21 January 2008

In the midst of all the delicious novelty, life here has organized itself into a series of comfortable routines.

I wake up in the morning and go for a run in the countryside just beyond my edge of town. At 6:30 in the morning, the sun's first rays are just beginning to break over the ridge of hills in the distance. As I run, I watch the sky ahead of me as it morphs through cool blues and purples, wisps of powder pink, and fiery reds, oranges, and yellows. On my return trip, the sun has established itself prominently in the clear sky, beaming down upon golden teff fields and the farmers who have already begun their day's work in them. The elevation (just over 2400 meters) and irregular footing of the rocky dirt roads add a distinctive aspect of challenge to running here, as do the herds of goats, sheep, cows, and donkeys that force me from the path from time to time. But, as in Welliso, I receive encouragement from those I pass in the form of garbled AngloAmharic exclamations, such as, "How are you the sport?!" and, "Oh my Cristos you are very fast!" (I confess here to the world that I try to slow my breathing whenever I pass someone on the road, so as not to reveal how winded running at elevation first thing in the morning really makes me. A short blonde girl must do what she can to look tough.)

Two days a week, I ride the neon green 18-speed across town to KB's house for meetings with our Amharic tutor. We struggle to discern the incredibly complex grammatical patterns underlying the Amharic language and wonder at least once during each session if we will ever be able to speak beyond the level of an Ethiopian five-year-old. Meanwhile, pantsless, dirt-covered, two-year-old Abi presses his face against the large front window to stare in at us, wondering when it will finally be time to play.

During these meetings, I leave the 18-speed at the local kebele office on the main road, so as not to endure the trial of dragging it down the steep, unridable hill to KB's house and back up again. Occasionally, I'll decide to spend the night on KB's couch, meaning the 18-speed stays overnight inside the kebele compound. The first time I did this, I had a brief moment of dread when I arrived the next morning to see a large pile of construction debris where my bike had been chained to the building. As office workers rushed to remove rusty sheets of corrugated tin and splintering wooden logs piece-by-piece from the haphazard heap, however, I saw the neon glow of the 18-speed emerge from underneath and realized that the heap had been assembled as a protective shelter.

The rest of my workdays are spent in talking to the directors of various local organizations and observing their programs. I am steadily gaining a clearer picture of this "network of HIV/AIDS response" inside of which I am expected to "serve as a link" and "identify gaps". I am also getting the picture that, over the next two years, I will be called upon to edit (read: completely redraft) many awkward and often incomprehensible project proposals written in non-native English in order to court foreign donors.

Shopping, once a daunting exercise in navigating innumerable stores and stalls and haggling down inflated farenji prices, has also settled into a manageable routine now that KB and I have established our "dembegnas" (the vendors of whom we are regular customers, who treat us generously in return). There is the seller of household items who will not let us escape without first having tea and bread. There is the seller of kitchen utensils who likes to talk to me about his side career as a writer (and who also will not let us escape without first having tea and bread). There is the store owner from whom we always buy peanut butter, who now has jars ready in hand before we even make it up to his counter. There is the store owner who always gives us free UAE-imported chocolates. There is our vegetable woman in the market (also KB's neighbor) who, rather than selling us items from the palette displayed in front of her, reaches into the sacks kept behind her for the VIP vegetables. And finally, there is the highlight of my Debremarkos experience, a small dry goods store stocked with tall sacks of flours, grains, legumes, dried chiles, and fresh spices of all varieties – and felicitously staffed by a kindly old man and his rather attractive son. For a young Southern girl who loves to cook, there's just something about a handsome foreign man surrounded by the smells of cinnamon and coriander…

Even some of our personal interactions with the community have taken on an air of the routine. We proceed effortlessly in Amharic through the same series of questions asked by everyone in greeting. (How are you? Are you fine? Is it good? Is it selam [peace]? How is Debremarkos? Have you adjusted? The weather condition, does it suit you? Ethiopia, how do you see it? How is work? How are you? Are you fine?) We laugh off the postman's daily request that we take him with us to America. I have tea and bread with Tsintayo at her family's café, where I invariably encounter what must be some of Debremarkos' shadiest characters. KB and I hang out in the Internet café, joking and listening to music with the girl and guy who work there (and enjoying just a little bit of concealed laugher at the guy's favorite t-shirt, which reads, "Soccer Mom," in big block letters with the American flag running through them). We laugh hysterically through jesting exchanges between KB's two supervisors, one aiming in all things to be "Western" and one resembling everyone's favorite crazy uncle, which unfold something like this:

"You see, he thinks he knows everything about Debremarkos. He told me so."

