EDSONATRA Hotel, October 7th, 9:00pm… My tiny room:
I was thinking just now about cities. Cities are strange to me… how do people find any kind of satisfactory existence in these places? It seems that the number of things you can do in a city are very limited: you can spend money to indulge your senses: eating, music, dancing. You can buy things. You can strive to make money, so that the cycle can be continued. You can occupy yourself with the ever ongoing pursuit of the opposite sex, the holy grail of satisfaction. Aside: Shimeles was telling me the other day of an Indian new-age prophet several decades ago who came to the States and attracted quite a following by preaching that the way to salvation was attainment of complete satisfaction on earth (a satisfied person does not sin), and that the only way to achieve this was total freedom of sexual intercourse. I think the poor man was woefully misled by his own dissatisfactions, though it’s a popular fallacy. Sex = satisfaction. Ahhh… just like $$ = satisfaction, right friends? Or What You Don’t Have Enough Of In Infinite Quantity = Satisfaction. Striving, striving, and always unhappy. OK, end of aside. But I was musing about cities. Could I ever be happy in one? I’m back in Addis: the bed is firm, the climate is ideal, and if you’re willing to sell your soul, you just might find an internet connection that can open your email before the arrival of the third Ethiopian millennium. What I mean is, I’m starting to like this city. The Montana Boy in Urban Africa terror is finally wearing off, and I’m getting comfortable. It’s funny, actually, how the simplest things provided me with hours and days of struggle, because I was so afraid of everything. Without my trusty African guide Shimeles, how will I eat out? How will I buy clothes? How will I get around, see sights, shop, do laundry, have fun? What if I get robbed, cheated, mugged, lost, imprisoned, scandalized, infected, sold to slave labor in the salt mines? Things are very different, but not so entirely hostile. This small-town boy is learning, bit by bit, that you can get what you want, all by yourself, if you just try. So I’m wearing my new wonderful shirt, not so expensive. I have plans to go to a jazz club, to the Ethnological Museum, to explore the town and maybe buy some souvenirs. And I finally got over my fear of eating at a nice restaurant *gasp* all alone. I went to a wonderful Indian restaurant (thank God, a break finally from Ethiopian food!) and read a GIS newsletter I found at the hotel, and enjoyed my food and my solitude (solifood?) and was feeling quite good about myself walking back in the dark. I don’t notice anymore that everyone’s black and I’m white, except occasionally when I see a white person and find myself gawking at them. I know how to avoid the simple scams, and actually, Addis is probably one of the safest cities I’ve traveled to. So what more could I want? …Out of here. Out of Africa. Got an email from Kristin Kienitz today raving about the natural wonders of New Zealand’s North Island. Wanted to know all about Africa.
Well, there’s no Natural Wonders here… not in the same way, anyhow. My view may be very narrow at this point, but I’ll take the liberties: Africa is not about seeing beautiful views, not about recreation or fun vacations or historic sites or meeting quaint villagers or kicking loose or kicking back or any of those things you usually write about from a foreign country. Africa defies definition. It is harsh, real, unglamorous and human. The sun burns you, the smog chokes you, and no matter how rich or famous you are, you can’t escape the anarchy of its infrastructure or the suffering in its slums. I wanted to send postcards to my friends with a picture of lava flowing from a volcano, and write on the back: Afar is so cool! Wish you were here!
But there are no postcards in Afar. There are no post offices. As far as I was concerned, there were no lava lakes or smoldering sulfur pits either. They are somewhere in the desert, yes, but they are haunted by roving bands of Eritrean guerrillas, infiltrating past the Ethiopian lines and causing any mayhem they can. There are no wild places here like American wildernesses are wild. Every place here has been marked by the hand of humanity: its jealousies, its vendettas, its miseries, its wars. What should I write home? The children carry rifles. Wish you were here! Somehow, the joys I carry back with me from this place must be more poignant, more reverent, more human than those superficial pleasures that can be expressed on the back of a 5x7 photograph in the mail.
I was thinking back to the placement of our last satellite, in a place called Tendaho, where Teddy and I walked about a rocky barren hilltop searching for bedrock and wondering how we’d find someone to guard the receiver when there couldn’t possibly be a living soul within 60 kilometers of that desolate place. The sun was beating down on our necks with a heat so searing and immediate, it was like receiving lashes. Yet suddenly appeared, out of nowhere, a small boy herding goats with a staff made of metal rebar. He whistled, and seven others appeared, all small boys and girls, all goatherds, all Afars. They acted as grown men and women, at first, and Teddy and I discussed quite seriously with them, asking permission to plant the satellite. Terms were discussed, and the eldest of the boys, perhaps eight or ten years old, acted with all the authority which he assured us had been vested to him as the guardian of the area. Yet slowly, we prodded them with jokes and smiles and treated them as equals and friends and, when a fly tried vigorously to enter Teddy’s ear canal with amusing effect, all of us broke into childish laughter. We made friends, took photos together, joked around, made inquiries, and I left the site thinking that this had been perhaps the most wonderful day of my Afar campaign: I had revealed that, under a thick veneer of sour adulthood produced by early, excessive hardship and burdensome responsibility, these Afar kids were still kids. Living under the most oppressive conditions, they still had lively young hearts that had not yet turned cold.
When we went to pick up the receiver from the site two days later, I tried to joke with the eldest, Muhammed, and to trade shy smiles with the smallest boy, who had hid his face from me two days before. But things were different today: it was all business. The children did not smile much, pokerfaces every one, and they had swapped goatherd staffs for polished AK-47s. The youngest brandished his gun, roughly as tall as he was, with the authority that comes only from knowing how to use something well. Shimeles began to go over the receipt agreement for the guarding services, but I could tell there was argument. Muhammed received 200 Birr stoically, unimpressed. He counted it with displeasure, then signaled to Shimeles that he did not agree. What about the other boys? They also should receive 200 Birr. Nevermind that this was probably more than these boys had ever before held in the palm of a small hand. It was not enough. The youngest had moved between us and the vehicle and was frowning with a kind of fearsome aggressiveness that I had not even hinted in him before. The money, the guns, the stoical faces: something was so wrong here, it made me horribly jittery. Teddy and I quickly and silently gathered the equipment and put it in the car while Shimeles insisted the price was fair. I felt as though I had stepped onto that island in Lord of the Flies. I did not really understand the score. Shimeles made a grand protest and hopped in the vehicle in a flurry of indignation which I saw at once was intended to throw the kids into uncertainty long enough to distance ourselves from their calculating little brains. It did not work: They were not impressed or moved in the slightest, and speeding away, I saw the reality in their dark faces quite clearly at that instant: they were calm, cold; making that decision: kill us; let us go.
What lessons should I take home from this, what heartwarming analogies should I draw about the humanness of Africa? Should I try to forget about that second day, and remember the way we all posed smiling for a photograph, comrades and friends? Do I shrug it off as a cultural or circumstantial peculiarity, pass them all off as a tribe of hoodlums? Or do I send that postcard: Africa is beautiful! Wish you were here!