cleared up, and that alone brought me enough joy to be a bit giddy.
Shimeles was leading us to a ‘secret’ location, and we had a nice walk through the evening streets of Debre Markos, past the women crouched over little glowing beds of coals and roasting ears of corn and various types of grains and barleys. We sampled all of them, and laughed and joked as we made our way off the main drag and deeper into a residential neighborhood, the street lit occasionally with the light from a little grocery stall or music shop. We enlisted the help of a 10-year-old girl to help us find our desired location, (I thought at the time it was a restaurant) and I was a bit surprised when she finally led us through a darkened doorway in a stick fence on a dark and seemingly abandoned street. In through a door to a little shabby parlor, quite empty except for two narrow benches and an even narrower table down the length between them. Peeling pink paint on the mud-brick walls and the whole room dimly lit by a single flickering bulb.
We sat down and the hostess, a young girl probably around seventeen or eighteen brought us strange and wonderful glass beakers, obviously homemade, with rough engravings of the Lion of Judah, and narrow and variously tilted necks… roughly the size of a grapefruit and looking a bit like something that would be found in an alchemist’s laboratory a few centuries earlier. The serving girl (quite shy, I thought, until Root informed me that she was in fact a literal servant girl, and was forbidden to talk to guests unless directly spoken to) filled our beakers with a honey-colored liquid from a big metallic kettle, and Shimeles invited me to drink. Tejj, an ancient local specialty, a honey-wine which, in the days before the revolution and the Derg, was often kept in a family for several generations while it aged, much like wines in old Italy. A toast! To a completed campaign, a job well-done, and a wonderful time! I drank- glug, glug, glug came the liquid through the neck of the flask… and goodness, it was quite delicious! Not really anything like anything I’ve tasted before (which is something I can say about most of the food and drink I’ve tried here in Ethiopia) but for a curious readership, I’ll say that it most closely approximated a good hard cider, with a bit of fermented bite and fizz, and more of a honey taste than apple… but nothing really at all like the mead I’ve had at home. I liked it quite a bit (a lot more than the ground-corn moonshine Arake of two nights previous, or the liquorice liqueur (Cuho) I tasted in Robe) and found it fairly light and easy to drink. The owner of the bar came in, an older woman with faded ceremonial tattooed bands around her neck, and though conversation was slow at first, Shimeles’ never-failing humor eventually warmed everyone up into loud laughter and conversation, of which I was occasionally a part when someone filled me in or made me the butt of a joke… but it was very pleasant just to sit there and listen to the rise and fall of the Amharic phrases bandied about, and the loud laughter, which was contagious and filled the room with a nice warmth that was added to by the mellow tejj. After three flask-fulls I was feeling a bit tipsy, and we paid (virtually beans!) and exchanged goodbyes and goodnights, and headed back for the hotel. I gave Root a short piggy-back ride which resulted in the entire neighborhood coming out onto the street to watch us in disbelief and laugh hysterically. I guess it is pretty funny to see an Ethiopian riding a farenji home, and we both laughed along. Even with Root’s help, my Amharic was still atrocious, only a step above non-existent, and I was thinking about how so many of the interactions I’d shared with local villagers, in every part of the country, had been conversations between them and Shimeles, carried out in Amharic and for the most part un-translated and uncomprehendable to me. Yet it rarely made me uncomfortable, and I enjoyed just being allowed to be privy to that sort of friendly connection, listening to the way the language was spoken, and watching the faces interact though expressions that I’d never paid all that much attention to before. It was rather how I imagined a handshake would start to feel to someone who became blind. It was fun to experience communication in a new way… and yes, occasionally Shimeles would translate some part of the conversation for me, and I would make an attempt to speak in Amharic and for a few brief seconds be a part of it all, before moving resignedly back to the sidelines again.
You know, I never mentioned about how, in Debre Markos two days before last, northbound on our way to Bahir Dar, we also went out and found that little house which served the Arake, and that was really an interesting glimpse into the local culture. I guess almost every home in the city (and the region, for that matter) brews their own alcohol… clear or golden, depending on whether the corn or grain is toasted first… and sells it in the home at night for a tiny bit of supplementary income. I don’t think this is something that tourists ever do, or know anything about, for that matter. But if you walk off the main drag and into the poor (i.e. real) part of town after dark, you’ll notice that almost every little mud and sheet-metal shanty has the door thrown open and the family is sitting inside chatting quietly under a flickering lantern or candle, a little homemade shelf of various glass bottles behind them filled with their very own homebrew distillate available to any passer-by who desires a drink. And though you’re served veritable shots (we even went so far as to light ours on fire) which are, though greatly different in taste, quite similar in quality to whiskey… the price is only about 0.30 Birr per shot… or about 3 American cents. It was really just this: we walked right into a family’s home, (these weren’t business people and this wasn’t a business) though we could have chosen any home to enter, as they were all open, and asked them to serve us for a tiny fee. As we were about to leave, two other fellows came in and asked for some Shiro, and the hostess dutifully prepared it for them, and I bet it cost them about 1 Birr. But this was just the reality of a place where everybody has to do anything they can to make a little money. Every home is open to visitors, every night, though of course no one may visit for several days… simply because there is the chance that someone will come in and spend one or two Birr, and thus it’s a service that no family can afford not to offer. But I sort of liked the way that, well, every house was open to you. Perhaps the reason was monetary, but still, it gave the whole village a very welcoming feel. If you want a cup of tea, no door is closed to you. But yeah, damn that moonshine burned going down. Shimeles swears it’s a medicine for about 36 different ills, including a cure for every kind of stomach worm. Not much of a surprise there, considering the way my belly felt scorched for a few hours afterward.
Root accompanied me to the Debre Markos market yesterday also, and we found a fabric stall I liked a lot, and I entertained the young owner of the shop for about half an hour while I made him pull down just about every blanket and scarf from the front of his shop and agonized over which color of blanket looked best with which pattern, before finally dropping 180 Birr on what I figured was about 200 dollars worth of nice fabrics. I know I could have gotten much fancier ones at the Entoto Market in Addis, but it would have at least doubled or tripled the price, and more so, I wasn’t sure I’d find the time to visit the market in Addis on my last two days. Root also had some fantastic silver earrings, which she swore were extremely cheap if you shopped in the Mercato in Addis, but if I don’t end up wandering there with her, I think I may just check out a place I heard of in the Piazza. There was one set, with beautiful engraved-silver peacocks, that were admittedly huge, but very beautiful.
I was just thinking (I’m scouring my brain now, trying to write about any old thing that’s happened, before I wrap up this journal and publish it for general consumption) about a little schoolboy in Bahir Dar who, seeing me stalled on the street, walked up and quite bravely and confidently asked me in good English where I was from. I replied America, and he asked me my name, and I asked his, but was reluctant to continue the conversation because I knew that all interactions like this end in some demand for money, and there’s something about that which still rankles me, even after five weeks here, even in the knowledge that it’s really a cultural standard: if any service is given, including conversation or advice, repayment is expected. Anyway, he was cute, in tattered purple school pants and dirty little backpack, and spoke incredible English for someone his age. He also maintained that he spoke Somali, Sudanese, and German.
“Have you ever been to Sudan, Mister?”
“Ah, yes, Khartoum…” I exaggerated the airplane’s layover, and then stepped into an internet cafe after Shimeles, hoping to lose the kid. The café was packed, though, and we came back out. The kid asked Shimeles if we were looking for a good internet café, and they launched into Amharic, but I followed that most internet cafes charged escalated farengi prices. He sounded very authoritative, and led us into a tall building and up several flights of stairs and through a bank office to a little copy center with computers, and then sat and waited in a chair while Shimeles and I checked our email… and indeed, it was probably the cheapest internet in Ethiopia. Shim then whispered to me that he wanted to repay the little fellow, but that he hated to give kids money, so we’d take him for cake and a soda at the snack café next door, and the kid seemed completely satisfied with this arrangement… in fact, it seemed like business as usual to him. We sat down, and I asked him to get me another of whatever he wanted. Yellow cake. And I ordered a coffee. Shimeles became engaged immediately in a conversation with a couple who turned out to be the owners of the café (always making connections, that’s Shimeles) and meanwhile I chatted amiably with the little guy, found him quite agreeable, in second grade and full of big ideas and new knowledge… and was a little sad to see him go when we wished him well and drove off.
Lots of stories like that…
Such friendly people in every town, if you can just relax a bit, let down your guard, give it a little effort. Wish I could speak a bit of Amharic, so I wouldn’t be such easy prey for someone with bad intentions… But then, I’m not sure I met anyone with bad intentions on this whole trip, er, outside the Afar… Crime and scam just doesn’t seem the norm in this country. Which has been a wonderful discovery. I feel incredibly at ease around the Ethiopians now, a huge change from when I stepped off the plane clutching my bags, expecting to be hustled like at the Tangier port.
In a few months time, what will my impressions be? Will I be missing the chilly green highlands, with the shepherds wrapped in their woolen shawls, the snap of whips, men trotting by on ornamented horses and mules, chilly grey rain clouds… Or sweet southern bananas, boars and zebras, Nile Perch, kids swarming the car crying ‘farenji, farenji!!’ Hot springs, snowy mountains, pretty girls, honey wine? Cheap food, cheap clothing, strange vegetation, smiling gap-toothed faces, mud huts and candlelight under the stars? So many little joys to take away from here… Yet somehow, it seems there’s something else, some… connection, some sort of critical interaction with the people or the place that’s been missing from my trip, and I don’t know that it will appear to me with time. But maybe… I can see myself making better friends on the following visits. Shimeles, Teddy and Root, I’ve become quite close to… and there are other potential friends as well, friendships which only need a bit more time and perhaps some improved language skills on my part to develop: Doctor Tigustu, Ingdiyeh and Helen, Barukat, Brookeh down at the Robe Observatory, Hewitt at the Jovial hair salon, Kestet and Daniel at the Edsonatra… who knows what others?? Is that what was missing? Or is there something even more basic, something that’s grown into me as I’ve grown in a certain place all my life, that I can no longer be happily separated from? Questions, questions… we’ll see.
While we were taking those sharp corners today on the way back to Addis at kamikaze speed, I was squinting down the highway until the road blurred into a grey river, and I was imagining myself plummeting down it in my kayak, boofing off the big drops, punching through those lateral waves slamming in from the side, getting worked upsidedown in the big holes and waiting it out before rolling upright… What a nerd.
There was another knock on the door a few paragraphs back, and this time it was accompanied by my name, so I got up and answered it. Hewit and Root. Should have guessed. They already ate burgers without me, but we walked to a nearby restaurant that seems popular with the young crowd and met two other girlfriends, and I thought, ‘Shit, why did I open the door? Now I’m stuck in Girl’s Night Out, right when I thought I was rid of these two…’ Fought down the antisocial feelings, but couldn’t force myself to get in the mood to party. I just washed my clothes and am wearing my chacos and swim trunks. Don’t get much dorkier or whiter than this… If we went out, how would I get back to Shimeles’s? Would Root try to take me home and make a scene? Bought three cakes to make myself feel better, but as I hadn’t had dinner or lunch, sweets wasn’t the best idea. Took to stealing pizza crusts off a nearby table. After we left, though, it was better… just had fun being my silly self with Hewit and Root, and they seemed to reciprocate in kind. Walked around for only about half an hour, and then Root said she wanted to go home and they wished me goodnight and said to call them tomorrow or Tuesday when I want to go shopping in the Mercato. Felt better about the whole thing. Maybe I’m making up the tension with Root. Realized that I was actually quite honored that those two came all the way across the city just to hang out with me for an hour… nice to have someone in another country actually like you as a person. Feeling much better until I went for a burger at the Bole Mini. Mistake. Should have kept starving myself, or living off Clif Bars. Ouch, stomach ache. New rule: eat as little as possible from now until back home.
Enough writing for now… giant moths have invaded the apartment, and I feel like kicking back with my book, The Last King of Scotland… or watching one of Shim’s pirated DVDs. Wondering about what’s happening back home, and what the winter has in store for me there. Ciao for Now.
7am, October 20th, Something or Other Hotel, Bahir Dar:
This Ethiopia tour has become remarkably easy, and yet exhausting in its monotony. On the shores of Lake T’ana, the headwaters of the Blue Nile, in the city of Bahir Dar. Yet I’m not really excited about anything except counting down my last malaria pills and stepping onto that KLM jet Tuesday night. Should it matter that Bahir Dar is supposed to be the most beautiful city in Ethiopia? Or that we’re only a stone’s throw from the fabled island monasteries which have been floating in rocky isolation in the lake’s center for hundreds of years? No, it doesn’t matter at all. When you feel like this, the tourist crap seems horribly trite and ridiculous.