"No, I did not say so."

"You DID say so!"

"No, I did not say so. I do not know everything. I only know myself."

"You do not EVEN know yourself."

"I do."

"How can you ever truly know yourself? How is it possible?"

"I do. At least 50 percent."

"Where is the scientific research you have done on this point?"

"I know more than YOU."

"Ara! This man is a liar!"

"I am no liar! In fact you cannot compete with me in any aspect. I will beat you in a footrace! I will even give you ten meters of head start. I tell you, you cannot compete with me! Now why don't you pay for our tea?"

"Ara! Do you see how this man exploits me?"

"No, this man is rich! He has much money, and I have only my big stomach!"

"I have been trying to explain to this man that if I had so much money, I would put it in a bank. But as it is, I have no account."

"This man lies! He keeps his money hidden in his home! He takes all his much money and digs a hole and puts into the ground! One night I will go while he sleeps to his home and find and take his much money!"

"This man speaks very may words, and yet he pays for very little tea. He has not the expense to cover his many words."

"Talk is cheap! Ha-HA!"

"Socrates [pronounced Soh-krayts] has said, 'Greece shall not be ruled by the loudest voices, but by the sharpest minds.' And so, my friend, I think you will not prevail in this argument."…

In a country half a world away from home, in a culture still largely unfamiliar, amongst people I have only just begun to know, it is assuring to be able to call anything "routine". Though this place still delivers daily the promise and thrill of new adventures, its growing familiarity gives it the air of home.

20 January 2008

Today marked the Ethiopian celebration of Timket (Epiphany). The festivities began over at KB's house with her landlord's family moving all their furniture out of the house and into the renters' quarters they will occupy during KB's stay. Generously, though, they left behind the neon-lit Orthodox Jesus icon clock hanging on the living room wall, not wishing to deprive us of the friendly face we have come to know and love as Disco Jesus. From his lofty seat in the living room heavens, he watched over the frenzied exodus of chairs, tables, and footstools, shining forth his blessings in the form of green, blue, and purple rays of light that swirled and danced behind him.

The dust had barely settled, and KB had barely been afforded the time to grasp the sudden and unannounced departure of the furniture that had once graced her house, when we were summoned again to action. Drumbeats, shouting, and singing announced the arrival of the Timiket procession. We hurriedly donned our traditional Ethiopian finest and scurried up the hill to join it. The streets were flooded with people clad in the traditional flowing white of Ethiopian religious celebration. Another less traditional clothing trend evident within the crowd was that of blue jeans, American pop culture t-shirts, and knock-off European football jerseys, popular among the teenage crowd on this major Orthodox holiday. A stream of iridescent parasols in every color of the rainbow glinted in the midday sun as it wound its way up the hill to the large Orthodox church. Into this stream my friend Tsintayo and I plunged, hand-in-hand. We allowed ourselves to be carried along in the current, swept up in the singing, chanting, clapping mass of humanity around us.

At the top of the hill, we were swept through the gates of the church, tall arches painted boldly in patriotic red, yellow, and green. We joined the crowd in circling the round church building three times, singing and clapping all the more loudly now for having reached our destination. Church elders in assorted white headdresses led the singing from the circular veranda of the church. Old women trilled their cries of triumphant celebration, while boys beat large skin-covered drums and blew zealously on metal horns. Once our three requisite revolutions had been completed, the crowd spontaneously formed into circles for dancing. Tsintayo spotted some of her friends and dragged me by the hand through the crowd to their circle (mercifully shaded from the intense Ethiopian sun by a small stand of trees). We clapped and laughed together as people from the crowd took turns dancing in the idle, some voluntarily, some forced by the collective will of the mob. There was a brief, enthusiastic campaign to pull the farenji into the middle, but, freely admitting my inferiority to their incredible skill, I adamantly preferred to watch. The dancers moved in impossible gyrations of their upper bodies within the ring of onlookers, and Tsintayo and I amused ourselves in the safety of the perimeter with comical attempts of the same.

