8:00pm, October 8, My little meditation cell at the EDSONATRA:
I had emailed Becks yesterday to let her know we were back in Addis, summing up the results of our trip, asking a few questions, and trying to explain the reason for our premature return. I feel a little guilty for coming back after only two weeks in the field, when the itinerary called for three and a half. Yet being completely honest with myself (and with you, dear readers!) there was really nothing I could do to delay our return any later than I did. I was never the one pushing for our return to Addis, and in fact it was Shimeles who stated from the beginning that we’d be lucky to get six points surveyed before returning, and that it was a damn foolish thing to push for more than 48 hours per site. I resisted as best I could: I got the ok from Becky to chop a day off the recording time for each site if we had to, and let that one slide… but I let it slide more because I could tell from the beginning that Shimeles’ first priority was to get the hell out of the Afar, and I would have to choose between more days per site or more sites total, so I went with more sites. Even sick with diarrhea and a cold and sunburn, I pushed us to get as much as we could every day, and did my damnedest to keep everyone optimistic about the whole affair. In the end, I coaxed a whole extra week and twice as many points out of Teddy and Shimeles, and under the admittedly trying circumstances, I think that it was honestly admirable. But I also feel a little let down by Shimeles in his insistence that we bail from the Afar so quickly. If he only wanted to give a week in the field, he should have made that known to Becky from the start, and not let her create a 24-day field itinerary for us with expectations of 22 sites to be surveyed. I don’t understand why he waited until I was here to decide to cut the whole thing short. Yes, it was uncomfortable and hot and dangerous, but it was not THAT uncomfortable or dangerous the entire time, and I made it clear that it would be very beneficial to continue to search for better sites between Mille and Logiya, and between Gewane and Mille, and near Awash… and he made it clear that he wanted to get the hell out of there, extra sites be damned. I know Teddy shared that opinion, but poor Teddy got dragged into something he was not at all prepared for, and I understood that. I wish that the car had been mine… without control of transportation, I couldn’t force us to search out bedrock in places where locating it was difficult. But I didn’t understand why Shimeles refused to do more searching than half-an-hour’s driving on one or two dirt roads at any one location. He seemed quite reluctant, actually, to really LOOK for bedrock where we needed to hunt for it a bit, and totally unwilling to get out of the car and walk a little. If one or two roads around a town didn’t reveal anything obvious, we were moving on, despite my protests that we should inspect a few other nearby locations. Especially aggravating, considering his willingness to drive to the ends of the earth to check out some mechanical problem on an acquaintance’s excavator. I just felt that he really didn’t want to be there, putting in sites, and despite his incredible skill at negotiation and friend-making, it made him a rather poor partner to perform the Afar fieldwork with. Perhaps I’m being a bit too harsh, but I feel a lot of pressure from Becky about my performance in the region, and I feel like it’s truly unfair to lay all the blame of underperformance on my shoulders alone. Perhaps I could have been more aggressive about what I expected us to do, but Shim has a strong personality, and I think the last thing we needed was a clash and poor relations between the two of us. And when he decided we would leave on the 6th, he was really leaving on the 6th, with or without me.
Perhaps I feel the need to explain all this because I got a reply email from Becky today, in which she was obviously less than thrilled about what I had written to her, and it stung a bit the way her impatience showed through so clearly, considering my own self-consciousness about my performance as her master’s student. It isn’t that bad, because I really know I did the best I could, but I feel a little betrayed by the man Becky was raving to me about, as being ‘so awesome.’ I’ve even been having these horrible dreams at night, panic dreams, always about the work or about Becky and my failing this task. In one, about the time we were in Kasagita, I dreamed I’d forgotten some critical item without which the whole Afar campaign couldn’t proceed, and that I’d bought a plane ticket home with my own money so I could get the part from Becky’s office and then go back to the Afar and continue without her noticing, but she caught me back in her office, and when she saw me, she had the most excruciatingly disappointed look on her face, and I could read her thoughts clear as day: He came back, he failed, he was the wrong person, I chose the wrong student for the job, my misgivings were correct, I should never have sent him to do this work, he was a mistake! I woke up in a cold sweat, with a crushing pain in my chest. Recently, I had another dream in which I was searching frantically over and over a vast, desert plain, still in the Afar, still searching for bedrock and finding none, sensing my failure become more certain and more complete with every passing moment. Twenty-two points and I had none, and the days were passing, passing, and I was frantic, helpless, insane. The panic was so palpable, the feeling of dread so fully enveloping that I awoke feeling a little sick and with a bad case of heartburn. Obviously, I have some fear of failure issues recently that I need to come to terms with. Self-doubt like this is something relatively new for me, and I’m not exactly sure why I’m suffering from it now, after all these years, but I don’t like it and it has to stop.
So, Becks wrote, … well, I should just include the email here to let the readers decide whether or not I’m being paranoid:
“Hi, Lewis. What's going on with the batteries/solar charging? You
really should not be having power problems in a place as sunny as the
Afar. Are you using the tiny UNAVCO batteries, or the car batteries
that I bought last time? If the former, please switch to the
latter. If the latter, please try to figure out why they are not
charging. Power problems can be a real disaster, as data from a
'flickering' site is very hard to use and not so high in quality.