I was thinking about going back to tell you the stories about the “Revitalized Water Man” and “Mimi’s Run in with the Afars” … but these will just have to be wrung out of me at a dinner party. I’m not going back in time again. So here we are. The present. We’re traveling with Shimeles’ 28-year-old ‘girl friend’ Hewit, and her friend Ruth (pronounced Root) who I like a good bit better. They’ve been decent company: Root speaks excellent English, and they’re young and somewhat lively and have given our trip a bit of youthful vigor that perhaps it was lacking before, both with Protestant Teddy in the Afar, and with just Shimo and Me down in the south. Yet I can’t help being a bit exasperated: They’re young, and pretty, and Root is talkative and a little goofy, but I’m not actually interested in them at all: they lack imagination, philosophy, drive, or… character. Which brought me to consider that I have yet to meet someone in this country who I would pursue as a friend back home. A little depressing to think about. The past two nights, we went out ‘partying’… huge dinner, beer, walking around, buying street food, finding a little liquor house that serves the local moonshine (Arake), and watching Ethiopia TV while sipping determinedly on several shots of roast corn distillate with a rather stomach turning taste, and a habit of burning like DrainO as it goes down. Last night, a bar with several Bedele Beers (Shim’s favorite, but honestly, nothing great folks… we’re spoiled with our Montana Microbreweries) and an aborted attempt to dance before deciding that Bahir Dar really doesn’t have any sort of a worthwhile nightclub. I share a room with Root, and Shimeles raises an eyebrow, hinting… But it’s all so worthless! I don’t want to hang out with Root. I want Halle, and Hans and Clark and Sean and Kendra and Walker, and Kahl and Keinitz and the myriad other friends back home who I adore, who really offer me something, who are worth hanging out with, who understand me, who know how to live, and who I miss so very terribly.
Should I stop bitching and look on the bright side, just for the last four days? Or should I mention how desperate I’ve become: outlining in my notebook all the ‘classic trips’ I want to do as soon as humanly possible upon my return… daydreaming, constantly. These aren’t even creative, but God how I miss them!
I wonder how home will live up to my inflated expectations. I’ve built it up so much in my head… Ah, of course it will! Funny that of all the things this trip has denied me for five weeks: American food, music, friends, orderliness and sanity, a shared language, movies, a familiar culture, family, cultural entertainment, school, the freedom to make my own schedule… I have missed my wilderness the most, almost to the point of insanity. It wears on me every day, and rarely an hour goes by this past week when I don’t find myself drifting off into some sort of fancy about places I’ve been, or will go, or will return to… solitude, freedom, joy. Can you hear my head exploding? Aaaarghhhh!
Ok, I KNOW, this is not what you want to read about. You’re all still thinking, ‘Damnit Lewis, we don’t CARE about what you miss at home… tell us more about Africa!’
It’s not as easy as that, though, anymore. My impressions have become scattered, my stories too many and all blending together, my experiences tainted by boredom and fatigue and loneliness. Would you rather hear that I watched ‘Capote’ at Shimeles’ house and loved it? …No, I’d imagine not, but it’s so easy to explain to my American readers, so easy for them to comprehend…
Why am I shying away from delving into this place? From writing like I did when I first arrived in Addis, when everything was frightening and new and incredible? Is it because I’m afraid that my final analysis of Ethiopia, once I put it all together, just doesn’t add up to what I had hoped to find here, and I think I can avoid forcing myself to that conclusion if I just keep mum? Well, I just made that up on the spot, but it may be correct.
I must try, I must try: The high plateau north and northwest of Addis is really quite beautiful: rolling hills and valleys and rounded mountains and eucalyptus forests, and everything so green green green! At 9000+ feet, the air is thin, and the population much sparser than the south. Here and there at regular intervals, those same grass huts sprout and bulge up from the ground… There’s something wholly organic about them: they don’t look as if they’ve been built, but rather that they swelled and popped up out of the dark soil in the night, like mushrooms… it is easy to forget that they were created by human hands, yet when considered, something about their design seems so right and so healthy. The rounded walls, the conical roof, the way a fire can be built right in the middle of the hut and the smoke just seeps and slips out of the roof-thatch like fog slipping up off the top of a mountain. These little rural scenes are my favorite: small cherub-faced boys and girls in green shawls and green shorts and green caps, like little Robin-Hoods, wander about pastures casually herding a few sheep along in front of them with flicks of a eucalyptus branch. Everywhere, everywhere in this country, people are with their animals. Always. It’s a sort of union that I think has been largely forgotten in developed countries: people and their domesticated animals, always together, dependent on one another, living every day side-by-side and in constant contact… until one day the human co-part decides to slaughter his friend for a dinner of mutton, and move on to new company. Yet there’s something in it that makes you consider the duality of the counter-dependency. That’s an all-too-fancy way of saying what I mean, which is that you understand that the people are wholly dependent here on the well-being of their livestock, which in a strange way subordinates them to their domesticated animals. It’s an odd concept, but somewhat pleasant as well, in an old-times pastoralist sentimental sort of way. I like watching men plowing their fields by hand, walking behind two oxen yolked to the plow, itself a handmade affair of twisted wood and rough-pounded iron… plodding through newly churned dirt with wrinkled black bare feet, peach-pink on the bottoms.
The small villages are the most pleasant: you know how it goes… in an agricultural society which has persisted unchanged for hundreds of generations, everyone has their place and their station and they fill it unquestioningly. Without the concept of money or riches, no one realizes they are poor, and thus no one really is poor… Happy faces greet you, children are playing, or people are working seriously but with that satisfied look of people who do not know to crave for more than they have. Also, the place looks quite appealing: the western notions of garbage, homelessness, and sheet metal have not yet been introduced, which is much more than can be said of the larger towns and cities where our glorious ideals of modernity and development have begun to take their first awkward and perverted steps toward the First World. Uck.
Well, Shimeles just came in with a bright and friendly good-morning (I love how he asks me, “Did you sleep well, dear?”) that cheered me right up, and I’d better go and get ready to drive back to Debre Markos to collect our LAST mobile station (yay!!)… But before I forget, I have to record my two favorite Shimeles-isms thus far:
“Lewis, you should maybe like to order a tasty caesarian salad…?”
And, “Yes, there were many Jews in San Paolo, in Brazil. I saw them many times and once even visited with them to one of their seen-o-googies… You know what is a Jewish seen-o-googie?”
This Ethiopia tour has become remarkably easy, and yet exhausting in its monotony. On the shores of Lake T’ana, the headwaters of the Blue Nile, in the city of Bahir Dar. Yet I’m not really excited about anything except counting down my last malaria pills and stepping onto that KLM jet Tuesday night. Should it matter that Bahir Dar is supposed to be the most beautiful city in Ethiopia? Or that we’re only a stone’s throw from the fabled island monasteries which have been floating in rocky isolation in the lake’s center for hundreds of years? No, it doesn’t matter at all. When you feel like this, the tourist crap seems horribly trite and ridiculous.
I was thinking about going back to tell you the stories about the “Revitalized Water Man” and “Mimi’s Run in with the Afars” … but these will just have to be wrung out of me at a dinner party. I’m not going back in time again. So here we are. The present. We’re traveling with Shimeles’ 28-year-old ‘girl friend’ Hewit, and her friend Ruth (pronounced Root) who I like a good bit better. They’ve been decent company: Root speaks excellent English, and they’re young and somewhat lively and have given our trip a bit of youthful vigor that perhaps it was lacking before, both with Protestant Teddy in the Afar, and with just Shimo and Me down in the south. Yet I can’t help being a bit exasperated: They’re young, and pretty, and Root is talkative and a little goofy, but I’m not actually interested in them at all: they lack imagination, philosophy, drive, or… character. Which brought me to consider that I have yet to meet someone in this country who I would pursue as a friend back home. A little depressing to think about. The past two nights, we went out ‘partying’… huge dinner, beer, walking around, buying street food, finding a little liquor house that serves the local moonshine (Arake), and watching Ethiopia TV while sipping determinedly on several shots of roast corn distillate with a rather stomach turning taste, and a habit of burning like DrainO as it goes down. Last night, a bar with several Bedele Beers (Shim’s favorite, but honestly, nothing great folks… we’re spoiled with our Montana Microbreweries) and an aborted attempt to dance before deciding that Bahir Dar really doesn’t have any sort of a worthwhile nightclub. I share a room with Root, and Shimeles raises an eyebrow, hinting… But it’s all so worthless! I don’t want to hang out with Root. I want Halle, and Hans and Clark and Sean and Kendra and Walker, and Kahl and Keinitz and the myriad other friends back home who I adore, who really offer me something, who are worth hanging out with, who understand me, who know how to live, and who I miss so very terribly.
Should I stop bitching and look on the bright side, just for the last four days? Or should I mention how desperate I’ve become: outlining in my notebook all the ‘classic trips’ I want to do as soon as humanly possible upon my return… daydreaming, constantly. These aren’t even creative, but God how I miss them!
I wonder how home will live up to my inflated expectations. I’ve built it up so much in my head… Ah, of course it will! Funny that of all the things this trip has denied me for five weeks: American food, music, friends, orderliness and sanity, a shared language, movies, a familiar culture, family, cultural entertainment, school, the freedom to make my own schedule… I have missed my wilderness the most, almost to the point of insanity. It wears on me every day, and rarely an hour goes by this past week when I don’t find myself drifting off into some sort of fancy about places I’ve been, or will go, or will return to… solitude, freedom, joy. Can you hear my head exploding? Aaaarghhhh!
Ok, I KNOW, this is not what you want to read about. You’re all still thinking, ‘Damnit Lewis, we don’t CARE about what you miss at home… tell us more about Africa!’
It’s not as easy as that, though, anymore. My impressions have become scattered, my stories too many and all blending together, my experiences tainted by boredom and fatigue and loneliness. Would you rather hear that I watched ‘Capote’ at Shimeles’ house and loved it? …No, I’d imagine not, but it’s so easy to explain to my American readers, so easy for them to comprehend…
Why am I shying away from delving into this place? From writing like I did when I first arrived in Addis, when everything was frightening and new and incredible? Is it because I’m afraid that my final analysis of Ethiopia, once I put it all together, just doesn’t add up to what I had hoped to find here, and I think I can avoid forcing myself to that conclusion if I just keep mum? Well, I just made that up on the spot, but it may be correct.
I must try, I must try: The high plateau north and northwest of Addis is really quite beautiful: rolling hills and valleys and rounded mountains and eucalyptus forests, and everything so green green green! At 9000+ feet, the air is thin, and the population much sparser than the south. Here and there at regular intervals, those same grass huts sprout and bulge up from the ground… There’s something wholly organic about them: they don’t look as if they’ve been built, but rather that they swelled and popped up out of the dark soil in the night, like mushrooms… it is easy to forget that they were created by human hands, yet when considered, something about their design seems so right and so healthy. The rounded walls, the conical roof, the way a fire can be built right in the middle of the hut and the smoke just seeps and slips out of the roof-thatch like fog slipping up off the top of a mountain. These little rural scenes are my favorite: small cherub-faced boys and girls in green shawls and green shorts and green caps, like little Robin-Hoods, wander about pastures casually herding a few sheep along in front of them with flicks of a eucalyptus branch. Everywhere, everywhere in this country, people are with their animals. Always. It’s a sort of union that I think has been largely forgotten in developed countries: people and their domesticated animals, always together, dependent on one another, living every day side-by-side and in constant contact… until one day the human co-part decides to slaughter his friend for a dinner of mutton, and move on to new company. Yet there’s something in it that makes you consider the duality of the counter-dependency. That’s an all-too-fancy way of saying what I mean, which is that you understand that the people are wholly dependent here on the well-being of their livestock, which in a strange way subordinates them to their domesticated animals. It’s an odd concept, but somewhat pleasant as well, in an old-times pastoralist sentimental sort of way. I like watching men plowing their fields by hand, walking behind two oxen yolked to the plow, itself a handmade affair of twisted wood and rough-pounded iron… plodding through newly churned dirt with wrinkled black bare feet, peach-pink on the bottoms.
The small villages are the most pleasant: you know how it goes… in an agricultural society which has persisted unchanged for hundreds of generations, everyone has their place and their station and they fill it unquestioningly. Without the concept of money or riches, no one realizes they are poor, and thus no one really is poor… Happy faces greet you, children are playing, or people are working seriously but with that satisfied look of people who do not know to crave for more than they have. Also, the place looks quite appealing: the western notions of garbage, homelessness, and sheet metal have not yet been introduced, which is much more than can be said of the larger towns and cities where our glorious ideals of modernity and development have begun to take their first awkward and perverted steps toward the First World. Uck.
Well, Shimeles just came in with a bright and friendly good-morning (I love how he asks me, “Did you sleep well, dear?”) that cheered me right up, and I’d better go and get ready to drive back to Debre Markos to collect our LAST mobile station (yay!!)… But before I forget, I have to record my two favorite Shimeles-isms thus far:
“Lewis, you should maybe like to order a tasty caesarian salad…?”
And, “Yes, there were many Jews in San Paolo, in Brazil. I saw them many times and once even visited with them to one of their seen-o-googies… You know what is a Jewish seen-o-googie?”