Heading back down the hill again toward home, we were still laughing and shaking our shoulders to the drumbeats we had left behind us. When we reached the house and parted ways, we expressed the hope of celebrating together in the same way, with the same joy, at the same time next year.

13 January 2008

It would, of course, be stating the obvious to say that things here in Ethiopia are different from the things to which I have grown accustomed in the U.S. Different circumstances, cultural norms, and social contracts dictate a very different dynamic to the interpersonal interactions making up everyday life. As a consumer in Ethiopia, for example, the absence of America's high degree of commercial competition, ease of price comparisons, accessibility to alternatives, and hyperactive legal system for seeking recourse makes the American motto, "The customer is always right," irrelevant. In a world where the community is emphasized over the individual and business is done in the context of informal chats over cups of tea and coffee, "Time is money," is similarly inapplicable. Living here in Debremarkos is a never-ceasing exercise in discovering these underlying rules for Ethiopian society and learning to navigate them competently.

Sometimes, though, a situation arises in which the potential implications are much greater than those of consumerism or concepts of time, and in which cultural mores seem not just different and quirky but possibly detrimental. These are the situations that raise difficult questions about which cultural mandates to accept and work within, and which to challenge. What is the limit of my right as a guest in this culture? What is my obligation as a volunteer working against the devastation caused by poverty and AIDS?

I was sitting in on an HIVAIDS workshop for local government leaders from the wider administrative zone, when one older man spoke up to make the argument that a woman who dresses provocatively is asking for men to have sex with her. I listened as he went on to blame globalization and increased exposure to the sexy dressing styles of foreigners for this problem, and I began to notice heads in the crowd turning in my direction, some nervously, some excitedly curious to see how the foreigner among them might react to this charge. The women's rights activist in me, as well as my sense of personal pride, wanted to stand up in the middle of the assembly to refute the charges now leveled doubly, though admittedly indirectly, against me, first as a woman and second as a foreigner. The public health worker in me was analyzing the cultural challenges to HIV/AIDS prevention measures implied in the man's statement. The rugged American individualist in me was formulating a speech that lauded the human ability to CHOOSE, rather than react, and stressed the importance of taking responsibility for one's own actions. My more prudent side, though, urged me to consider that I had a mere four weeks of experience in Debremarkos and was still working to integrate into the community; that I didn't have the sort of trust relationship with these largely unfamiliar government leaders that would have prevented me from being seen as an outsider; that there was a handful of Ethiopian women among the overwhelmingly male group who seemed ready to voice their opinions on the issue; and that at this stage, with little Amharic language and little knowledge of the community's workings, I was still largely a guest, observer, and student in a discussion that was rightly theirs. (The realist in me also chimed in with, "Sure, go ahead, Christen, launch into a diatribe about responsibility for individual decisions, the dangers of eternally blaming one's environment, and the innocence of the victim…in AMHARIC." The realist in me is terribly sarcastic.)

In the end, I let my obviously disgruntled and disappointed silence in front of my expectant onlookers express my disagreement with what was being said around me. And to gather my thoughts and rein in my emotions, during the tea break I visited a local friend at her family's café – where I was subsequently harassed by a heavy-set middle-aged man, drunk at 10:30 in the morning, who used his limited English skills to communicate to me things unsuitable for publication here.

It is easy to lay blame upon environment. It is easy to blame a chauvinistic culture for victimizing women. It is easy to blame a society exalting individual expression and "liberation" for the deterioration of traditional morality. But having acknowledged that none of us make our choices in a vacuum, in doing so we also acknowledge that we do make choices, for which we are personally responsible. And ultimately, through a critical mass of these individual choices, it is possible even to change the environment in which these choices are made. Lasting cultural change must come from within. But when two different cultural environments meet, in an ideal world, the fair, open, humble exchange that would take place would serve to more fully inform the individual choices made within each culture, possibly leading to cultural changes to the benefit of both.

7 January 2008

Merry Ethiopian Christmas! Signs of the holiday are all around Debremarkos: Women are dressed in their white, traditional habisha dresses. A scattering of cows' hooves and even a few heads are strewn along the roadside in the aftermath of many meaty Christmas dinners.

