27.10.04

The village we went to this morning had another visitor working in the kabelli. I abandoned our sitting and waiting team and ran over to watch his more interesting work when I saw him slide on a plastic glove all the way up to his bicep. It went right over his button-up shirt and almost to his vest. He was standing behind a cow who was in very tight twig pen. With his bare hand he lifted the cow's tail so she looked like she was giving the poop signal. Then he reached his gloved hand into her anus all the way up to his elbow. Wow. The cow was bothered at first, but once he got far enough in there, she didn't move much.

What was he doing?

Palpating the uterus to see what stage of heat the cow was in.

How could he tell?

She was in the last stage of heat because her uterous was large and engorged.

What was he going to do?

Artificially inseminate her. Did I want to watch.

Very much.

He withdrew his arm and flicked off some of the sticky brown that covered it. He carefully took off his long plastic glove and blew it up a little to keep everything separated, then tied it to the twig cow cage for further use. I followed him up to his office. He bent over a big round cylinder marked "Liquid Nitrogen," loosened the lid, and pulled out one of four little straws the size of little coffee cup stirrers. I was surprised by how tiny they were. He massaged it in his hands, warming it up, then clipped off one end. A milky white drop hung on the end, kept there by surface tension.

Do you know what this is?

Uh, bull sperm, right?

It is the insemination.

He dropped the straw into a larger metal straw, "the gun," about the same diameter as a softdrink straw, but almost two feet long, and we went back outside to the unsuspecting cow. Standing behind her, the vet donned his long soiled glove again, while holding the sperm gun in his mouth. Yes, he held it between his teeth like some people might a rose. Wow.

This part was tricky. He really needed three hands. I wasn't wearing a glove and was expecting to have to dash back over to the team to wrap a measuring tape around a little kid's head at any moment, so I didn't volunteer. With his bare hand, he lifted the tail again. In went the gloved hand. The cow kicked. The cow kicked hard and was knocking out the cross-bars that held her in. I grabbed them and stuck them back in place and got a poop wad on my hand. Then the bare hand retrieved the insemination from between his teeth and poked it in the cow's other opening. Oooh, she didn't like that. She really kicked then.

But the worst part only took a few seconds, and he was withdrawing everything and saying, "Finished!"

We went in and both washed our hands. This is a substation, he told me, but he lives in Soddo, though he was trained up at Lake Tana and then in Debre Zeit. How much does this cost, I asked. For the government, 35 birr, he said. For the farmers here, only 2 birr. Seventeen cents. Wow.

26.10.04

Learned how to make injera today from one of the women who works at the hotel. It's poured on a big flat earthenware pizza stone turned up around the edges. We see women firing them in little fires outside huts as we drive around. It's poured from a birdhouse-shaped gourd that has a whole the size of a loony cut in the wide part to pour the batter in, and the very end cut off the stem end, so it makes something like a fast-moving cake decorating tip to pour out of.

The stone is supported by bricks and is above a hot fire of little sticks. An "oven lid," something like a very large Taiwanese rice farmer's hat, is put over the injera while it cooks. After three or four minutes, the lid is taken off, the injera lifed with the fingers onto a grass-woven version of the pizza stone, and transported to the pile of finished pieces.

It's elegant, if smoky. I watched today, Almaz said she's "giving me homework"--I'll do the pouring next time. Then she invited me and Andy (after determining his relationship to me--I don't know if everyone is just being cautious, or if our relationship looks different to them than a marriage relationship, but everyone suggests that we are brother and sisters and allows me to say we're married) into her house to eat a piece with some shura. I have never had such fresh injera. It was incredibly soft and chewy and yum.

Today is another day where we're not out in the field because they're doing 18 month visits instead of 12 month. Andy is reading his textbook. I am thinking about what I really really want to do/see before we leave. Our departure from Soddo is two weeks from today. Our departure from Ethiopia is only three days after that.

18.10.04

The most crustaceous scalps and scabulous skins I've ever seen, that's what we saw today. We were the busiest we've ever been, and saw probably 22 families. It looked like either super-infected scabes, or impetigo. One little boy had it so bad, that infection crust--Andy says its called honey-crusted infection (that'll forever ruin toast and honey)--was webbing his little fingers together. They have to keep track of all the medecine they give out, and Alemush said she wouldn't trust the mom to give the baby five days worth of doses anyway, so Andy suggested two days of mega doses since we'll be coming back tomorrow. And to tell the mom that the best way to prevent that kind of infection is to keep her baby clean. Alemush said, "Yeah, we always tell them that."