10pm, October 16, A nice room in a nice hotel in a small town (maybe Asella?):
Wow. Fifty-five pages at this point. Maybe I should think of cleaning this thing up, having it hardbound and published for the general reading public. I might sell two or three copies. It could be my first flop, as fine a start to a famous writing career as any could hope for. Naw… But let’s continue. We got up early and drove past Goba up to the Sangetti Plateau, at 13,000 feet (yes, you can drive right up there!) and it was pea-soup fog and rain and about 39 degrees, though it felt colder. Really, really wonderful, though we didn’t see any of the Ethiopian Wolves that are supposed to frequent the plateau. It’s a sort of soggy alpine heath, that reminded me a bit of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and a bit of a scene out of a Jane Austin novel. The heather actually grows into whole trees up there, but mostly it’s rocks and lichens and low heather and scrub, and tiny little tarns with freezing cold water… and some things that look a bit like the Centennial Plants of the Mohave Desert… The air was damn cold and clean, and Shimeles was freezing his ass off and I was having a jolly old time. We returned the way we’d come, and at the main Park Entrance we paid to get in and then hired an unofficial local fellow as a guide, and within a few minutes of walking, brushed right up against some huge-tusked boars and a whole herd of Walia Ibex, including a few massive males with those fantastic and beautiful curly horns… very majestic creatures! Then we made tracks, and bounced and shook down out of the mountains at such a breakneck rate that I was quite sure my teeth were going to rattle right out of my head, and could feel all my guts getting re-arranged and tangled up inside my abdomen. We turned north at Dodoba, and drove through an evening landscape that reminded me an awful lot of Montana, and despite the bouncing and heartburn and car sickness, I was in quite a cheery mood from the beautiful scenery the entire way. While Shimeles and Misee and Mimo talked and laughed, I went over and over in my mind how it would be possible to protect and preserve the fantastical unique beauty of Montana while accepting and coping with the realities of population growth and economic expansion, and found myself wishing I had Hans there to bounce ideas off of… But the best thing I came up with was a more encompassing system of public (and private?) land demarcation, in which much of the remaining open land in the state could be classified on a sort of sliding scale of protection and use regulations… and a very rigorous and complete state-wide zoning code which would treat environmental and developmental constraints as two interconnected systems which had to be carefully considered and compared to create a solution which would allow for acceptable and sufficient community and infrastructure enlargement while ensuring as great a degree of environmental protection as possible. The two must be seen to be interlinked… I was reading a GIS newsletter I found at the EDSONATRA in Addis, and I think one of the articles influenced this idea a lot.
Even after spending the past two days in phenomenally beautiful areas, I’m still homesick. Well, it’s not nearly so bad, but… it made me think, what is it really that makes me miss ol’ Missoula? Well, being able to talk to people can’t be overlooked. And all the friends that it’s taken me a lifetime to collect. And it’s familiar territory. Familiar culture. And I know how to pursue the things I want to do, and know where to find other people who share those interests. And of course, I’m not doing constant field work, not driving all the bloody damn time. Hmmm… that was an easy answer. Don’t really even know why I bothered to bring that up. But I should point out, the scenery here, and the feel of the place, really does compare to the good ol’ Treasure State. I’m impressed… I honestly didn’t expect it.
I had a nice conversation with Becks last night by sat phone, while I shivered under the twinkling stars in the cold and dark, and a thousand hyenas howled just outside town. I’m pretty happy with this phase of the trip now, and it seems to be getting constantly better. Tomorrow morning, we’ll drive to another hotsprings to soak on the way to Nazret, and drink fresh fruit smoothies. Huzzah! Not so bad, is it? I was thinking about how to reply to Kristin’s email bragging about all the awesome things she’s discovered in New Zealand, and I think I finally have some good retaliation now. (Speaking of Kienitz, a funny thing tonight: while I was thinking about the aforementioned subject, I flicked on the TV to the one English station, and it was reruns of a show called CoastWatch [alas, no Pam Anderson] … about Fisheries Agents from Gisborne who are constantly going on undercover stings to take down illegal fisherman off the Islands. Kinda like Cops, but with Fisheries guys. Hmmm… leave it to New Zealand to have a show like that. Pretty lame show, but still, funny coincidence.)
So, the only hardships now are the constant driving, driving, driving… and the food. Ugh. For those of you who say, ‘Ethiopian food’s delicious! I don’t see what his problem is…’ Let me give you a little analogy. Say you’re on the road for five weeks in rural Texas. Now let’s say that there’s only one type of place to eat in rural Texas, and that’s the all-American roadside diner, the greasy-spoon sort of place. And I mean the ONLY option. No fancy Greek restaurants, no supermarkets, nothing else. Ok, now imagine that all those roadside diners only serve one meal, liver and onions. There’s no breakfast menu, no international fare… just liver and onions. I admit, when done right with quality ingredients, it can be a darn tasty dish. And even if it’s cheap and greasy, it’s not bad every once in a long while, right? Well, these are greasy-spoon diners we’re talking about, folks. Quality ingredients? Fancy preparation? Fat chance.
Still with me? Now, imagine that every single day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you walk into yet another greasy-spoon joint, and order… surprise, surprise: liver and onions, dripping in grease, occasionally nasty, always enormous (they’ve got to get rid of that liver somehow!) and never like your mom used to make. Mmmm… Now imagine, Day 25, Meal 75… Breakfast. Imagine the way your heart sinks and your stomach churns as you step into that restaurant at 7 a.m. and smell… what’s that? … your favorite dish being fried up in the back room.
Welcome to my Ethiopian Field Campaign, friends! Oh, for a spoonful of yoghurt!
Wow. Fifty-five pages at this point. Maybe I should think of cleaning this thing up, having it hardbound and published for the general reading public. I might sell two or three copies. It could be my first flop, as fine a start to a famous writing career as any could hope for. Naw… But let’s continue. We got up early and drove past Goba up to the Sangetti Plateau, at 13,000 feet (yes, you can drive right up there!) and it was pea-soup fog and rain and about 39 degrees, though it felt colder. Really, really wonderful, though we didn’t see any of the Ethiopian Wolves that are supposed to frequent the plateau. It’s a sort of soggy alpine heath, that reminded me a bit of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and a bit of a scene out of a Jane Austin novel. The heather actually grows into whole trees up there, but mostly it’s rocks and lichens and low heather and scrub, and tiny little tarns with freezing cold water… and some things that look a bit like the Centennial Plants of the Mohave Desert… The air was damn cold and clean, and Shimeles was freezing his ass off and I was having a jolly old time. We returned the way we’d come, and at the main Park Entrance we paid to get in and then hired an unofficial local fellow as a guide, and within a few minutes of walking, brushed right up against some huge-tusked boars and a whole herd of Walia Ibex, including a few massive males with those fantastic and beautiful curly horns… very majestic creatures! Then we made tracks, and bounced and shook down out of the mountains at such a breakneck rate that I was quite sure my teeth were going to rattle right out of my head, and could feel all my guts getting re-arranged and tangled up inside my abdomen. We turned north at Dodoba, and drove through an evening landscape that reminded me an awful lot of Montana, and despite the bouncing and heartburn and car sickness, I was in quite a cheery mood from the beautiful scenery the entire way. While Shimeles and Misee and Mimo talked and laughed, I went over and over in my mind how it would be possible to protect and preserve the fantastical unique beauty of Montana while accepting and coping with the realities of population growth and economic expansion, and found myself wishing I had Hans there to bounce ideas off of… But the best thing I came up with was a more encompassing system of public (and private?) land demarcation, in which much of the remaining open land in the state could be classified on a sort of sliding scale of protection and use regulations… and a very rigorous and complete state-wide zoning code which would treat environmental and developmental constraints as two interconnected systems which had to be carefully considered and compared to create a solution which would allow for acceptable and sufficient community and infrastructure enlargement while ensuring as great a degree of environmental protection as possible. The two must be seen to be interlinked… I was reading a GIS newsletter I found at the EDSONATRA in Addis, and I think one of the articles influenced this idea a lot.
Even after spending the past two days in phenomenally beautiful areas, I’m still homesick. Well, it’s not nearly so bad, but… it made me think, what is it really that makes me miss ol’ Missoula? Well, being able to talk to people can’t be overlooked. And all the friends that it’s taken me a lifetime to collect. And it’s familiar territory. Familiar culture. And I know how to pursue the things I want to do, and know where to find other people who share those interests. And of course, I’m not doing constant field work, not driving all the bloody damn time. Hmmm… that was an easy answer. Don’t really even know why I bothered to bring that up. But I should point out, the scenery here, and the feel of the place, really does compare to the good ol’ Treasure State. I’m impressed… I honestly didn’t expect it.
I had a nice conversation with Becks last night by sat phone, while I shivered under the twinkling stars in the cold and dark, and a thousand hyenas howled just outside town. I’m pretty happy with this phase of the trip now, and it seems to be getting constantly better. Tomorrow morning, we’ll drive to another hotsprings to soak on the way to Nazret, and drink fresh fruit smoothies. Huzzah! Not so bad, is it? I was thinking about how to reply to Kristin’s email bragging about all the awesome things she’s discovered in New Zealand, and I think I finally have some good retaliation now. (Speaking of Kienitz, a funny thing tonight: while I was thinking about the aforementioned subject, I flicked on the TV to the one English station, and it was reruns of a show called CoastWatch [alas, no Pam Anderson] … about Fisheries Agents from Gisborne who are constantly going on undercover stings to take down illegal fisherman off the Islands. Kinda like Cops, but with Fisheries guys. Hmmm… leave it to New Zealand to have a show like that. Pretty lame show, but still, funny coincidence.)
So, the only hardships now are the constant driving, driving, driving… and the food. Ugh. For those of you who say, ‘Ethiopian food’s delicious! I don’t see what his problem is…’ Let me give you a little analogy. Say you’re on the road for five weeks in rural Texas. Now let’s say that there’s only one type of place to eat in rural Texas, and that’s the all-American roadside diner, the greasy-spoon sort of place. And I mean the ONLY option. No fancy Greek restaurants, no supermarkets, nothing else. Ok, now imagine that all those roadside diners only serve one meal, liver and onions. There’s no breakfast menu, no international fare… just liver and onions. I admit, when done right with quality ingredients, it can be a darn tasty dish. And even if it’s cheap and greasy, it’s not bad every once in a long while, right? Well, these are greasy-spoon diners we’re talking about, folks. Quality ingredients? Fancy preparation? Fat chance.
Still with me? Now, imagine that every single day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you walk into yet another greasy-spoon joint, and order… surprise, surprise: liver and onions, dripping in grease, occasionally nasty, always enormous (they’ve got to get rid of that liver somehow!) and never like your mom used to make. Mmmm… Now imagine, Day 25, Meal 75… Breakfast. Imagine the way your heart sinks and your stomach churns as you step into that restaurant at 7 a.m. and smell… what’s that? … your favorite dish being fried up in the back room.
Welcome to my Ethiopian Field Campaign, friends! Oh, for a spoonful of yoghurt!
October 25th, 9:30pm, Paarkii Baallee Hoteell, Robe:
Well, the pools at Wondo Genet weren’t nearly so romantic or fantastical by the light of day… everything looked a bit trashy, though you could still imagine what its former beauty must have been like. The pools were still warm, but if you looked close you could see the water was fully of little algae particles which were less than appealing. The waterfall had slacked off considerably from the night before, and was now just any other muddy little stream windy between grassy beds. The showers, however, were still fantastic (although it was a little disappointing to see the corroded pipes the water spouted out of) and it was kind of fun to stand in a big crowd of local guys, all taking turns sudsing up and washing our crotches in the blasting hot water. Still, I’d gladly go back, but would be very sure to take that long hike up in the hills during the day (Shimeles said there is a place somewhere up there where there is a big sand pit right up in the hills, and the sand is steaming hot and you can bury yourself in it and watch the Colobus monkeys play overhead. That’s on next trip’s must-do list) and save the romantic trip to the hot pools for after dark.
Never did get to try those little bananas again, or the local papayas or special fruits who’s name I can’t even recall right now. Oh well. I suspect there will be another chance in a year or so.
We began the drive up into the Bale Mountains (pronounced Bali), and it didn’t take long for the jolting of the road (really awful!) to bring back the acid reflux. I’ve fingered as a likely culprit the chronic overeating, along with constant meat intake, low-level stress, and jolting car-rides with no exercise. Shimeles offered that, should I want to bring Halle back here next time, he’d be really happy to go with us to see the best parts of Ethiopia, on the cheap… backpacking and camping, student-style. I think there’s a very decent chance I’ll take him up on his offer, if I don’t get too burned out on this place. He’d be an incredible guide and fun companion, and I figure if we just let him choose the dates and paid his way for a few weeks, he’d be happy to do it. Now that I’m getting a better idea of the best places to visit, a return trip for vacation purposes is sounding more appealing. … But not THAT appealing. Keep in mind how damn homesick I am, after only 4 weeks here.