Abbi – the two-year-old boy who runs around KB's compound in an orange-and-purple-striped t-shirt, bare bottom, and black plastic rain boots, sticking indiscriminately into his mouth any stray items he finds lying around the yard, from rocks to old nails – has even put on pants for the occasion. It has been a day full of food, festivities,…and probably the most work I've done since getting here to Debremarkos.

KB and I started our Christmas tour with lunch at my house. We reminisced fondly on Hank's life as we ate him, covered in spicy, soupy, dark red wot and rolled up in injera. I was there with him in his last moments of life – rather against my will, as it happens. I had gone over to KB's house for the afternoon, hoping that the slaughter would occur in my absence. When I got back home in the evening, though, my landlady called me outside, where I found Hank clutched firmly between our renter's hands. Thoughtfully, they had saved this highly cultural moment for me to witness. My landlady even encouraged me to photograph the action, though I politely declined. Hank, for his part, died nobly, going silently to his slaughter, without all the headless thrashing and blood-spraying I had observed in the deaths of some others of his kind. And just as he brought us all joy in his lifetime, so he continued to do so after his death as truly the tastiest chicken I have eaten in Ethiopia.

The compound was bustling with people for the Christmas holiday, with the renter's fiancée and my landlady's three youngest sons – 18, 19, and 20 years old – all present. Though people were in and out throughout our Christmas lunch, splitting their time between the homes of various friends, family, and neighbors, we all sat down together for the coffee ceremony. My landlady's sons questioned KB and me about American pop culture, and we laughed (and inwardly groaned) as one showed off his Backstreet Boys ringtone ("Show me the meaning of being lonely…"), one produced a picture of Eminem from his wallet, and one showed a keen interest in learning the meanings behind Celine Dion lyrics.

Our next engagement was at the house of a family friend across town, whose daughter happens to be one of our former language and culture trainers from our pre-service training in Welliso. It was fantastic to see a familiar face, and we filled each other in on all the latest news from our mutual friends now scattered across Ethiopia. KB and I had helping upon helping of alicha siga wot (something like beef stew) forced upon us, along with glasses of tella (local "beer" brewed from barley and looking suspiciously like muddy lake water) and red wine (good, yet always served mixed with Pepsi, which somewhat ruins it, I think). After two heavy holiday lunches eaten back-to-back within a three-hour period, we were both ready to settle into a peaceful food coma and go quietly into the night. But, alas, we had already committed ourselves to one more Christmas gathering…

We spent the evening at the home of our newly-hired Amharic tutor. His very pregnant wife cooked us a delicious meal of chicken fried rice, telling us importantly, "We once had three foreign volunteers working here with us. We KNOW about farenjis." Unfortunately, I was too painfully full to get properly excited about the well-cooked dinner, but I shoved at least half of my plate down out of politeness. Dinner was followed by coffee and popcorn, served to us by a young girl in faux snake skin pants. I lost the desire to ever consume anything again.

Now, nighttime finds me sprawled out awkwardly on my stomach on KB's couch, the will to move having long ago drained completely from my body. It's sort of a comfort to find the familiar aspect of overeating is common to holidays across the globe, but a steady diet of lentils, chickpeas, bananas, grains, and vegetables has not prepared my digestive system for three meat-laden meals in one day. At the moment, I am thanking God that Ethiopian Christmas only comes once a year.

5 January 2008

Tonight I went out with my compoundmates to watch Manchester United and Aston Villa play in the third round of the FA Cup, at one of just a handful of local hotels with satellite television. Our hotel was packed with predominantly young Ethiopian men gathered to watch the game; both the restaurant area and a separate outdoor pavilion were filled to capacity. The first half of the game passed with no score, and as the second half began similarly, the ManU fans in the crowd began to get restless. Finally, late in the game, the TV cameras cut to a shot of Wayne Rooney hopping from the bench, stripping off his warm-ups, and preparing to enter the game. The ManU segment of the hotel crowd erupted into boisterous cheers for the Englishman, an Ethiopian fan favorite, and their roars were even later some twenty minutes later when he scored the second goal of the game, following Cristiano Ronaldo's first, to seal the ManU victory at 2-0.