As for the rest of the work, the highest priority is to collect data
from the continuous sites. In fact, since Shime has stuff to do in
Addis this week, I suggest that you grab one of his students and go
pick up the NAZR data yourself. It's just a few hours drive to
Nazret, and you could stay there over one night. That way you're not
hanging around Addis. It makes sense to do Arba Minch and Robe in
one trip, because you can sort of drive a loop. If Shimeles needs
more time in Addis, though, you could possibly drive or fly up to
Bahar Dar and get those data too. If you have time in Arba Minch,
remeasuring the Nechisar point would be great.

I don't understand how you charged the drill straight from the wall.
Don't ever do that again. Wall voltage there is 220 V and the
charger is only built for 100 V so it should blow all the fuses
inside the charger immediately. Maybe when you are in Addis, you
could find a place to get a transformer. I'm sure there are stores
on the Bole Road that sell things like that to adapt American
electronics.

Moneywise, Shimeles should have gotten the jeep rental fee
transferred into his account. Will you please check that it
arrived? It's very expensive to transfer money there, so I think
I'll assume that your $1000 is enough for now. It should be less
expensive in the south than in the Afar. Let me know by phone when
you get to $500.

Finally, you can leave one on my receivers there (the one that was
there all along). You should bring the two you came with, plus the
UNAVCO unit. Or, Shimeles I think has money already for shipping the
UNAVCO unit back, so you could send it that way if you can manage
it. They are really miffed that it's been sitting in Ethiopia for so
long, so no matter what, make sure it leaves the Observatory.

Good work in the Afar. I'm glad you guys are back safely.

Best regards,
Becks”