You know one habit of Ethiopians that bothers the hell out of me? They’re all hopeless cell-phone addicts. EVERY Ethiopian seems to have one. I’ve seen guys so poor they don’t even seem to own a pair of pants, yet they somehow afforded a cell phone. And they’re ALWAYS talking on the damn things. But that’s not what annoys me, not so much. Americans are really just about the same (although I like to think that my friends, at least, are mostly different). But the Ethiopians have absolutely no sense of cell-phone courtesy. Their phones are NEVER turned off, not for any purpose. And if it rings, they answer. Always. In the middle of a deep, personal heart-to-heart? Doesn’t matter. You’re instantly cut off. Telling a joke? A story? Asking a question? At a fancy restaurant? Sitting with the territorial governor or the regional army chief to beg a favor? In the middle of a tense argument with a gang of Afars who are all shouting and pointing their guns at you? It doesn’t matter! They’ll always answer, and there’s no “sorry, I have to get this…” No apologies, and once they’re on the phone, there’s no effort to get off to get back to the business at hand, either. They’ll talk, and talk, and talk… and personally, it’s been the hardest thing not to take too much offense to it. But it’s really RUDE! And I don’t know how many times I’ve just wanted to snatch the phone out of Shimeles’ (or someone else’s) hand and smash it on the pavement. Even when we’re way out of phone range but someone keeps trying to call Shimeles, six times in a row the conversation breaks up after a few seconds, but he’ll keep answering the damn phone in the middle of a conversation with me and shouting “Hallow! Hallow? Hallow??” It drives me crazy.
Well, I don’t want to spend too long writing tonight because we have to get an early start tomorrow and I still want to call Becks tonight, and read a bit, and spend a good seven hours at least sleeping on this wonderful firm queen-sized bed I somehow lucked out in getting… Had a bit of a scare for a while tonight, convinced myself that I’d left the sat phone at Wondo Genet, and was ripping out my hair in silence on the drive home from dinner, trying to think of where I’d put the damn thing when we were packing up to leave this morning. Found it, though. Phew. Oh, other stress: that damn cheap battery that Becks picked up last time she was here to use in the field and insisted we take: it’s turned over twice in the back of the car and leaked battery acid all over everything, and the big North Face duffel and the Timbuck2 laptop back got a good dose of it… and I know those bags are at least worth $250, and I’ve taken them with me twice into the shower and scrubbed and scrubbed them with soap, but I’m really nervous that there’s really nothing I can do now, and slowly the acid will eat big holes in both bags. It’s already got a start on them, and I don’t have much confidence that my washing has stopped it. Oh, dinner: really quite good tonight. Pure meat. Lamb, I think. They had the carcass strung up right inside the restaurant, and sliced off the hunks of muscle right in front of us and chopped it and cooked it and served it in this neat Ethiopian tagine with coals in the bottom, and damn it really was tasty. That was it. Chunks of meat, with a bit of injera for those who so desired. Of course everyone was feeding me gurshas long after I was completely stuffed, but at least I enjoyed the taste this time. I sketched the tagine for Halle to copy if she wants.
Our drive up into and through the Bale Mountains was my happiest time yet on this trip: even from 70 kilometers away, I started thinking that the place looked a hell of a lot like Montana, only with grass-thatch huts and eucalyptus trees and black people. If it wasn’t for the terrible road, I would have been enjoying myself immensely, but the jouncing and jolting was so awful that my inner euphoria was competing with some serious external discomfort. However, as we got higher and higher into the hills, I really started to enjoy myself. Near 9,000 feet, the villages got very sparse, and the ones that were still around were very small and picturesque, with only a couple beautiful little huts and patchwork fields of bright green grasses and grains, on the steeply sloping hillsides. At 10,000 feet all the trees fell away, and we reached a sort of temperate, equatorial tundra, where everything managed to look lush and alpine at the same time. Up ahead and above us, huge pegmatite and limestone spires soared skyward in awesome domes and formations jutting from the ridgetops like a stegasaurus’s back-spines.
At 11,000 feet, it was getting damn cold, and the air became so clean and clear and fresh and sharp and delightful… I kept trying to open my window, and everyone else kept shivering and shouting at me to close it. The sky was gorgeous: billowy white clouds and smeary grey ones, in sharp, crystal-clear contrast to the brilliant blue sky patched between them as they whipped and churned above us. The kind of sky you can only find at higher elevations on cold spring or fall days, the kind that make you want to whoop and run about and suck great lungfuls of air and sing songs from The Sound of Music and let the cold wind make your nose run. We drove right through the spires on the ridge-top, and through picturesque little mountain villages and I thought, ‘this is a part of Ethiopia I could get used to, a part of it I could stay for a considerable time!’ and admired the mountain-people who looked happy and tough and rode beautiful horses on strange saddles and plaid saddle-pillows and rode very upright and whipped the beasts along with cloth riding-crops, looking very elegant in a way that instantly set them apart as highlanders. Topping out at a little village around 12,000 feet, we drove straight into the clouds, and then soon after it started to rain fiercely, and the road became truly treacherous and we slid and banged and sploshed around all over the road, barely making progress and still with a long way to go to Robe. We entered the Wildlife Preserve, and there were almost no villages now, and things looked more and more like a real wilderness of sorts, and we kept our eyes peeled for a red fox or Ethiopian Wolf, but it was really pouring and we had no luck. We reached the entrance to the Bale Mountains National Park, and I made a mental note that if I ever came back to Ethiopia on Vacation, trekking here would be the No. 1 thing on my checklist. About half an hour before dark, we finally bounced and slid into Robe, and successfully extracted over six months of data from the continuous station without trouble or incident. The evening light was spectacular, the air cool and clear, the streams and rivers running clean and sparkling, and though the town wasn’t one of the wonderful villages of traditional huts that I liked so much, the view from the one street made me feel about as close to back home as I suspect I could ever get here. The scenery and smell and feel of it isn’t really just like Montana… no, not at all… but there are some things similar that I think all high, lonesome, mountainous places share, and for those things I was very, very thankful. To top it off, just as we checked into our hotel and the last light of day was fading from the sky, the entire town of Robe experienced a power failure and I sat on the step of my room watching the white clouds fade to deep purple in a turquoise-violet sky, and the sky fade to black, and the clouds clear and a crescent moon rise. The full outline of the moon was visible, all around the dark part, and the sky was able to get darker than I’ve seen it my whole visit here. Thank goodness for power failures! The two ladies were bitching, but I love the way these towns look when the lights and generators and loud music go off, and all the little candles and lanterns come out, and everywhere is soft light and quiet voices, and as I looked up, so did the bright, bright stars, twinkling from the strange constellations in a cold, clean sky.
Well, the pools at Wondo Genet weren’t nearly so romantic or fantastical by the light of day… everything looked a bit trashy, though you could still imagine what its former beauty must have been like. The pools were still warm, but if you looked close you could see the water was fully of little algae particles which were less than appealing. The waterfall had slacked off considerably from the night before, and was now just any other muddy little stream windy between grassy beds. The showers, however, were still fantastic (although it was a little disappointing to see the corroded pipes the water spouted out of) and it was kind of fun to stand in a big crowd of local guys, all taking turns sudsing up and washing our crotches in the blasting hot water. Still, I’d gladly go back, but would be very sure to take that long hike up in the hills during the day (Shimeles said there is a place somewhere up there where there is a big sand pit right up in the hills, and the sand is steaming hot and you can bury yourself in it and watch the Colobus monkeys play overhead. That’s on next trip’s must-do list) and save the romantic trip to the hot pools for after dark.
Never did get to try those little bananas again, or the local papayas or special fruits who’s name I can’t even recall right now. Oh well. I suspect there will be another chance in a year or so.
We began the drive up into the Bale Mountains (pronounced Bali), and it didn’t take long for the jolting of the road (really awful!) to bring back the acid reflux. I’ve fingered as a likely culprit the chronic overeating, along with constant meat intake, low-level stress, and jolting car-rides with no exercise. Shimeles offered that, should I want to bring Halle back here next time, he’d be really happy to go with us to see the best parts of Ethiopia, on the cheap… backpacking and camping, student-style. I think there’s a very decent chance I’ll take him up on his offer, if I don’t get too burned out on this place. He’d be an incredible guide and fun companion, and I figure if we just let him choose the dates and paid his way for a few weeks, he’d be happy to do it. Now that I’m getting a better idea of the best places to visit, a return trip for vacation purposes is sounding more appealing. … But not THAT appealing. Keep in mind how damn homesick I am, after only 4 weeks here.
You know one habit of Ethiopians that bothers the hell out of me? They’re all hopeless cell-phone addicts. EVERY Ethiopian seems to have one. I’ve seen guys so poor they don’t even seem to own a pair of pants, yet they somehow afforded a cell phone. And they’re ALWAYS talking on the damn things. But that’s not what annoys me, not so much. Americans are really just about the same (although I like to think that my friends, at least, are mostly different). But the Ethiopians have absolutely no sense of cell-phone courtesy. Their phones are NEVER turned off, not for any purpose. And if it rings, they answer. Always. In the middle of a deep, personal heart-to-heart? Doesn’t matter. You’re instantly cut off. Telling a joke? A story? Asking a question? At a fancy restaurant? Sitting with the territorial governor or the regional army chief to beg a favor? In the middle of a tense argument with a gang of Afars who are all shouting and pointing their guns at you? It doesn’t matter! They’ll always answer, and there’s no “sorry, I have to get this…” No apologies, and once they’re on the phone, there’s no effort to get off to get back to the business at hand, either. They’ll talk, and talk, and talk… and personally, it’s been the hardest thing not to take too much offense to it. But it’s really RUDE! And I don’t know how many times I’ve just wanted to snatch the phone out of Shimeles’ (or someone else’s) hand and smash it on the pavement. Even when we’re way out of phone range but someone keeps trying to call Shimeles, six times in a row the conversation breaks up after a few seconds, but he’ll keep answering the damn phone in the middle of a conversation with me and shouting “Hallow! Hallow? Hallow??” It drives me crazy.
Well, I don’t want to spend too long writing tonight because we have to get an early start tomorrow and I still want to call Becks tonight, and read a bit, and spend a good seven hours at least sleeping on this wonderful firm queen-sized bed I somehow lucked out in getting… Had a bit of a scare for a while tonight, convinced myself that I’d left the sat phone at Wondo Genet, and was ripping out my hair in silence on the drive home from dinner, trying to think of where I’d put the damn thing when we were packing up to leave this morning. Found it, though. Phew. Oh, other stress: that damn cheap battery that Becks picked up last time she was here to use in the field and insisted we take: it’s turned over twice in the back of the car and leaked battery acid all over everything, and the big North Face duffel and the Timbuck2 laptop back got a good dose of it… and I know those bags are at least worth $250, and I’ve taken them with me twice into the shower and scrubbed and scrubbed them with soap, but I’m really nervous that there’s really nothing I can do now, and slowly the acid will eat big holes in both bags. It’s already got a start on them, and I don’t have much confidence that my washing has stopped it. Oh, dinner: really quite good tonight. Pure meat. Lamb, I think. They had the carcass strung up right inside the restaurant, and sliced off the hunks of muscle right in front of us and chopped it and cooked it and served it in this neat Ethiopian tagine with coals in the bottom, and damn it really was tasty. That was it. Chunks of meat, with a bit of injera for those who so desired. Of course everyone was feeding me gurshas long after I was completely stuffed, but at least I enjoyed the taste this time. I sketched the tagine for Halle to copy if she wants.
Our drive up into and through the Bale Mountains was my happiest time yet on this trip: even from 70 kilometers away, I started thinking that the place looked a hell of a lot like Montana, only with grass-thatch huts and eucalyptus trees and black people. If it wasn’t for the terrible road, I would have been enjoying myself immensely, but the jouncing and jolting was so awful that my inner euphoria was competing with some serious external discomfort. However, as we got higher and higher into the hills, I really started to enjoy myself. Near 9,000 feet, the villages got very sparse, and the ones that were still around were very small and picturesque, with only a couple beautiful little huts and patchwork fields of bright green grasses and grains, on the steeply sloping hillsides. At 10,000 feet all the trees fell away, and we reached a sort of temperate, equatorial tundra, where everything managed to look lush and alpine at the same time. Up ahead and above us, huge pegmatite and limestone spires soared skyward in awesome domes and formations jutting from the ridgetops like a stegasaurus’s back-spines.