In Ethiopia, football fandom is dominated by the English Premiership, and Ethiopian fans of the EPL give their loyalties, almost without exception, to either Arsenal or Manchester United. (Every once in a while, one will come across a scattered Chelsea fan or two, as well. I am told by my friend Mohammed that female Ethiopian football fans tend to favor Chelsea. He laughs as I ask him teasingly if this is the reason why he chooses to pull for the Stamford Bridge Club.) Ask the reason behind their chosen affiliation, and most people will give the obvious answer: Arsenal and ManU lead the League. Many Ethiopian football fans, especially those of Arsenal, will also cite the contributions of African players, a reason also noted by academics studying the phenomenal spread of the EPL's popularity in Africa. At least in Ethiopia, though, it is not the names of Adebayour (Togo), Toure (Ivory Coast), and Sanga (of Senegalese parentage) that are emblazoned on Arsenal posters and knock-off jerseys; nearly always, it is the name of the Spanish midfielder, Cesc Fabregas. Wall hangings of Ronaldo and Rooney - not Drogba (Ivory Coast) or Diouf (Senegal) - are sold in the marketplace beside those of Orthodox Saints Mariam and Markus. In partial explanation of this seeming discrepancy, merchandisers of the EPL have not yet begun to fully exploit their African fan base. In many ways, though, when it comes down to it, results are results, goals are goals, talent is talent, and the stars are those that can get the job done most often and consistently, in any culture and language.

4 January 2008

My Peace Corps experience has entered into a new phase in two major aspects. First, I am living (mostly) alone, for the first time in my life. Peace Corps has finally been able to secure a house for KB, and she moved across town on Wednesday – a story in and of itself, but I feel it's KB's to tell. I can hardly say, though, that I'm truly living alone, as I have the company of my landlady, her twenty-year-old son, and a young male renter who works in a health facility, all no more than five yards away in back of the house. I am still greeted in the morning by ladylady's sing-songy "Kristiiiiiin! Indamin adderrrrrrk!" (Good morning!), I am still invited daily into her room for the coffee ceremony, and I am still regularly serenaded by Bob Marley pouring from her son's CD player. Furthermore, I can still fall back on KB's English-speaking, American-cultured companionship anytime I feel like biking across town to her kebele. KB and I were laughing the other day at the irony of our rather rare situation: We both signed up for the Peace Corps, a program that's entire premise is the placement of American volunteers ALONE in foreign communities for cultural exchange and professional assistance. Yet, neither of us can imagine having gone through half of what we've experienced here alone. Perhaps our fellow volunteers who are on their own will emerge from these two years stronger than will we…but we are certainly enjoying the short-term benefits of being here together.

Second, I am actually going into the office on a regular basis, which is a big change from my first two weeks here. I have been adamant that my first task here in Debremarkos is to learn as much as possible about the community, the culture, and the existing social structures, which I must understand in order to work within them effectively. Thus, my supervisors worked with me to compile a list of organizations doing HIV/AIDS-related activities in Debremarkos, and I will make an effort to visit each of them to observe their operations. My workdays have generally fallen into the following routine:

At 8:30 in the morning, I arrive on my bike at the HAPCO office. Sometimes Amoro has told me ahead of time what activity I will be observing and at which organization, but usually I show up unaware and preparing myself for anything. I chit-chat with the female secretaries in the office until Amoro arrives, a bit later than our pre-arranged appointment time but certainly within the reasonable expectations of habisha time. He informs me of the program for the day, ranging from facilitator trainings to recruitment for voluntary HIV/AIDS counseling and testing (VCT), and we ride off to our destination, he on his motorcycle and I riding behind on my 18-speed bike. We show up invariably in the midst of a large meeting already in progress. I am shown to a seat, a process involving an uncomfortable amount of fuss and generating an uncomfortable amount of attention. I listen to the introductions being made by each member of the assembly, straining through the language barrier and the faint Ethiopian voices to pick up the pattern I should follow. Finally, my turn comes, and I make my basic introduction, which, to my amusement, is met with rapturous, encouraging applause. Then, I settle in for hours of largely incomprehensible Amharic discussion, broken up by tea and coffee breaks every hour and a half. I glean what information I can from the proceedings, I monopolize the time of any English-speakers I discover, and I make lists of names, observations, and Amharic vocabulary to look up later in my dictionary.