Lots of the kids in this village had it and other scabs and infections and pustules and mollescum, but none were quite this horrible. The children here were also the most malnourished we've seen yet. It was horribly sad. Tiny stick legs with big knobby knees. Teeny little shoulders that connect to an oversized-looking head. If it is possible to not be a scriptural character and have your bowels yearn, that's what mine were doing. Protein deficiency looks just like they say it does: skinny apendages, blown-out tummies, lightened hair colour. All three of the babies we put in the hanging scale today just sat there--it was way too easy to get their measurement because they didn't fuss or kick like normal.

On the other hand, few of the kids looked really unhappy (until they got close to we freakish whiteys)--most of them were playing the game the kids play in every village; see how close you can crowd the strangers till somebody picks up a stick or string whip. Then there's a happy shriek while the kids dash away and a grown man chases them snapping at their legs. Everybody loves it, the kids and usually the grownup. (Which is why is isn't that effective. Only fences work really, and then you have to have a border patrol. The last time I tried chasing the kids away, it was waaaay too much fun and completely innefective. I got an annoyed look from the team and that was the last time I tried.)

One older woman who was there with her grandchildren, caught up Andy and I in surprisingly strong arms and held us head down to her shoulder, tugging us back in each time we attempted to surface. When we were allowed to stand again, Andy said, "That felt really good." Baileyin (who just told the whole team today that we'd been pronouncing his name wrong all along) said she was thanking us because her trachiasis surgery had made such a difference in her life. Again, I wish I had actually done something she could be thanking me for, but it did feel good.

We go back to the same village tomorrow to finish up.

21.10.04

This afternoon we stopped at a family clearing to examine some patients--five huts surrounded by a nibbled yard of grass, and as soon as our Land Rover pulled up under the tree at the far edge, about fifty people spilled out of them onto it. It was a polygamous household--four or five wives. The most malnourished child we've seen yet sat on the hips of one of them, her belly protruding out in anticipation of another child. The baby hung limply in the scale and barely whimpered. Though the mom said he was one year old, his weight was only 6.2 kilos, his head measured less than 48 centimeters in circumference, and his arm was less than 12 cm in circumference.

Its frustrating to not speak the language; all your thoughts have to go through the filter of someone else's mouth--Abebetch's. Andy and I would like to tell this woman more than, "Your baby is very sick. He needs more food. You need to take him to the clinic."

The first is, I'm sure, very well known to the mom. The second may or may not be known, but if it were, the baby would probably be getting more food since most of the other children didn't look that bad. If it were not known, she would likely need more info than just that, or else it would be obvious to her in the first place. Someone needed to teach this mom what her baby should be eating to supplement her breastmilk, possibly how to and how often to breastfeed. As for the third, since the first was obvious, I would assume that if going to a clinic were possible, she would have already. Frustrating.

The household's grand dame was one of our patients. She had high round cheeks that sucked in where years ago she had teeth, and her full lower lip wagged in and out of a pout as she smiled and spoke to people or just waited, breathing. She had no scarf on her head, so we could see her fuzzy head of white white hair. She was also the first person I've seen to not be wearing any Western clothes--just a gabi wrapped around her waist, then up over her shoulder, leaving the other one bare. Thin and strong and bare, it was utterly feminine--she exuded Woman and Mother.

Andy said, as kids and teenagers and men and women holding other children milled around her knees, "Think how different her world is now, from when she was a child." I thought about it for a minute. No, I said, her world--this world--is much different, but not so drastically different as my own grandmother's, Gigi for Great Grandma.

Here's the difference:

In this woman's world now, there are things that are different, thrown in like anachronisms: corrugated tin, plastic shoes, plastic jugs for hauling water, trucks, roads for them to make dust on, radios occasionally, Coke bottles. But even though some people may have an idea of what the world is like outside of their fields, it is a vague notion. Even Nado, who lives in town and talks to more feuringes than most people, had never seen a computer until tonight when he saw our laptop. He looked at the email on the screen Andy was reading and asked, "Where's the paper?" Maybe he was just playing naïve, or maybe he was being funny (or maybe he was looking for the printer?)--in any case, he said he'd never seen one before.

The core components of her world--how families live and what people do everyday and the knowledge and beliefs that drive these things, are the same; men still plow a plot of land walking barefoot behind yoked cows; women still harvest one handful at a time, bent over at their middle, swinging a scythe. Women still marry and have children and live out lives of family rearing and tending in one or two huts. I would be assuming to say, "still marry and have children etc. unquestioningly," but I imagine that is so.