At 11,000 feet, it was getting damn cold, and the air became so clean and clear and fresh and sharp and delightful… I kept trying to open my window, and everyone else kept shivering and shouting at me to close it. The sky was gorgeous: billowy white clouds and smeary grey ones, in sharp, crystal-clear contrast to the brilliant blue sky patched between them as they whipped and churned above us. The kind of sky you can only find at higher elevations on cold spring or fall days, the kind that make you want to whoop and run about and suck great lungfuls of air and sing songs from The Sound of Music and let the cold wind make your nose run. We drove right through the spires on the ridge-top, and through picturesque little mountain villages and I thought, ‘this is a part of Ethiopia I could get used to, a part of it I could stay for a considerable time!’ and admired the mountain-people who looked happy and tough and rode beautiful horses on strange saddles and plaid saddle-pillows and rode very upright and whipped the beasts along with cloth riding-crops, looking very elegant in a way that instantly set them apart as highlanders. Topping out at a little village around 12,000 feet, we drove straight into the clouds, and then soon after it started to rain fiercely, and the road became truly treacherous and we slid and banged and sploshed around all over the road, barely making progress and still with a long way to go to Robe. We entered the Wildlife Preserve, and there were almost no villages now, and things looked more and more like a real wilderness of sorts, and we kept our eyes peeled for a red fox or Ethiopian Wolf, but it was really pouring and we had no luck. We reached the entrance to the Bale Mountains National Park, and I made a mental note that if I ever came back to Ethiopia on Vacation, trekking here would be the No. 1 thing on my checklist. About half an hour before dark, we finally bounced and slid into Robe, and successfully extracted over six months of data from the continuous station without trouble or incident. The evening light was spectacular, the air cool and clear, the streams and rivers running clean and sparkling, and though the town wasn’t one of the wonderful villages of traditional huts that I liked so much, the view from the one street made me feel about as close to back home as I suspect I could ever get here. The scenery and smell and feel of it isn’t really just like Montana… no, not at all… but there are some things similar that I think all high, lonesome, mountainous places share, and for those things I was very, very thankful. To top it off, just as we checked into our hotel and the last light of day was fading from the sky, the entire town of Robe experienced a power failure and I sat on the step of my room watching the white clouds fade to deep purple in a turquoise-violet sky, and the sky fade to black, and the clouds clear and a crescent moon rise. The full outline of the moon was visible, all around the dark part, and the sky was able to get darker than I’ve seen it my whole visit here. Thank goodness for power failures! The two ladies were bitching, but I love the way these towns look when the lights and generators and loud music go off, and all the little candles and lanterns come out, and everywhere is soft light and quiet voices, and as I looked up, so did the bright, bright stars, twinkling from the strange constellations in a cold, clean sky.
Wondo Genet Hotel, October 14, 9pm:
Today, Shimeles and I became friends. I’m embarrassed to say that I woefully misjudged him, his intentions, his feelings, his worldview, his character, his impression of me. We had a wonderful conversation in the car, that started as a discussion of Barukat … he told me what he’d learned about her and why she’d stayed the night with him last night, (not sex!) and his explanation left me feeling so warm towards him, and excited about what it began to reveal about his personality, that it put me in a generally excited and joyful mood for the rest of our drive north to Shashemene. Suddenly, I think something between us finally clicked, and I realized that I’d been wrong about so many things (including what I’d thought about his impression of me) and we talked, and talked, and talked some more… (I’ll generalize greatly here, because I don’t feel like recreating our conversation in print) about what it means to be happy, and to share happiness, and about women, and respect, and love, and about hardship, and optimism, and about being yourself, and being open, and easygoing, and about taking life’s hits in stride, and about not being afraid to have fun, and about hard work, and the importance of family… all mixed in with shared jokes and personal stories and admittances to each other about how grateful we were to be in the other’s company… And you know, it was really, really wonderful. I came to a new understanding of Shimeles, and with it a new respect, and I feel very lucky that he feels the way about me that he does, and I really hope that we can continue to develop this friendship because I think we still know so little about each other, but hanging out with him can be so much fun… and it’s getting to be more so!
Mmmm, I was just thinking about the delicious tiny bananas that we bought for two birr from a girl on the roadside near Arbaminch. My God they were tasty… so good, they really didn’t remind me of other bananas at all! Mmmm… I’ll have to try the local bananas here at Wondo Genet, and the papayas and other local fruits too. And also about how excited I was about the discovery that you can identify all Ethiopian music by the tribe it originates from, even if you don’t understand any of the languages, by listening carefully to the rhythm of the beat in the background. Every tribe’s music always is based on the same basal beat, and once you learn those simple beats, you can always pinpoint the origin: Gurage, Amhara, Tigraya, Omo, etc…
On the more negative side, I’m SO DAMN SICK of Ethiopian food right now, I can barely contain the barf reflex at every meal. I don’t want to even look or think of an injera for years… no more greasy wats or tibs or any of it. I feel an uncontrollable grief every time we sit down for another meal: ‘please,’ I think, ‘please, no more of this fatty finger-food. No more berbere, no more shiro, no more stuffing giant gurshas into my mouth for me… Oh God, not another greasy Doro Wat… Wait, Shim, why are you ordering seconds??’
And we always eat so MUCH! If I didn’t have to worry about rudeness and cultural protocols, if I could just eat as much as I wanted and then stop, without feeling guilty, I would eat literally one fifth to one eighth as much as I’m eating right now. Oh, today I really thought I was going to vomit if I stuffed one more heaping finger-load into my mouth, but somehow my horrified tastebuds relented and I was able to march onward through the second and third helping that Shimeles ordered. When I get home, I’m going to eat organic fruits and veggies and homemade soups and salads and eat very little and maybe be a vegetarian for a while, and not ever look back. Oh tef, how I hate you right now.
Also, for the past week or so, I’ve had constant chronic heartburn. Usually mild, but present and uncomfortable almost all day long, every day. I’m a bit worried that it might be damaging my esophagus if it keeps up like this. Anyway, Shimeles says he’s suffering from the same problem, which he blames on the chat, and I blame on his driving, but we went in together on a huge bottle of tums, and I’m munching on a couple right now. I think I’d rather just eat tums for the last ten days of my visit here than have to eat one more friggin’ fir-fir with goat sauce.
I am really worried about my current physical condition. Let me be completely honest, and look back over the past three and a half weeks spent here in Ethiopia: I literally have walked probably less than 200 yards daily, on average over all the days here. Can you imagine that? Dad gets more walking than that in just going between the computer and the refridgerator on an average day in the office. I can list to you all the walking I do on any given day: I wake up and walk to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and then walk back and pack up my things. I walk out to the car. I walk from the car into a restaurant three times a day, and back from the restaurant to the car each time. I walk from the car to a station not more than 30 feet away, and set it up or take it down, and walk back to the car. I walk from the car into a hotel, and walk once or twice between the bed and the bathroom. And that’s it. Isn’t that horrible, people?!! My God, it’s KILLING ME! My muscles are literally wasting away, and sometimes I just feel really… unwell… and I can tell it’s entirely from lack of physical exercise. Pushing the car out of the mud the other day made everything in my body as sore as from a marathon day of rock climbing. I tried to jog behind the car for a few minutes yesterday in the park, and within 15 seconds at a slow trot, my muscles were screaming, my lungs gasping, and the blood pounding in my head so hard I came down with an almost 24-hour headache. AHHHHH! I may as well have spent this entire trip laying in a hospital bed, or floating weightless in a space capsule, for the way my body has degenerated. My energy, my alertness, my spunk, my libido… all gone, dead, melted away into a pool of worthless fatty tissue. Halle, you may have to carry me off the plane in a stretcher on Wednesday night, like those astronauts who come back from Mir after two months in space. Oh, how I daydream about all the things I’ll do when I’m home, to make up for this awful deterioration: I promise myself I’ll jog up the ‘M’ every day; I’ll take my road bike up Grant Creek, or out to Alberton even, after school; I’ll take 30-mile hikes; I’ll go on three day backpack trips and fast for the duration; I’ll skin up a mountain every weekend, and maybe twice for good measure; I’ll paddle the Clarkfork through town, and then paddle back up; I’ll climb in the gym until I can’t feel my arms; I’ll NEVER drive to school; I’ll do yoga early in the mornings; I’ll sprint and strain and lead rocky mountaineer trips and learn to ice climb and not ever let a week go by without a major excursion and damnit, I’ll NEVER let myself get in this bad of shape again!
Today, though, I must say, I was in a very good mood. I was thinking about what wonderful friends I have at home, and how much I owe to my mother and father, who brought me up in just such a way… Who shaped little Lew into a young man who may not be on the fast track to Medicine or Law or his first quick million, but is wonderfully happy and knows what makes him so; takes nothing for granted; loves to live, and to love; and smiles and laughs and feels and takes risks and goes on occasional flights of unbound euphoria and is pretty sure that he’ll make sure that wherever fate carries him, he’ll always keep these things the principal force in his life and never forget how he owes it all to his good ol’ mom and dad… (*Sniff* … Thanks mom!)
Which also made me consider how grateful I am to have such a wonderful family, and though it’s small, to be so close to everyone in it, and to love them all so much! If you’re not part of that family, I’m sorry, because this is probably disgusting to read, but … hey, maybe I love you too! XOXO
Today we met Mimo (Shim’s eldest sister) and her friend Mesii, and we all drove up together from Shashemene through gorgeous mountains and farmland and villages and orchards and river valleys and old royal-family retreats to Wondo Genet, which used to be the home of the princess, Haile Selassie’s daughter. It is fantastic! A real mountain retreat, with mist in the eucalyptus, and strange little monkeys all around, and so many flowers all around in the lush moss, and trees with bright red flowers and others with bright purple, and everywhere the sounds of birds chirping in the damp leaves and gurgling water. We got two nice rooms (I’m sharing with Shime, who’s snoring like a lion right now) and after taking a little rest while it rained outside, we walked down to the hotspring just after dark. The place was positively magical: Everything was dark, but I could hear the sound of rushing water, and just make out steam rising through dark trees. We came to a place where powerful streams of hot water gush out of a cliff face and form a wonderful steaming hot shower, where Shim and I stood and let it crash down over our heads and necks and sore muscles and joints, for almost 20 minutes. The night was cool and moist and there was a good breeze carrying air fresh from the recent rain with the strange smell of eucalyptus and other unknown plants. We had the place almost entirely to ourselves, it seemed, except for a few other dark bodies which appeared more spirit than man: the dark black Ethiopians blend in so well with the night that several times I bumped right into someone in the shower and still only knew it from the feel of warm skin: even right against them I couldn’t make them out from the dark rocks and water. We moved over to the large hot pools, where water is piped directly out of the spring maybe a kilometer above on the mountain, and jets out untouchably hot into three cement baths large enough to swim short laps. Not a single other person was in the pools. I could hear monkeys making a chatter somewhere distant in the trees. The rains had made the creek which ran down next to the pools swell with muddy water, and it was now a tumbling, rushing river, which rushed down the steep hill not twenty feet away from where we swam, surging with a muffled splatter down through the roots of a giant, gnarly sycamore and cascading over a small waterfall before rushing off again into the darkness below us. There were a few dim lights hung about, which illuminated bits of dark, wet foliage, drooping banana leaves and dripping yew branches, all twisting and thick and mysterious in the drifting fog and steam… The whole place had an impossible, forbidden feel to it… like we had sneaked into Disneyland at night and were playing inside Splash Mountain: a fantasy place where people weren’t supposed to be. Or, even more, it felt like I had stumbled into Rivendel. The gushing, splashing water, the hot steam and cold air, and the dark shapes moving silently behind distantly burning lamps, the exotic lush foliage and immense mystery and delight of the place, made it all seem like something that could only be imagined, from the time of Middle Earth. I stood half in the water and watching the muddy water rush through the roots of the great, magic, lichen-drooped tree for a long time, just savoring the feeling of it, and grinning all the way to my gums in the dark. Now, I could say, Wish you were here! The land of the Lotus Eaters, indeed.
Today, Shimeles and I became friends. I’m embarrassed to say that I woefully misjudged him, his intentions, his feelings, his worldview, his character, his impression of me. We had a wonderful conversation in the car, that started as a discussion of Barukat … he told me what he’d learned about her and why she’d stayed the night with him last night, (not sex!) and his explanation left me feeling so warm towards him, and excited about what it began to reveal about his personality, that it put me in a generally excited and joyful mood for the rest of our drive north to Shashemene. Suddenly, I think something between us finally clicked, and I realized that I’d been wrong about so many things (including what I’d thought about his impression of me) and we talked, and talked, and talked some more… (I’ll generalize greatly here, because I don’t feel like recreating our conversation in print) about what it means to be happy, and to share happiness, and about women, and respect, and love, and about hardship, and optimism, and about being yourself, and being open, and easygoing, and about taking life’s hits in stride, and about not being afraid to have fun, and about hard work, and the importance of family… all mixed in with shared jokes and personal stories and admittances to each other about how grateful we were to be in the other’s company… And you know, it was really, really wonderful. I came to a new understanding of Shimeles, and with it a new respect, and I feel very lucky that he feels the way about me that he does, and I really hope that we can continue to develop this friendship because I think we still know so little about each other, but hanging out with him can be so much fun… and it’s getting to be more so!
Mmmm, I was just thinking about the delicious tiny bananas that we bought for two birr from a girl on the roadside near Arbaminch. My God they were tasty… so good, they really didn’t remind me of other bananas at all! Mmmm… I’ll have to try the local bananas here at Wondo Genet, and the papayas and other local fruits too. And also about how excited I was about the discovery that you can identify all Ethiopian music by the tribe it originates from, even if you don’t understand any of the languages, by listening carefully to the rhythm of the beat in the background. Every tribe’s music always is based on the same basal beat, and once you learn those simple beats, you can always pinpoint the origin: Gurage, Amhara, Tigraya, Omo, etc…
On the more negative side, I’m SO DAMN SICK of Ethiopian food right now, I can barely contain the barf reflex at every meal. I don’t want to even look or think of an injera for years… no more greasy wats or tibs or any of it. I feel an uncontrollable grief every time we sit down for another meal: ‘please,’ I think, ‘please, no more of this fatty finger-food. No more berbere, no more shiro, no more stuffing giant gurshas into my mouth for me… Oh God, not another greasy Doro Wat… Wait, Shim, why are you ordering seconds??’