While I miss out on most of the details of these meetings, and while I surely contribute nothing to the proceedings, this current work routine has been extremely valuable in meeting community members and in seeing various heretofore conceptual processes played out in the reality of Debremarkos. In one example of both, I accompanied the site selection committee for a USAID-funded mobile VCT campaign as it toured around Debremarkos to select locations for their next venture. I spent a lot of time talking with the two Ethiopian employees of the project and ended up having both lunch and dinner with them. Our lunch conversation having apparently gotten small-talk about work, family, and football out of the way, dinner resulted in a discussion about Ethiopian politics, culture, and inter-faith relations (the openness of which was perhaps encouraged by the bottle of red wine we shared between us). The full contents of this conversation I will not reproduce here, but one of the Ethiopians, a Muslim, in response to my questions about the fairly peaceful relationship between Ethiopians of different religions, shared with me an Amharic maxim: "The country is for all; religion is private." It is an interesting expression from a country with such visible public demonstrations of religiosity. Yet, at the same time, it seems to be an accurate reflection of how Ethiopians relate on an everyday basis to the religious preferences of their fellow countrymen.

1 January 2008

The American new year began with new life – six of them, in fact. My landlady's younger dog had its first litter of six tiny little puppies, five black and one white with two black spots on his back.

The puppies have not been the only recent addition to the compound. One day last week as I was washing clothes in the yard beside the house, KB came outside and exclaimed, "When did that get here?" I looked up to see a large brown rooster standing on the concrete walk between the house and the renters' rooms. I asked my landlady about it, and she replied, smiling, "Christmas! Doro wot!" Apparently we are hosting our holiday dinner as a guest at the compound until the time comes to eat him for Ethiopian Christmas next week. KB and I watched amusedly as our Christmas chicken dinner clucked, bobbed, and wandered awkwardly around the compound, feet tethered together by a ribbon of old cloth. I doubt he perceived the irony when he wandered into the kitchen that would serve as the site of his eventual demise. Nor did he seem to perceive the danger as he stumbled repeatedly toward the barn housing my landlady's two dogs, so my landlady had to continually beat him away with a slender switch, causing him to squawk and hop clumsily away on his tethered feet. This dance repeated between the rooster and my landlady all around the compound yard for a good fifteen minutes, providing great amusement for KB and myself as we watched from the window of the house.

As I write this, I can hear my Christmas dinner crowing in back of the house. It seems to be no deterrence that everyone in the compound has been awake for about three hours now (assisted by his 6 A.M. wake-up call). I doubt this is healthy in light of his preordained resting place inside our stomachs, but KB and I have named him Hank. Lately, Hank has been intent on entering my house, and after a multitude of failed attempts to discourage him, we have settled on a working arrangement in which he is allowed to come inside provided:

(1) he leaves no chicken poops behind him, and (2) he proceeds directly in the straight path from my back door to my front door and out onto the front porch without deviating. I have warned him that if either of these stipulations is violated, I will eat him immediately. Thus, every day around noon, as the sun passes over the house from the back yard to the front, Hank struts in through the back door, announcing his presence with claws clicking on the tile floor, emerges from the kitchen into the living room, stares at KB and me for a bit, and then bobs his way out the front door to rest in the warmth of the sunny porch. He has become an establishment in my Ethiopian home life; I think I will miss him when he is gone.

30 December 2007

As I write this, I am sitting on the shore of beautiful Tana Lake in Bahir Dar. A flock of around 60 large white pelicans floats in the shallows just beyond the reach of the tall shore grasses, which wave gently in the late afternoon breeze. The water laps soothingly against the concrete seating patio – though the effect is somewhat dampened by the jangling Amharic pop music blaring from the bar area behind me.