Also, I’ve been feeling a little guilty about making that third trip to get the Y034 point. We had a very bad incident in Paradiso, picking up the satellite there, and it was massively compounded by the fact that my decision to set up Y034 meant we had to pass back through Paradiso three times, after our safety there had been severely compromised. I found myself cursing that fellow from the Geothermal Station who had so angered the local Afars in the first place and potentially sewn the seeds of that later explosive situation, but really it could have happened anyway and the real problem was that instead of picking up the equipment and paying the 200 Birr like we said and getting the hell out of there for good, we gave them time to plot and scheme while they knew damn well we had to come back through Paradiso at least once, and it was a horrible day all day on that drive to Manda, wondering what kind of shit was going to unfold if they stopped us on the road in Paradiso. It was a damn miracle that a rain/lightning storm happened to exactly coincide with our passing back through and caused enough distraction that we managed to speed through Paradiso at about eighty miles per hour, no one saying a word, before their gunmen could scramble down to the road, but we saw them running down with rifles, and nobody said anything in the car after that for a long while and we all knew how bad it could have been and why we’d been in that situation, and I mumbled that I was really sorry and Shimeles said that we ought to be damn thankful that it turned out like it did, and everyone was quiet again for a long while after that.
Ahh, I even wrote about it in this journal, I think, before that happened, that going back for that point could be a big mistake. Well, no harm came to us, and we got what we needed, and it’s easy to forget about it now. But in thinking of that, maybe Shimeles really was quite right in insisting that we not stay longer in the Afar than absolutely necessary. The danger never seems real until you’re in some deep shit and regretting you weren’t more wary of it. It’s just hard to know.
Well, we also went and saw one of the Geothermal sites near Serdo on our second-to-last day up there, and saw some wild boars and baboons and a veritable ‘mud volcano,’ which was certainly cool, and what I’d been hoping to see at least once while in the Afar… but I’m a spoiled little traveler, and I have to say that compared to anything at Yellowstone, it was pretty bland and unexciting. Everyone seemed concerned that I would fall in, while they all danced far closer to the edge than I. Made it a little hard to enjoy myself sometimes, you know… Feel bad about Shim and Teddy babysitting me, but whenever I try to wander off by myself, even just 20 meters away to go pee, they always shout after me, “Don’t go too far away, Lewis!” Started to feel like a big white toddler. Grrrr…
Teddy and Shimeles were funny. So different! Shimeles seems so world-wise and pragmatic, and he’s seen and been through so much (i.e. his horrible and fascinating story of survival during the years of Red Terror under the Derg, while his family was being executed under suspicion of being ‘counter-revolutionary’), and if he seems a bit arrogant at times, I must grant him a very great deal of respect. Teddy is dark and handsome and has a face which fits his impressively complete innocence in all worldly matters. He is astoundingly Protestant Christian, in a way that I thought you didn’t find outside the United States these days. He doesn’t preach, and certainly doesn’t give off any hint of holier-than-thou feelings. He is instantly likeable, humble and friendly and interesting and interested, a good listener, curious, with a good sense of humor and a good heart. I liked him immediately, before I even knew his name or that he was Shimeles’ masters student, and it was a total and wonderful surprise when he suddenly decided to come along. Of course, the decision was prompted by a desperation to have help from Shimeles in working on his thesis before the fall semester officially starts up here, and with Shimeles disappearing into the desert with me for several weeks, this was Teddy’s only chance. (Sadly, I think he only got about maybe 12 hours of help from Shim over the entire course of the two weeks, for all his labor and suffering and endless help with my project, of which he officially has no part at all.)
What’s really funny, though, is the way that Teddy’s religious convictions aggravated the hell out of Shimeles, who seemed to take it as his solemn duty to root out and destroy Teddy’s faith in Jesus before the trip was through. Poor kid. I don’t know how many times in the car, for lack of anything else to do, Shimeles would draw Teddy out into a conversation of faith, and then go on the attack, professing to be exposing Teddy’s complete naivety in all matters worldly and religious. Shimeles himself, it seemed, had done quite a bit of study, both of various religions and of his own spirituality, in what sounded to have been a tumultuous period of spiritual self-doubt… His knowledge of religious texts and ideologies was vast, and his final determination- that organized religions had hijacked and sabotaged the true nature of God- was firm and self-righteous. Over and over again, I would half-listen while an animated debate raged from the front seat to the back, from Amharic to English and back to Amharic again, about the true nature of God and his love and his holy spirit, etcetera etcetera etcetera.
But however innocent and naïve, Teddy’s faith was strong and I don’t think Shimeles managed to shake it in the slightest… and I was a bit annoyed at him actually, because Teddy’s religious convictions are his own personal business, and he doesn’t harass anyone else with them or act lordly over anyone or preach or condemn… he simply believes strongly in what he believes, and acts according to those beliefs. How many times did Shimeles give the poor kid (he’s 29, I shouldn’t call him a kid) shit about closing himself off to the world, about not dancing or drinking or listening to pop music or staying up late and flirting with girls who were not his girlfriend, about refusing himself the pleasures God has granted us in deference of some bastardized ideology of fear and intolerance. I mean, Shimu may have had a point, and I would have no problem of holding an open discussion with Teddy to try to understand his point of view more fully and to perhaps open his eyes as well, but … the way Shimeles went about it, so viciously… I certainly didn’t feel like he was the one to be preaching about religious tolerance.