And we always eat so MUCH! If I didn’t have to worry about rudeness and cultural protocols, if I could just eat as much as I wanted and then stop, without feeling guilty, I would eat literally one fifth to one eighth as much as I’m eating right now. Oh, today I really thought I was going to vomit if I stuffed one more heaping finger-load into my mouth, but somehow my horrified tastebuds relented and I was able to march onward through the second and third helping that Shimeles ordered. When I get home, I’m going to eat organic fruits and veggies and homemade soups and salads and eat very little and maybe be a vegetarian for a while, and not ever look back. Oh tef, how I hate you right now.
Also, for the past week or so, I’ve had constant chronic heartburn. Usually mild, but present and uncomfortable almost all day long, every day. I’m a bit worried that it might be damaging my esophagus if it keeps up like this. Anyway, Shimeles says he’s suffering from the same problem, which he blames on the chat, and I blame on his driving, but we went in together on a huge bottle of tums, and I’m munching on a couple right now. I think I’d rather just eat tums for the last ten days of my visit here than have to eat one more friggin’ fir-fir with goat sauce.
I am really worried about my current physical condition. Let me be completely honest, and look back over the past three and a half weeks spent here in Ethiopia: I literally have walked probably less than 200 yards daily, on average over all the days here. Can you imagine that? Dad gets more walking than that in just going between the computer and the refridgerator on an average day in the office. I can list to you all the walking I do on any given day: I wake up and walk to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and then walk back and pack up my things. I walk out to the car. I walk from the car into a restaurant three times a day, and back from the restaurant to the car each time. I walk from the car to a station not more than 30 feet away, and set it up or take it down, and walk back to the car. I walk from the car into a hotel, and walk once or twice between the bed and the bathroom. And that’s it. Isn’t that horrible, people?!! My God, it’s KILLING ME! My muscles are literally wasting away, and sometimes I just feel really… unwell… and I can tell it’s entirely from lack of physical exercise. Pushing the car out of the mud the other day made everything in my body as sore as from a marathon day of rock climbing. I tried to jog behind the car for a few minutes yesterday in the park, and within 15 seconds at a slow trot, my muscles were screaming, my lungs gasping, and the blood pounding in my head so hard I came down with an almost 24-hour headache. AHHHHH! I may as well have spent this entire trip laying in a hospital bed, or floating weightless in a space capsule, for the way my body has degenerated. My energy, my alertness, my spunk, my libido… all gone, dead, melted away into a pool of worthless fatty tissue. Halle, you may have to carry me off the plane in a stretcher on Wednesday night, like those astronauts who come back from Mir after two months in space. Oh, how I daydream about all the things I’ll do when I’m home, to make up for this awful deterioration: I promise myself I’ll jog up the ‘M’ every day; I’ll take my road bike up Grant Creek, or out to Alberton even, after school; I’ll take 30-mile hikes; I’ll go on three day backpack trips and fast for the duration; I’ll skin up a mountain every weekend, and maybe twice for good measure; I’ll paddle the Clarkfork through town, and then paddle back up; I’ll climb in the gym until I can’t feel my arms; I’ll NEVER drive to school; I’ll do yoga early in the mornings; I’ll sprint and strain and lead rocky mountaineer trips and learn to ice climb and not ever let a week go by without a major excursion and damnit, I’ll NEVER let myself get in this bad of shape again!
Today, though, I must say, I was in a very good mood. I was thinking about what wonderful friends I have at home, and how much I owe to my mother and father, who brought me up in just such a way… Who shaped little Lew into a young man who may not be on the fast track to Medicine or Law or his first quick million, but is wonderfully happy and knows what makes him so; takes nothing for granted; loves to live, and to love; and smiles and laughs and feels and takes risks and goes on occasional flights of unbound euphoria and is pretty sure that he’ll make sure that wherever fate carries him, he’ll always keep these things the principal force in his life and never forget how he owes it all to his good ol’ mom and dad… (*Sniff* … Thanks mom!)
Which also made me consider how grateful I am to have such a wonderful family, and though it’s small, to be so close to everyone in it, and to love them all so much! If you’re not part of that family, I’m sorry, because this is probably disgusting to read, but … hey, maybe I love you too! XOXO
Today we met Mimo (Shim’s eldest sister) and her friend Mesii, and we all drove up together from Shashemene through gorgeous mountains and farmland and villages and orchards and river valleys and old royal-family retreats to Wondo Genet, which used to be the home of the princess, Haile Selassie’s daughter. It is fantastic! A real mountain retreat, with mist in the eucalyptus, and strange little monkeys all around, and so many flowers all around in the lush moss, and trees with bright red flowers and others with bright purple, and everywhere the sounds of birds chirping in the damp leaves and gurgling water. We got two nice rooms (I’m sharing with Shime, who’s snoring like a lion right now) and after taking a little rest while it rained outside, we walked down to the hotspring just after dark. The place was positively magical: Everything was dark, but I could hear the sound of rushing water, and just make out steam rising through dark trees. We came to a place where powerful streams of hot water gush out of a cliff face and form a wonderful steaming hot shower, where Shim and I stood and let it crash down over our heads and necks and sore muscles and joints, for almost 20 minutes. The night was cool and moist and there was a good breeze carrying air fresh from the recent rain with the strange smell of eucalyptus and other unknown plants. We had the place almost entirely to ourselves, it seemed, except for a few other dark bodies which appeared more spirit than man: the dark black Ethiopians blend in so well with the night that several times I bumped right into someone in the shower and still only knew it from the feel of warm skin: even right against them I couldn’t make them out from the dark rocks and water. We moved over to the large hot pools, where water is piped directly out of the spring maybe a kilometer above on the mountain, and jets out untouchably hot into three cement baths large enough to swim short laps. Not a single other person was in the pools. I could hear monkeys making a chatter somewhere distant in the trees. The rains had made the creek which ran down next to the pools swell with muddy water, and it was now a tumbling, rushing river, which rushed down the steep hill not twenty feet away from where we swam, surging with a muffled splatter down through the roots of a giant, gnarly sycamore and cascading over a small waterfall before rushing off again into the darkness below us. There were a few dim lights hung about, which illuminated bits of dark, wet foliage, drooping banana leaves and dripping yew branches, all twisting and thick and mysterious in the drifting fog and steam… The whole place had an impossible, forbidden feel to it… like we had sneaked into Disneyland at night and were playing inside Splash Mountain: a fantasy place where people weren’t supposed to be. Or, even more, it felt like I had stumbled into Rivendel. The gushing, splashing water, the hot steam and cold air, and the dark shapes moving silently behind distantly burning lamps, the exotic lush foliage and immense mystery and delight of the place, made it all seem like something that could only be imagined, from the time of Middle Earth. I stood half in the water and watching the muddy water rush through the roots of the great, magic, lichen-drooped tree for a long time, just savoring the feeling of it, and grinning all the way to my gums in the dark. Now, I could say, Wish you were here! The land of the Lotus Eaters, indeed.
10:30pm, Rift Valley Pension, Arba Minch, October 13th:
We kidnapped a nice eighteen year old girl named Barukhat from the Crocodile Farm, and took her with us into Nechsar Park. She’d grown up in Arba Minch all her life, but had never stepped foot inside the Park, and she was very pleasant and this trip has been all about making friends everywhere we go. Picked up that nice ‘ranger’ too, forget his name, who helped us out so sportingly while we were stuck in the mud two days ago. And he brought his big gun this time.
I really enjoyed the park: we drove much further this time, all the way across the Nechsar Plain, to where the dramatic cloud-veiled mountains rise with staggering beauty up from the rift floor, in deep canyons and rocky steppes and ridges green and shaggy with exotic vegetation. I had what I’m certain has been the nicest moment of my trip so far, and may very well remain so until I’m home. We’d been approaching the feet of the mountains at the western edge of the plain, and I was watching great purple-grey rain clouds toss rain and sun across spectacular green folds. Abruptly and unexpectedly, the road plunged downward a bit and we were driving through a tunnel of great overhanging sycamores and vines, on a red-earth dirt track, with the windows down and fresh air blowing in on the front of the approaching storm. We encountered a short but treacherous mud pit, and considering the late hour and our experience of two days before, decided to make it the turn-around point. However, the guard and Shimeles and I got out and started to walk just a bit further on the road, to see what was immediately ahead. Tiny black ants appeared in ribbons across the road, in thick columns so dark they formed an opaque black band, and stepping through them, the ribbon immediately wrapped itself over my shoes and pant legs. Luckily they weren’t the biting type. Beautiful irredescent blue and green birds flitted through the underbrush, making strange chirps. Suddenly the track dropped, and disappeared straight into a swift-flowing brown river, maybe twenty feet wide, to reappear as deep, muddy tire tracks climbing the opposite bank. Need an engine snorkel to cross this one…
I loved this river. It was narrow, but deep, and muddy but very clean, and the surface was almost void of ripples, so smooth was the water. But it whipped past us at a very good rate, and I loved the smell of it, and the way it twisted and curved in sharp, blind bends, under a protective canopy of overhanging Acacias and Sycamores and other unknown arbors… leaning not oppressively, but just in such a way as to give the whole scene a feel of mystery, of excitement. I wanted more than anything to have a canoe just then, to hop in and pilot the craft on swift water through narrow bends and uncharted dark gorges, each surreal and sublime, as I was sure they’d be. Then the guide touched my shoulder and indicated upwards, into the branches of the Sycamores above us. Colobus Monkeys… five, then ten, then twenty, appeared, gazing down on us with wise, musing black faces ringed in white hair like the beard of an old ascetic, and then leapt with amazing agility and spunk through the branches of the gigantic tree, swinging and tumbling and flying, dangling alternately off of each of all four hands and tail… Their tails were the best part, long and black near the body, with a shaggy white end two to three feet long and just as nimble as the hands in flinging them about the treetop. Colobus Monkeys! In the wild!! From zoos, the Colobus have always been my favorite to watch, and here I’d found them wholly unexpectedly. It was so private and personal, too. Hadn’t seen a single other person up there the entire day, and it was quite likely we’d be the only ones today, tomorrow, the whole week perhaps. The isolation raised a tingling joy inside me, it tickled something deep down that had been neglected and ignored and that wanted so badly to stay there in the park and frolic in the gleeful alone-ness.
Before I forget, I should mention some of the things I spotted today during our six hours in Nechsar: Hornbill Toucans, Guenther’s Dik-Diks (always in pairs, with their funny tiny horns and dangling upper lip), a tortoise (which I picked up and removed from the road while he hissed at me… heavy feller!), the Burchell’s zebras, an enormous golden-maned warthog, Anubis baboons, some small Grant’s gazelles with forward pointing horns, and a herd of Swayne’s heartebeasts at a distance (I later spotted two solitary ones closer to the car, and they looked just like fantasy animals out of Narnia: great elegant animals with a shaggy hump but shaped like a large elk, only with a double set of antlers that look positively magical… or like an old multi-pronged TV antenna, if you’d prefer to think that way), and greater kudu antelopes (which are so cool, with their huge black spiraling horns), and a leopard (though only for a second) and a huge and amazing spiny thing that must be distantly related to porcupines. The Nechsar plain was spectacular, with the waving white-topped grass and poppies, yellow with blood-red centers. At one point, I got out of the car and was running ahead (Shimeles needed my fat ass out of the vehicle so he could get better clearance) and suddenly realized there was a great Kudu with its magnificent curly horns not 30 feet away and just watching me, with a big green bunch of leaves hanging out of his mouth. I thought of waiting quietly for Shimeles to drive up with the camera, but I couldn’t help myself. Some strange, long-buried predatory instinct rose up inside me and for about 10 brief seconds I was giving chase across the plains, part of the age-old game of hunter and hunted… and then I tripped on a round boulder and almost broke my ankle. Shimeles scolded me when I came back for chasing it away and foiling a good picture, but it felt good somehow, to have forced the wonderful animal to recognize and acknowledge me, to have that brief and personal interaction with it… to go away not only knowing I had seen an African Gazelle, but that it had also had a good and hard look at me.
Success with the NCSR point. Now we’re back at the hotel, and Barukat is in the next room with Shimeles. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s so damn smooth. He never fails to get any girl he wants, and he knows it. Is it just the confidence? I haven’t seen one girl say no to him. It’s amazing! It’s ridiculous! It’s inspirational! It’s… it’s… Shimeles. I guess there’s just some people who can pull that stuff off very, very well. The Naughty Professor.
