Rodeo, 2:00am, Sept. 22:
My terror of the Afar increases. Afars are famed, I’m told, for doing things their way, which is usually rather disagreeable to anyone else. Used to trade in contraband, and so are used to getting large sums of money quite easily, so they have an inflated sense of money compared to the rest of Ethiopia. That in addition to their association of all white travelers with a goldmine bank account in Switzerland. I’ve heard that if your car breaks down in Afar, the locals will demand 35,000Birr just to prevent them from dismantling it for several days. And Shimeles tells me that previously guards have demanded a “fair” price of 700 Birr to watch the unit for three days, considering it will require bringing their entire family along and paying the elders to stay up all night chewing chat and praying for them. Well, we will be at the whim of the Afars, but I can only hope they are in an agreeable mood. I have hopes that we can set up sites at army outposts along the way, or that the army will be so thick up in that region that the safety of our sites may be guaranteed. I’ve been assured that destruction of monument pins is widespread, so I’ll endeavor to conceal everything as well as I can after using it, i.e. countersinking and dusting the pins.
Teodros is coming with us! Hurrah! He’s the student at the Geophysical Observatory who, of all those I met, I liked the most and instantly bonded with. Plus his English is good, and he’s Shimeles’ masters student, studying magnetic imaging of hot springs. Goodness, there’s a feral cat somewhere outside my window making a horrible racket. The cats here are the most awfully bedraggled creatures I’ve ever seen. There was one outside the hotel this morning laying unfeelingly in a puddle of it’s own blood or vomit or something, covered in oil and oozing from the eyes. Left to their own devices in cities like this, the cats become little different from how I imagine sewer rats in old London. It is not hard for me to compare the cat to the children I see while driving around with Shimeles who lay prostate (dead?) on the median strip of car-clogged, smog-choked avenues, seemingly dead to the world while chaotic traffic pounds by within inches on either side, spewing filth and dust and black exhaust. Why? Could they find no better place to die? Perhaps it is out of consideration for their fellows, so no one has to step over them on the busy sidewalks.
I am starting to look at the shantytowns which border every main thoroughfare through a different light. I’ve been inspecting them more closely, and if you replace the corrugated steel sheeting with mudbrick or sticks, they would be quite comparable to the Berber villages I encountered in the High Atlas, which I found quite quaint. Though there are certainly varying degrees, for the most part the inhabitants of these towns, which I’m finding to be probably 90% of the population of Addis, don’t seem particularly miserable or destitute. Barely scraping by, certainly, but doing so with great pluck and joviality. Most people I see entering or leaving the shantytowns are dressed smartly and seem engaged. Perhaps it is just the result of a recently rural populace, re-creating to the best of their abilities the rural Ethiopian village environment within the confines of this new urban locality. It’s easy to draw parallels to industrializing London, though of course I was never there, but the city seems to be born of a people who are wholly new and alien to the concept of a city, and have no experience to draw from as of yet to create of the suburban masterpieces of calm and order which are so often encountered in the United States.
I’m glad that I’m seeing things in new ways, opening my eyes a bit more and looking from new angles. It fills out the experience immensely. I can’t admit to have completely overcome the initial subconscious terror of being the one gringo in a sea of millions of unfamiliar black faces, not speaking the language or understanding the culture and finding everything on the surface to seem morbidly undesirable by American standards… but I’m getting there, making progress. I talked at length with Rihel (the manager of this place… which isn’t really called the Rodeo, I discovered) and Hewitt and Rhokia at Rihel’s popular eating establishment, the Elephant Walk, just up the street. Shimeles joined us, and I think maybe he likes me just a bit more now that he sees I made some local friends without his help. I like Shimeles, and we laugh a fair bit, but I get the distinct feeling he isn’t that interested in me as a person, (never asks anything about me) and is perhaps somewhat annoyed at having to babysit me for five weeks. I’m particularly fond of Hewitt, the hair stylist. She seems genuinely wise and thoughtful, is engaging and fun to talk to and quite interesting. Rhokia is amusing… a brash, rebellious type, a Somali who now lives in Melboure and doesn’t take any shit from anyone and makes sure they all know it… but she’s a little too prickly and righteous for prolonged conversation. Rihel’s brother, Ceesigh, I very much liked, but didn’t see him today. Perhaps he chewed a little too much chat last night.
The food here, I find, is quite spectacular when taken in small amounts. One large meal of injera a day seems to suit me quite fine. I had a small salad today with iceburg lettuce and cheap Italian dressing, and couldn’t believe how much I missed green vegetables. I suspect it will only start to get worse. I should have taken Halle’s bottle of liquid amino… I see grave vitamin deficiencies in the near future. The injera is an enormous sourdough pancake, quite thin, which has fermented for three days before being swiftly cooked on an enormous ceramic pan, and is smooth on top and bubbly on the bottom, perhaps more like a doughy crepe than a pancake. I like it quite a bit, though it’s not much by itself. Everything else, soup, spices, pastes, potatoes, stewed meat (beef, lamb, goat) and spinach and rice and hot chilies and the odd cooked vegetable are all dumped unceremoniously onto the center of the enormous injera, which is like a playful edible sponge, and you tear from the bare edges of the thing to mop up (there’s really no other word for it), with your right hand, all the gooey greasy goodness in the center of the dish. The locals do a lot of squeezing and pinching and pick up the goop along with the wetted injera on the bottom of the dish and squeeze it all together until juice runs out from between crimped fingers and “compose the perfect bite,” as Shimeles says, before inserting into a wide open mouth… Theirs or someone else’s, the latter a common practice which conveys affection, but Shimeles finds impractical and a little disgusting, and I think would be rather alarming, considering the messiness of the food and the fact that most of the feeder’s hand has to enter the eater’s mouth in order not to create a mess. Whoever is being fed, the right hand gets extremely greasy, and handwashing before and after eating is a must, a practice I admittedly rarely follow back home. The left hand, while not used to any great extent, does not seem to be totally relegated to hide in the shadowy lap for the meal. It seems to be alright to use it to assist in the tearing of the dry injera, a feat which is quite difficult one-handed. I have yet to try any coffee other than a macchiato, which is good but… why can’t I just have my damn coffee black?? The other beverage I’ve become familiar with is Ambo natural mineral water (sky-high in sodium, bottled from limestone springs high in carbonate in Ambo, to the west) sometimes poured into an orange soda, like Fanta or something. We ate Italian pasta for dinner tonight, and I must say it was simple and cheap and far better than anything I had while in Italy, with only a few exceptions, those times I dished out over 30 Euros for a meal. Here, I have yet to spend more than $3.50 in a single setting, and usually waddle out of a place clutching my bloated stomach. I’m probably going to get quite fat if we stay here much longer. All day driving and sitting and eating… I’m afraid to walk too much because I feel a little embattled by the smog and the throngs and the shouting and honking and the general chaos, and the fact that while every street is a virtual wall of shopfronts, there really isn’t much I’m interested in perusing. Or maybe it’s just that I’m still scared. Anyway, I need to go back to bed, but if I remember, I’ll discuss the excitement of city driving tomorrow.