In Gigi's case, not only have things and products changed, its like our whole civilization has changed; expectations, roles, and especially our way of thinking. We are post-industrial-revolution products ourselves. It is impossible for us to think like a subsistence farmer.

The techno-age change is part of it--the way Chris's mind moves and makes associations is a way Grandma's doesn't because it hasn't been shaped by the same things. (This is the same argument for why people think PowerPoint presentations in schools are limiting education and stifling creativity.)

Or maybe the only difference between that grandma's world and my Grandma's world is that in my grandma's world, we think we're different than any other time or age and we've managed to convince others, too. The Ethiopian grandma doesn't have that hubris, so doesn't have expectations for change.

***Still thinking this through***

I saw two chickens get killed today, and then Nado, (forget his name) the bar guy, and Nego the kitchen guy all came out back with what looked like a pro. photo man and asked if I'd take a picture with them. We grouped five feet from where we'd rinsed the chicken bodies. Nado even had the guts to put his crossed arms on my shoulder. Just me and the guys hangin out butchering roosters.

20.10.04

Andy walked up the hill alone after checking our email today, because I didn't have the energy to do it and got a ride with the team. Then he walked over and got dinner by himself and lunch for tomorrow and brought me a party of tikus wuha so I could make a packet of soup mix from South Africa because I feel gross and am going to bed.

19.10.04

Went back to the scabby, infectious village today. Andy brought a bar of soap so if the crusty handed kid came back he could really look, then wash his hands. He's only about three. I think we were all glad when he showed up with his grandfather. Andy took another look at him, holding his hand this time, and I took a picture. It's pretty awful. Then he washed his hands and then gave the bar of soap the the boy and grandfather, after another dose of antibiotic. His hand actually looked a little better already.

They butchered a goat today and I ran out to watch but was too late to see anything but the hanging meat being taken apart. A few carefully looked-up words, however, managed to communicate that they're going to do another one the day after tomorrow and will come get us from our room before they do. Oh man, now I'm not sure I want to see that. I guess you get used to it.

I thought about that when they brought someone in to the kabelli--the fenced village center where the health clinic and prison usually are--on a white stretcher--a gabi slung between two thin, limbed trees. The crowd's attention was diverted away from us. I wanted to go look too. We figured it wouldn't be right, but I could get away with it. I didn't though, especially after Baileyin told us that he thought it was a corpse, not a sick person. Yesterday people said that there was a woman in the jail who had murdered her husband. That is so creepy. It really hangs a sinister shadow behind what seems like hard, but honest, village life. Ew, ew, ew. Then I really didn't want to go look, but I kept peeking and saw the corpse move. So I think Baileyin was mistaken and they must have done something with the body earlier.

How would a woman kill another person out in a village? What would cause her to do it? And how would people find the body, and find out she'd done it? What will they do with her? Have her live out the rest of her life in a tin-roofed jail in the center of town? What if they had kids? What if the mom had actually made the kids participate? The whole thing is just really creepy. Remembering the dark in those huts only feeds my malignant imagination.

On a much lighter, brighter note, the MM's left today. (That in itself isn't brighter, just the MM's in general.) Bob and Pat gave us their town pin and their card with phone number and address, giving us a standing invitation to their loft and telling us we are special; the others gave us two mini Butterfinger bars. Andy scarfed his immediately, and asked if I'd get over it if he ate mine. We got the opthomoscope back (I now know the proper name for it) and gave them a couple postcards to mail in Addis. Then we got some hugs from Pat and Bob and handshakes from everyone else, and they were off. We had "and spaghetti na meat sauce inna tomahto sauce" and "and party tikus wuha"--a kettle of hot water for tea for dinner. I?m the one with the cold now. It's miserable. I think I'd rather have malaria. Then at least my nose wouldn't be so raw. We brought every disinfectant and over-the-counter anti-diahrreal known to medecin with us, but no Vaseline and no thermometer.

17.10.04

Its been windy here for about a week, especially at night. Everything that falls clatters on the tin roof, and it sounds like someone is trying to get in through the door and the cracks in the window. The kids have taken advantage of the wind for play. Lots of them have plastic bags attached by the handles to a six or seven foot string. Billowed up in the air like a kite, it flips and swings and tugs. It is the most hopeful thing I've seen here, for some reason.