In the Montana part of my brain, I’ve been thinking about kayaking, and climbing peaks, and camping under golden-leafed alders, and skiing deep powdery chutes. I was thinking about how much fun it was to kayak the north fork with Kristin this summer, and that got me thinking about the rest of my friends. Do I need more adventurers? Should I cut out all the ones that don’t pass the ‘outdoor action’ litmus test, so as to prevent my wasting any time doing things I don’t really want to do? Well, probably yes to the former and no to the latter. Should never get rid of friends, even if they have very different goals than you. It enriches the diversity of the social experience, I think. But I’ve been pledging to myself to get more involved in the right kind of social circles, especially in the Rocky Mountaineers. Meet this Forest Dean fellow. And, total nonsequitor, get involved in a ‘Negative Population Growth’ campaign too. Attend some zoning meetings, perhaps? All this travel continues to clarify the fact that what we have at home is SO unique… really nothing like it anywhere else in the world, and we’re all damn fools to let it slip through our fingers for personal profit, apathy, or lack of foresight. Gotta speak out on this one, it’ll eat me up if I don’t. Night, friends.
We kidnapped a nice eighteen year old girl named Barukhat from the Crocodile Farm, and took her with us into Nechsar Park. She’d grown up in Arba Minch all her life, but had never stepped foot inside the Park, and she was very pleasant and this trip has been all about making friends everywhere we go. Picked up that nice ‘ranger’ too, forget his name, who helped us out so sportingly while we were stuck in the mud two days ago. And he brought his big gun this time.
I really enjoyed the park: we drove much further this time, all the way across the Nechsar Plain, to where the dramatic cloud-veiled mountains rise with staggering beauty up from the rift floor, in deep canyons and rocky steppes and ridges green and shaggy with exotic vegetation. I had what I’m certain has been the nicest moment of my trip so far, and may very well remain so until I’m home. We’d been approaching the feet of the mountains at the western edge of the plain, and I was watching great purple-grey rain clouds toss rain and sun across spectacular green folds. Abruptly and unexpectedly, the road plunged downward a bit and we were driving through a tunnel of great overhanging sycamores and vines, on a red-earth dirt track, with the windows down and fresh air blowing in on the front of the approaching storm. We encountered a short but treacherous mud pit, and considering the late hour and our experience of two days before, decided to make it the turn-around point. However, the guard and Shimeles and I got out and started to walk just a bit further on the road, to see what was immediately ahead. Tiny black ants appeared in ribbons across the road, in thick columns so dark they formed an opaque black band, and stepping through them, the ribbon immediately wrapped itself over my shoes and pant legs. Luckily they weren’t the biting type. Beautiful irredescent blue and green birds flitted through the underbrush, making strange chirps. Suddenly the track dropped, and disappeared straight into a swift-flowing brown river, maybe twenty feet wide, to reappear as deep, muddy tire tracks climbing the opposite bank. Need an engine snorkel to cross this one…
I loved this river. It was narrow, but deep, and muddy but very clean, and the surface was almost void of ripples, so smooth was the water. But it whipped past us at a very good rate, and I loved the smell of it, and the way it twisted and curved in sharp, blind bends, under a protective canopy of overhanging Acacias and Sycamores and other unknown arbors… leaning not oppressively, but just in such a way as to give the whole scene a feel of mystery, of excitement. I wanted more than anything to have a canoe just then, to hop in and pilot the craft on swift water through narrow bends and uncharted dark gorges, each surreal and sublime, as I was sure they’d be. Then the guide touched my shoulder and indicated upwards, into the branches of the Sycamores above us. Colobus Monkeys… five, then ten, then twenty, appeared, gazing down on us with wise, musing black faces ringed in white hair like the beard of an old ascetic, and then leapt with amazing agility and spunk through the branches of the gigantic tree, swinging and tumbling and flying, dangling alternately off of each of all four hands and tail… Their tails were the best part, long and black near the body, with a shaggy white end two to three feet long and just as nimble as the hands in flinging them about the treetop. Colobus Monkeys! In the wild!! From zoos, the Colobus have always been my favorite to watch, and here I’d found them wholly unexpectedly. It was so private and personal, too. Hadn’t seen a single other person up there the entire day, and it was quite likely we’d be the only ones today, tomorrow, the whole week perhaps. The isolation raised a tingling joy inside me, it tickled something deep down that had been neglected and ignored and that wanted so badly to stay there in the park and frolic in the gleeful alone-ness.
Before I forget, I should mention some of the things I spotted today during our six hours in Nechsar: Hornbill Toucans, Guenther’s Dik-Diks (always in pairs, with their funny tiny horns and dangling upper lip), a tortoise (which I picked up and removed from the road while he hissed at me… heavy feller!), the Burchell’s zebras, an enormous golden-maned warthog, Anubis baboons, some small Grant’s gazelles with forward pointing horns, and a herd of Swayne’s heartebeasts at a distance (I later spotted two solitary ones closer to the car, and they looked just like fantasy animals out of Narnia: great elegant animals with a shaggy hump but shaped like a large elk, only with a double set of antlers that look positively magical… or like an old multi-pronged TV antenna, if you’d prefer to think that way), and greater kudu antelopes (which are so cool, with their huge black spiraling horns), and a leopard (though only for a second) and a huge and amazing spiny thing that must be distantly related to porcupines. The Nechsar plain was spectacular, with the waving white-topped grass and poppies, yellow with blood-red centers. At one point, I got out of the car and was running ahead (Shimeles needed my fat ass out of the vehicle so he could get better clearance) and suddenly realized there was a great Kudu with its magnificent curly horns not 30 feet away and just watching me, with a big green bunch of leaves hanging out of his mouth. I thought of waiting quietly for Shimeles to drive up with the camera, but I couldn’t help myself. Some strange, long-buried predatory instinct rose up inside me and for about 10 brief seconds I was giving chase across the plains, part of the age-old game of hunter and hunted… and then I tripped on a round boulder and almost broke my ankle. Shimeles scolded me when I came back for chasing it away and foiling a good picture, but it felt good somehow, to have forced the wonderful animal to recognize and acknowledge me, to have that brief and personal interaction with it… to go away not only knowing I had seen an African Gazelle, but that it had also had a good and hard look at me.
Success with the NCSR point. Now we’re back at the hotel, and Barukat is in the next room with Shimeles. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s so damn smooth. He never fails to get any girl he wants, and he knows it. Is it just the confidence? I haven’t seen one girl say no to him. It’s amazing! It’s ridiculous! It’s inspirational! It’s… it’s… Shimeles. I guess there’s just some people who can pull that stuff off very, very well. The Naughty Professor.
In the Montana part of my brain, I’ve been thinking about kayaking, and climbing peaks, and camping under golden-leafed alders, and skiing deep powdery chutes. I was thinking about how much fun it was to kayak the north fork with Kristin this summer, and that got me thinking about the rest of my friends. Do I need more adventurers? Should I cut out all the ones that don’t pass the ‘outdoor action’ litmus test, so as to prevent my wasting any time doing things I don’t really want to do? Well, probably yes to the former and no to the latter. Should never get rid of friends, even if they have very different goals than you. It enriches the diversity of the social experience, I think. But I’ve been pledging to myself to get more involved in the right kind of social circles, especially in the Rocky Mountaineers. Meet this Forest Dean fellow. And, total nonsequitor, get involved in a ‘Negative Population Growth’ campaign too. Attend some zoning meetings, perhaps? All this travel continues to clarify the fact that what we have at home is SO unique… really nothing like it anywhere else in the world, and we’re all damn fools to let it slip through our fingers for personal profit, apathy, or lack of foresight. Gotta speak out on this one, it’ll eat me up if I don’t. Night, friends.
October 12, Rift Valley Pension, Arba Minch, 9:45pm:
This morning, I woke up with Guinea Worm. Or so I thought. I woke up just before sunrise thinking, why is it so damn hot in this room?? I’m burning alive! Sweat pouring off my forehead. Felt like a horrible sunburn at first, but I looked in the mirror and pinched myself. No sunburn. No itchiness. Just a horrible searing heat, stinging and prickly, all over my face and spreading to my hands and elbows. What the hell’s wrong with me? Tried to wash my face, but as soon as I did, the stinging turned into a thousand fierce stabbing pains, like acupuncture gone horribly awry. Allergy? I took two benadryl and laid back down. Didn’t feel like an allergy…
Shimeles called me that it was time for breakfast, but I didn’t want to go out, not into the sun, not when I was already on fire like this. Shit, what is it?? I thumbed through my guide to African illnesses: all the possible culprits sounded horrible. The thought of trying to get health care in Arba Minch sounded even worse: dirty needles, mis-prescribed medications, skin infections… Shit! What was I going to do? I got a hold of myself and assured myself that it would pass with a little time. Just endure it for a while, it can’t go on like this…
No indeed. It proceeded to get worse. We drove to the University to pick up the data from the permanent station, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything. A friendly conversation with the guards at the meteorological observatory was excruciating… I sat squirming, pouring sweat, feeling like my skin was about to peel off my face in black chunks. Had to get back to the shower, and scrub it over and over with soap, get whatever it was off. I thought about it and decided the mosquito netting I used last night had probably been treated with some sort of chemical, and my skin was reacting to everything that had been above the covers and in contact with the net. Hoping that was it. What does Schistomiasis feel like? The travel book had about a hundred entries for various slithering parasites that could crawl into your skin and proceed to do indescribable, uncurable things to your insides, and of course a burning rash was symptomatic of every one. Took the shower and scrubbed repeatedly with soap, which felt great until I stepped out from under the water. Then the real burning started. It exploded, from my fingers up to my shoulders, and my thighs, and my face all the way back to my ears now, and I writhed on my bed, trying to do anything, think of anything, to make the burning go away. It felt like my skin should have been swollen and red, maybe oozing or cracking, but when I looked in the mirror, it was white and cool and unmarked by any sign of discomfort. I inspected for tiny mites, but saw nothing. No bites, no swelling, no redness. When I touched it hard, it didn’t hurt at all. The tse-tse flies? Mustard Gas? I had no idea, but was definitely getting scared now. Calm, be calm…
Went out to lunch with Shimeles. It felt like there was an invisible layer of acid on my skin, slowing eating through every one of my nerve ends. And then, quite rapidly, my face started burning less, and a bit later, my arms too. Slackening, slackening…
Down to a little prickliness, like wearing course wool, a persistent sensation. Phew. I think I might live. What the hell was it?
At lunch, I received much praise about my ability to eat with the injera. Starting feeling like a damn fine Ethiopian, not so farenj any more. Walking to the car, thinking about this: blending in, fitting in, savvy to the local ways, not at all like those other clueless farenj who blundered about slackjawed in their rented Land Cruisers with rented drivers and rented guides… and I proceeded to walk face-first into the metal corner of an enormous billboard, reeling backward and tripping and falling on my ass right in front of the restaurant terrace for the viewing enjoyment of the assorted local patrons. Stupid farenj! Wiping blood off my face, I looked on the bright side: This’ll make me look damn tough, and mean, and maybe now I can grimace at the local kids and they’ll run away in terror: Ahhhhh!! Scary farenji!! Big lump, right between the eyes, like a tumor. Grrr… scary farenj.
To the Ethiopian Car Wash: drive down to the river, and then, drive right on in. Young local men stripped to their underwear, or further, splash and scrub and wipe, up to their knees in the fast-flowing water, make our muddy monster cleaner, and cleaner, and cleaner. Plenty of time to sit and watch the river scene. A handsome lean washer, in hot pink spandex briefs, offers me a hunk of gnawed off sugar-cane. I gladly accept, chewing on the wet, fibrous meat and then spitting out the leavings. Wow. Sugar cane. Cool.
Handsome young men bathing all down the riverbank, on the islands and on the other shore, 30 yards distant. The river is cool and fairly clear, and fast moving and only a few feet deep. I note that American Puritanical taboos of nakedness are virtually non-existent here. A little courteous modesty, but it’s all very practical. Men and women have no problem stepping a few feet away from a busy bus stop and dropping their pants to pee. Nobody stares, nobody blushes. Naked. That’s just the way people are, without clothes on. It makes me happy, after I think about it for a minute. Why should we have this American or Arab terror of the human body exposed? Not intending to let latent homoerotic feelings emerge here, but in all honesty, while sitting and watching the ease with which the men wash and splash about together in the river, and the fellows washing our car, bending and flexing, I was fascinated by the everywhere-present perfection of the human male form: the smooth, chocolate-dark skin; the perfectly toned muscles flexing and rippling; nowhere a single instance of the obesity or anorexia that seems to plague almost every American body, of any age. Their muscles were not grossly huge, nor small or lanky. It was… beautiful… seeing how the human body was meant to be, was created to be, under the strain of hard, healthy physical labor, of eating only what one needs, of living a life of many joys and few comforts (ok, that last one is a bit metaphysical, but … somehow it showed)… And it was stimulating… not so much sexually, but in an inspirational way. Well, I suppose if I was a young American female, it would have been very stimulating, but what I saw was The Human as Art, as perfection, as beauty achieved. Or maybe I’m just kidding myself and I was fascinated by everyone’s enviously enormous schlong. Who can say?
Enough of that. It was funny how the cars got washed right in the river. Dirty, but there aren’t too many cars in this part of the country, so as of yet, it’s probably not too detrimental to the river. Goodness, rivers are really the lifeblood of this country. Everything requires the river, from farming to washing to drinking, the Ethiopian rivers are well-used.