KB and I hopped a car to Bahir Dar to meet eight fellow volunteers for a Christmas/New Year's celebration. It has been a wonderful weekend, full of beautiful scenery, good meals, and the company of friends. As I have walked through the tourist town, I have sometimes forgotten that I am here in Ethiopia and not continuing a relaxing post-graduation summer at home, the palm tree-lined streets reminiscent of Florida and the expansive lake leading my thoughts back to m Tennessee home. The change of scenery has been refreshing, as has been the opportunity to spend time debriefing the past two weeks with friends who have achieved similar triumphs and survived similar challenges. We shared a delicious holiday dinner together, created from items bought at the farenji-catering supermarkets and American treasures sent from home (a big thanks to all PCV family and friends out there). We were able to celebrate the holidays with a spread that included appetizers of hummus and rolls and Lay's ranch potato chips, Stove Top stuffing, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Idaho cheddar mashed potatoes, canned cranberry sauce, red and white wines, no-bake chocolate oat cookies, Little Debbie Christmas tree cakes, popcorn, ("Premium") canned ham fried in chicken fat, and two chickens – which we purchased from the Saturday market chicken man, slaughtered, plucked, skinned, cleaned, gutted, cut, breaded, pan-fried over the kerosene burner, and ate with inordinate satisfaction. Afterward, stuffed and happy, we shared stories from our respective work sites and laughed harder than we had since we were together in Welliso two weeks ago.

With all that said, though, the weekend was not without its stressors. While Bahir Dar is a beautiful place to visit, the constant flow of tourists would make it difficult to establish a permanent identity within the community and shed the rich farenji label assigned automatically to white people. It was a tiring ordeal to face every day the kind of negative attention we have worked so hard to avert in Debremarkos, and on a much larger scale here. Being able to speak Amharic certainly helps, but even so, it is hard to distinguish yourself from the tourist masses. I am not sure I could live here (though I will definitely appreciate the chance to stay with friends here every once in a while!).

28 December 2007

"Hello, beautiful, do you need a boyfriend?"
"No thanks, I already have one."
"One for the road?"

26 December 2007

Today's entry begins in a slightly unorthodox fashion with the moral of the story: Be careful what you wish for.

Every venture outside our little living compound inevitably yields a new situation to process, a new challenge to face, a new town character to encounter, a new story to laugh about. Many of these occur on our three-quarters-mile walk from my house to the town center or vice versa, during which we pass seemingly half the people living in Debremarkos, all lining the two-lane asphalt road. Their responses to two blonde farenji girls walking down the street together range from unabashed gawking to calling after us with a hodgepodge of Amharic and English phrases. In the case of the bolder and usually university-educated ones, they approach us and strike up conversation as we walk, in order to test out their English. Sometimes, though, people are even bolder than this, and these occasions make either the best or the worst stories, depending on how you want to look at it.

Yesterday was, perhaps as a bizarre Christmas present, a day for bold characters. As KB and I walked home from some Christmas Internetting, we made eye contact with a young boy of about 16 years, wearing an old Miami Hurricanes Starter jacket, as he crossed our path. This proved to be a critical mistake, as he consequently altered his course and began following us home. We tried subtle evasion tactics at first. We sped up, but he sped up along with us. We stopped walking to let him pass us, but he stopped, turned around, and waited for us. We changed sides of the street, changed speeds erratically, and used other pedestrians as human screens, but through all our maneuvering the boy remained never more than two steps behind us. Every time we looked at him, he would laugh nervously (though I'm not sure HE had the right to be nervous, considering the situation). I asked him in Amharic where he was going; he replied (laughing nervously) that he didn't know. We were running out of subtle tactics. KB turned to me and said, seemingly harmlessly, "This is when we need to run into someone we know." At that exact moment, as if in a well-intentioned but horribly misguided answer to our desperate and perhaps hasty prayer, from the cross street ahead of us emerged a figure we indeed knew all too well: Tirssaw the Toothman, our neighborhood shady realtor, baring his four ludicrously protruding front teeth at us in a smarmy grin as he walked past. [See entry from 26 November.] While it was certainly not the answer we were hoping for, it did serve one useful purpose in making me decide I had had enough of sketchy characters for one Christmas. I stopped in the middle of the intersection, turned to the young boy, and prepared to launch into a firm Amharic telling-off, but I had gotten only as far as, "Ishee (okay), chao," when he replied, "Ishee," and left us. KB and I looked at each other incredulously – why hadn't we thought of that before?