On Saturday Andy and I walked up to the private hospital where the medical missionaries are working. There was a huge crowd of people, all waiting to be fitted with glasses. Those donation boxes you see in grocery stores? They really do something with them apparently. (Last evening when we talked to the MM's again, they said there were through giving out glasses even though they have a bunch left, because the most common Rx's are gone and its too sad--and some people get mad--to turn people away. They'll leave them here to be handed out later.)

They let us observe the cataract surgeries they were doing. I hyperventilated during the first one and started to see a dark room, but backed out and sat on the floor in the hall before I fell over. It is just so wrong to see an eyeball slit open and something shattered, and stuff moved around, and water irrigating it, and a blob of tissue pulled out, and a plastic lens put in, and air pumped in. So wrong, but amazing. I got over it, and watched three other surgeries. They're pretty quick (they do about 25 a day) and it felt like I was watching a miracle. Carlos, the surgeon, who is from the Dominican Republic, likes doing it because it's rewarding to see someone pull off the bandages the next day and be able to see.

The man who got the money for the hospital is "one of those old-time general surgeons, you know, the kind who can do everything," we are told by the MM?s. Dr. Harold Adolph, an American who was born in China to missionaries himself. He was there for some of the surgeries we observed; he's tall and fair--his hair is gray and yellow, like it used to be blond--and has arms that look like the skin used to be filled with muscle. He is in his seventies and has lived here doing this sort of thing for more than twenty years. They say he is quite a storyteller.

Which is why, when they said he was one of the fundraisers and organizers of a church here and was going to preach on Sunday, I decided to go listen. A very kind (kind of crazy) couple of MM?s, Bob and Pat from SoCal, picked me up and drove me down. Andy's had a cold, and needed to sleep. "Oh yeah," he said, "You haven't been to many evangelical churches, have you." No indeed.

The church is a huge long mud-and-stick building with eight windows on either side, that seats about 1000 people on lots of low wooden benches. It has a great big stone foundation, though, so it looks pretty permanent. Bob said it only took six to seven thousand dollars to build a church like that. "That much?" I said. Duh. "That's really cheap," he said. "Its because labour is so cheap here." After Pat took a few pictures and we'd met out back with the men who were running the meeting, they led us in through the back door--to the very front of the church, right behind the preacher. Everyone watched us come in and sit down, and some watched much longer than that. I know because I would look at them during prayers and make eye contact.

The meeting started at 7:30 am and, I found out when I got there, was supposed to end at ten. I had complete understanding of people who have told me, "You go to a long church." Try sitting for the full three hours STRAIT, being watched the whole time, and having all of it shouted at you in another language. There was a guest preacher from Addis there, very smart looking in a well-fitted suit, with a big thick body. But people don't speak Amharic much down here, so there had to be an interpreter. So the sermon was actually shouted twice; once in Amharic and once in Wolaytinga. Occasionally the guest preacher couldn?t wait until the translation was finished and would shout an overlapping shout. The guy at the mic, who also played the guitar when the choir sang, was kept busy guessing when to turn up the speaker to amplify the shouting as the Addis preacher paced away from podium so he could thrust his finger towards the people or towards the heavens, and when to turn it down because the translator repeated all the moves standing in place in front of the mic. This last was profiled against one of the bright windows, and I could see a glittering sprinkle baptize the nearest worshipers each time he hit a consonant. From where I was, it looked like he was grinning the whole time. After an hour and a half there was some great singing with ululations and hallelujiahs thrown in.

I thought maybe this would be when Dr. Adolph would come in. Instead, all but about 150 people got up and left. Everyone else moved forward. It was time for communion. Pat remembered excitedly that this was Worldwide Communion Day. Not knowing what was expected of me or how it operated, I declined communion. Then I found out it was little pieces of injera and cups of orange Fanta and wished I'd said yes.

Finally it was time to go. Still no Dr. Adolph.

But Pat and Bob's driver had invited them to his house. There, he put a big platter of scrambled egg and avocado in front of each of us, and a steaming mug of sugared tea. When he saw I wasn't drinking it, he insisted I have a bottle of soda instead, and opened me a Coke. The phone rang. The message: Dr. Adolph was speaking right now at a church not far from the hospital. But by then we were just beginning looking at an album of family photos, and there was no escape, so eventually I just got dropped off back with Andy.