Shim and I chewed chat. Again. Ugh! … Why can’t I just say no to that damn stuff?? It’s so awful and it always makes me feel sick, but… it’s such a social institution here. Well, after sucking on that great bitter wad of cellulose in my cheek pouch for an hour or so, I had the distinct pleasure of witnessing a revolutionary moment: Shimeles got sick on the chat. And, better yet, he swore he’d never use the stuff again, a resolution which I made sure to support wholeheartedly. Then, we watched Michael Moore’s Sicko on Shim’s computer. I’m sure if any of you have watched it, you probably had similar feelings and I don’t need to describe them here. But I just kept thinking about it all evening, and even when Shim and I went out for dinner, we had a long conversation about politics and wisdom and world-leadership, and I was thinking and thinking about how we (Americans) can’t just keep waiting for the right leader to come along and take us all out of this darkness, this national tailspin, waiting for the right movement, the right moment, the right election, waiting always on someone else to light the fuse. That’s what’s wrong with the whole damn country, I think. It’s not George Bush, it’s not his administration or our political system or the evil times we live in. It’s us. It’s us apathetic, ambivalent citizens of the USA, crying our crocodile tears for the dead in Iraq, spewing lofty ideals over booze and coffee, and always holding out the hope that by casting our one vote and crossing our fingers, everything will turn out right.
Well, it won’t turn out right, not like that. We ALL need to be leaders, we ALL need to start the change we want to see happen, be the action, be our own leaders. And if I say we, I must be implying I. I’ve been thinking, and I think our country is in a much more dire crisis that it realizes. We’ve become so focused on the Iraq war, we’re all politically myopic. We see trouble abroad, and it blinds us to the deterioration at home. Deterioration of what? Of the very ideals our country is built on, that’s what. And it’s standing (or not standing) for those ideals, living (or not living) them that will determine the future of America on the world stage. I believe we’ve reached a crisis in our country that very few realize exists. I feel that right now, these next couple years, are absolutely critical in determining what sort of a country, a people, we Americans are going to be. Will our empire become a shining beacon, a light to which other nations can steer of their own free will… or will be continue to descend in a vat of viscous rhetoric, preaching freedom while we meet the terrorists violence for violence, blood for blood, proving that we are better terrorists than they, and that we can beat them at their own game… which means they win. We’re not so far off from that end as we think, is how I feel.
Anyway, I’ve been making resolutions (Binding? Non-binding?) about my political actions when I return to my home country. I like Barak. Get the man elected. You know it’s important, so try, lead, act! Now!
I’ve been thinking a lot also about speaking out against unchecked population growth, the unplanned spread of humanity across everything that makes Montana special (or America, for that matter) with no foresight whatsoever. There are no leaders in this fight. Can I be one? Should I? I pledge to involve myself politically, and to continue to involve myself socially as well. I want to bring some fresh new blood into the Rocky Mountaineers, share my love of the wild places with others, share my joys and in doing so, spread my beliefs. Some of the things I’ve been thinking. Big plans that will come to naught? I felt very similarly when I returned home from Europe, but I seem to remember the passion and hellfire that drove my spirit was quickly extinguished once I was back home and comfortable, happy, and could easily ignore the deterioration that is marching closer and closer to my home. Will I stand up and fight this time around? Maybe. Maybe. Or what of running off into the woods and turning a blind eye so I can live the life I’ve always dreamed of? Will I turn to that before I commit myself to spending my life at war? Fight for what I love, or just love it? Or will I instead become a sweater-wearing, knee-sock tromping be-spectacled gent, always glancing back over his shoulder wistfully at the life he might have had if he’d only had the guts to grab it, and always trying to convince himself that his mediocre existence was all for the best, in the end…
Stay tuned, dear readers, for the eventual conclusion of this page-turning quandary!
This morning, I woke up with Guinea Worm. Or so I thought. I woke up just before sunrise thinking, why is it so damn hot in this room?? I’m burning alive! Sweat pouring off my forehead. Felt like a horrible sunburn at first, but I looked in the mirror and pinched myself. No sunburn. No itchiness. Just a horrible searing heat, stinging and prickly, all over my face and spreading to my hands and elbows. What the hell’s wrong with me? Tried to wash my face, but as soon as I did, the stinging turned into a thousand fierce stabbing pains, like acupuncture gone horribly awry. Allergy? I took two benadryl and laid back down. Didn’t feel like an allergy…
Shimeles called me that it was time for breakfast, but I didn’t want to go out, not into the sun, not when I was already on fire like this. Shit, what is it?? I thumbed through my guide to African illnesses: all the possible culprits sounded horrible. The thought of trying to get health care in Arba Minch sounded even worse: dirty needles, mis-prescribed medications, skin infections… Shit! What was I going to do? I got a hold of myself and assured myself that it would pass with a little time. Just endure it for a while, it can’t go on like this…
No indeed. It proceeded to get worse. We drove to the University to pick up the data from the permanent station, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything. A friendly conversation with the guards at the meteorological observatory was excruciating… I sat squirming, pouring sweat, feeling like my skin was about to peel off my face in black chunks. Had to get back to the shower, and scrub it over and over with soap, get whatever it was off. I thought about it and decided the mosquito netting I used last night had probably been treated with some sort of chemical, and my skin was reacting to everything that had been above the covers and in contact with the net. Hoping that was it. What does Schistomiasis feel like? The travel book had about a hundred entries for various slithering parasites that could crawl into your skin and proceed to do indescribable, uncurable things to your insides, and of course a burning rash was symptomatic of every one. Took the shower and scrubbed repeatedly with soap, which felt great until I stepped out from under the water. Then the real burning started. It exploded, from my fingers up to my shoulders, and my thighs, and my face all the way back to my ears now, and I writhed on my bed, trying to do anything, think of anything, to make the burning go away. It felt like my skin should have been swollen and red, maybe oozing or cracking, but when I looked in the mirror, it was white and cool and unmarked by any sign of discomfort. I inspected for tiny mites, but saw nothing. No bites, no swelling, no redness. When I touched it hard, it didn’t hurt at all. The tse-tse flies? Mustard Gas? I had no idea, but was definitely getting scared now. Calm, be calm…
Went out to lunch with Shimeles. It felt like there was an invisible layer of acid on my skin, slowing eating through every one of my nerve ends. And then, quite rapidly, my face started burning less, and a bit later, my arms too. Slackening, slackening…
Down to a little prickliness, like wearing course wool, a persistent sensation. Phew. I think I might live. What the hell was it?
At lunch, I received much praise about my ability to eat with the injera. Starting feeling like a damn fine Ethiopian, not so farenj any more. Walking to the car, thinking about this: blending in, fitting in, savvy to the local ways, not at all like those other clueless farenj who blundered about slackjawed in their rented Land Cruisers with rented drivers and rented guides… and I proceeded to walk face-first into the metal corner of an enormous billboard, reeling backward and tripping and falling on my ass right in front of the restaurant terrace for the viewing enjoyment of the assorted local patrons. Stupid farenj! Wiping blood off my face, I looked on the bright side: This’ll make me look damn tough, and mean, and maybe now I can grimace at the local kids and they’ll run away in terror: Ahhhhh!! Scary farenji!! Big lump, right between the eyes, like a tumor. Grrr… scary farenj.
To the Ethiopian Car Wash: drive down to the river, and then, drive right on in. Young local men stripped to their underwear, or further, splash and scrub and wipe, up to their knees in the fast-flowing water, make our muddy monster cleaner, and cleaner, and cleaner. Plenty of time to sit and watch the river scene. A handsome lean washer, in hot pink spandex briefs, offers me a hunk of gnawed off sugar-cane. I gladly accept, chewing on the wet, fibrous meat and then spitting out the leavings. Wow. Sugar cane. Cool.
Handsome young men bathing all down the riverbank, on the islands and on the other shore, 30 yards distant. The river is cool and fairly clear, and fast moving and only a few feet deep. I note that American Puritanical taboos of nakedness are virtually non-existent here. A little courteous modesty, but it’s all very practical. Men and women have no problem stepping a few feet away from a busy bus stop and dropping their pants to pee. Nobody stares, nobody blushes. Naked. That’s just the way people are, without clothes on. It makes me happy, after I think about it for a minute. Why should we have this American or Arab terror of the human body exposed? Not intending to let latent homoerotic feelings emerge here, but in all honesty, while sitting and watching the ease with which the men wash and splash about together in the river, and the fellows washing our car, bending and flexing, I was fascinated by the everywhere-present perfection of the human male form: the smooth, chocolate-dark skin; the perfectly toned muscles flexing and rippling; nowhere a single instance of the obesity or anorexia that seems to plague almost every American body, of any age. Their muscles were not grossly huge, nor small or lanky. It was… beautiful… seeing how the human body was meant to be, was created to be, under the strain of hard, healthy physical labor, of eating only what one needs, of living a life of many joys and few comforts (ok, that last one is a bit metaphysical, but … somehow it showed)… And it was stimulating… not so much sexually, but in an inspirational way. Well, I suppose if I was a young American female, it would have been very stimulating, but what I saw was The Human as Art, as perfection, as beauty achieved. Or maybe I’m just kidding myself and I was fascinated by everyone’s enviously enormous schlong. Who can say?
Enough of that. It was funny how the cars got washed right in the river. Dirty, but there aren’t too many cars in this part of the country, so as of yet, it’s probably not too detrimental to the river. Goodness, rivers are really the lifeblood of this country. Everything requires the river, from farming to washing to drinking, the Ethiopian rivers are well-used.
Shim and I chewed chat. Again. Ugh! … Why can’t I just say no to that damn stuff?? It’s so awful and it always makes me feel sick, but… it’s such a social institution here. Well, after sucking on that great bitter wad of cellulose in my cheek pouch for an hour or so, I had the distinct pleasure of witnessing a revolutionary moment: Shimeles got sick on the chat. And, better yet, he swore he’d never use the stuff again, a resolution which I made sure to support wholeheartedly. Then, we watched Michael Moore’s Sicko on Shim’s computer. I’m sure if any of you have watched it, you probably had similar feelings and I don’t need to describe them here. But I just kept thinking about it all evening, and even when Shim and I went out for dinner, we had a long conversation about politics and wisdom and world-leadership, and I was thinking and thinking about how we (Americans) can’t just keep waiting for the right leader to come along and take us all out of this darkness, this national tailspin, waiting for the right movement, the right moment, the right election, waiting always on someone else to light the fuse. That’s what’s wrong with the whole damn country, I think. It’s not George Bush, it’s not his administration or our political system or the evil times we live in. It’s us. It’s us apathetic, ambivalent citizens of the USA, crying our crocodile tears for the dead in Iraq, spewing lofty ideals over booze and coffee, and always holding out the hope that by casting our one vote and crossing our fingers, everything will turn out right.
Well, it won’t turn out right, not like that. We ALL need to be leaders, we ALL need to start the change we want to see happen, be the action, be our own leaders. And if I say we, I must be implying I. I’ve been thinking, and I think our country is in a much more dire crisis that it realizes. We’ve become so focused on the Iraq war, we’re all politically myopic. We see trouble abroad, and it blinds us to the deterioration at home. Deterioration of what? Of the very ideals our country is built on, that’s what. And it’s standing (or not standing) for those ideals, living (or not living) them that will determine the future of America on the world stage. I believe we’ve reached a crisis in our country that very few realize exists. I feel that right now, these next couple years, are absolutely critical in determining what sort of a country, a people, we Americans are going to be. Will our empire become a shining beacon, a light to which other nations can steer of their own free will… or will be continue to descend in a vat of viscous rhetoric, preaching freedom while we meet the terrorists violence for violence, blood for blood, proving that we are better terrorists than they, and that we can beat them at their own game… which means they win. We’re not so far off from that end as we think, is how I feel.
Anyway, I’ve been making resolutions (Binding? Non-binding?) about my political actions when I return to my home country. I like Barak. Get the man elected. You know it’s important, so try, lead, act! Now!
I’ve been thinking a lot also about speaking out against unchecked population growth, the unplanned spread of humanity across everything that makes Montana special (or America, for that matter) with no foresight whatsoever. There are no leaders in this fight. Can I be one? Should I? I pledge to involve myself politically, and to continue to involve myself socially as well. I want to bring some fresh new blood into the Rocky Mountaineers, share my love of the wild places with others, share my joys and in doing so, spread my beliefs. Some of the things I’ve been thinking. Big plans that will come to naught? I felt very similarly when I returned home from Europe, but I seem to remember the passion and hellfire that drove my spirit was quickly extinguished once I was back home and comfortable, happy, and could easily ignore the deterioration that is marching closer and closer to my home. Will I stand up and fight this time around? Maybe. Maybe. Or what of running off into the woods and turning a blind eye so I can live the life I’ve always dreamed of? Will I turn to that before I commit myself to spending my life at war? Fight for what I love, or just love it? Or will I instead become a sweater-wearing, knee-sock tromping be-spectacled gent, always glancing back over his shoulder wistfully at the life he might have had if he’d only had the guts to grab it, and always trying to convince himself that his mediocre existence was all for the best, in the end…
Stay tuned, dear readers, for the eventual conclusion of this page-turning quandary!
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