The story might have ended there, but the Toothman's unexpected appearance proved to be a portent of things to come. Today, KB wanted to visit the government store to buy toilet paper (at the bargain price of birr 2.90 a roll, versus a normal price of birr 3). We were waiting outside the store while a worker went to retrieve some rolls from the warehouse when, from the darkness just inside the doorway, we caught the unmistakable glint of four familiar snaggled teeth. Tirssaw the Toothman had apparently chosen the government store as his Wednesday morning haunt and was relaxing in a wooden chair, watching the proceedings. As KB went up to the counter to collect her TP and look through a selection of other household items, I found myself standing alone with him, face-to-face with his jumbled dentistry. I tried desperately not to meet his unconcealed stare in my direction, as each time I did resulted in his waggling his eyebrows up and down at me pointedly (which resulted subsequently in my feeling the need to vomit). Mercifully, KB was not long in making her purchases, and we left the Toothman behind to unsettle other customers.

I wish I could say the story ended even there…but it was not to be. KB and I were having what we like to call a "competent day," one of those rare days amidst long stretches of clumsiness in which it feels like we really have things under control. We had been involved in successful Amharic conversations, made several purchases at fair prices from shopkeepers who knew us by name, and made friends of the post office workers (whom a PCV always wants on his or her side). We were basking in the glory of our cultural adaptation as we walked back to the house when, having apparently failed to learn my lesson, I made a very foolish comment to KB: "I almost hope we run into some characters on the walk home. We need to meet our daily quota of hilarious awkwardness." I got exactly what I deserved when, at the same fated intersection from the day before, we ran into the Toothman. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that he ran into us, as he sprinted out to the road from the hotel bar when he saw us approaching. Apparently our encounter at the government store had made us best friends, as we each received an enthusiastic hug in greeting. He tried to talk to us as we walked, but his Amharic was too rapid and too garbled from having to pass through his snarled teeth that he was absolutely incomprehensible to us. My language comprehension skills were not assisted by the fact that I was laughing uncontrollably at the irony of the moment. The Toothman was not deterred, however, and he laughed right along with me as if we were just having a grand old time together. After a few meters of carrying on like this, the Toothman took his leave, off to do some other important socializing. Being the lucky one at his side, I got a second hug. KB had walked far enough ahead that she was out of the Toothman's hug radius, but she received the celebrated chest-pump/fist-point combo, which I think officially makes them Ethiopian homies.

25 December 2007

Christmas is here! Well, not so much here as there in America, but KB and I did our best to bring a little bit of American Christmas cheer to our Ethiopian lives. We woke up this morning and used our single kerosene burner to make a big Christmas breakfast: scrambled eggs, French toast, fried potatoes, and hot chocolate (Swiss Miss, straight from the States, courtesy of Suzanne and Bonnie, to whom I give my eternal gratitude). In lieu of presents under the tree, we opened up the letters we had been stockpiling all week. We listened to Christmas music on KB's laptop ALL DAY LONG – which, granted, still doesn't make up for the solid month of Thanksgiving-to-Christmas-Day holiday music we would have endured or avoided in the States. We watched "A Christmas Story" (only once, though we considered keeping it running all day in a continuous loop to simulate TBS's traditional marathon). I wore my Santa hat around the house like an idiot (thanks again to Suzanne and Bonnie).

Ethiopia was even willing to help us out a little bit in our quest for American-style holiday celebration. Santa brought running water to the house, not just once but, astoundingly, TWICE during the day. I went to the store to buy toilet paper and, deciding to buy two rolls at once in a little indulgence of Christmas spirit (merry Christmas to ME!), the shopkeeper pulled from the shelf one pink roll and one green. In the evening, KB's supervisors stopped by my house bearing two kilos of Christmas bananas. Muluken told us, "I said to Ato Zeleke: Today is their Christmas. It is a very special holiday. I have seen it on TV. There is singing and much food, and families are all together. They might be lonely today. We must go visit."

All in all, it really was a merry Christmas. I had debated whether to even acknowledge the day or to just let it pass like any other sunny, 84-degree December workday in Debremarkos, worried that my attempts to scrape together a makeshift celebration would only depress me when they inevitably fell far short of the real thing. But KB and I had a great day together, and through the warmth conveyed in letters and phone calls, we truly felt connected to the people we love. We each talked to several family members and friends from the U.S. My Welliso host family called me three times – one per each family member over the age of four – and there was a barrage of text messaging between PCVs. Far from all people I have long known and loved, it is indescribably good to feel an assurance that they are still thinking of me on this special day.