So, no preaching from Dr. Adolph. However, we did get some Conference talks emailed to us this week, so I think next Sunday we'll hear a little preaching from the Wasatch Front. The MM's have been warm and nice, letting us observe surgery and introducing us to the enigma called Dr. Adolph (who is now my mission to befriend before we leave. I want to hear him tell a story.). Actually, the closest we came to a row was when Andy told Willy Hunter, the MM's broad and bearded executive director, after he'd declared that the ultimate help this place needs is genetically modified foods, that I am someone who doesn?t believe in genetically modified foods. Sometimes Andy gets pleasure out of throwing me in the water and watching me swim. Oooooh, I was ready to strangle him, and let him know with a quick look which he laughed at. I backpedaled and treaded water for a second, ("It all depends on what you call "genetically engineered," etc.) but then Willy took over and it was no longer an argument. Basically, golden rice, which has a complete protein and can be grown everywhere, is the solution. To Ethiopia. To Hunger. To Poverty.

For the record, I DO have problems with "genetically modified foods," though that is less my "beef" than the way farming is actually done, and I DON'T think it's a World Peace panacea but I don't feel like going into it right now. I'll bloody well jump in when I feel like swimming.

Saturday Nado kindly took us to the market. I don't think he's ever shopped with feringes before. It was crazy, but controlled and fun. A man kept thrusting gabis on me and trying to wrap them around my body and shouting things to the crowd that made them laugh. We were laughing too. "A jolly farmer," Nado said. We got some ?cassava? to try, and bought a plastic bag to carry it home in. Bags cost 25 cents, 50 cents for us. Andy said, "Why fifty cents for us?" "It is nothing," Nado said. "They are poor." So there. That should teach us. Out, out damned principle.

13.10.04

A woman and her children and stooped mother were lined up on the bench. She had pulled a long, brown, sweet-potato-shaped breast out from her collar and was consoling the child in her lap with it. The baby whimpered into it, tugging and squeezing. I wanted to take a picture and asked one of the team if it would be alright. She said that if I was just getting a picture of the whole group, it would be fine, but if it at all looked like I was trying to get a picture of her nursing, she'd cover up. I was debating and Andy said, "You should respect that. Just keep the picture in your mind."

We see a lot of people, a lot of different families. When you go into different communities and different family plots, you can really see differences in general cleanliness, health, and happiness. There are some families where none of the kids look well--there's a dullness about them, as well as usually filthy faces and hair and shreds of clothes, skin diseases, sometimes lumps or wounds, a desperateness. This family--it looked well. No new clothes, but clean faces and a self-contained dignity. A quietness that translated into no squinty stares, and what, a sense of responsibility? (Maybe I'm just remembering all these virtues because they flattered me?)

When they stood up to go, I walked a few steps with them, thanking them--"tossimo, tossimo." The woman took my hand and held it for a moment, thanking me back. The older mother looked up at me and started saying something sadly, touching her eyes. I thought she was telling me that her eyes were sore, that she was having some other sort of pain. I cupped her cheek in my hand, apologizing for not being able to do anything, for being useless for anything besides whipping crowds of children into a frenzy. She placed her hand on top of mine, pressing it into her cheek, then took my hand in both of hers and kissed it, thanking me in Wolaytinga. It made my own eyes get wet. I have no right to thanks like that. I have done nothing to deserve that. Anyone who can get a plane ticket and find a car to get down here can do what I've done.

Nado hit it bang on tonight when he asked about our work, "What is it for? What will it do?" Long term studies about trachoma/trachiasis may have some beneficial impact eventually for these people, and certainly the trachiasis surgery is something, but even the "cataract surgery ministries," as cliched as they are, that come out for a week and process through as many people as they can stay awake for, seem to do more than we're doing. It's part of the same question you face when you work (I imagine, as a physician) on the reservations: Does the part of my time I'm here giving make up for the fact that some of my interest is self-centered? Etc.

Its raining again tonight. Rainy nights make for muddy slip-n-slide mornings.

11.10.04

One photojournalist, on edge and fleeing the country.

Seven Medical Missionaries, all ordering the fried lamb.

Three Koreans from the road survey team.

Five francophones, their third night in a row.

There were a lot of feringes in the hotel restaurant tonight.

The photojournalist woman Andy met when he went in to watch some CNN. She had a really cute short haircut, spiffy pants with lots of zippers, fancy running shoes, and a really nice camera. She told Andy she had been in Ethiopia three weeks, down photographing the Omo people, and was staying, no matter what it took, at the Sheraton hotel tonight. She was really on edge. She kept telling him, "I’m no American princess," as though even she was shocked at her reaction. But Ethiopia is a hard place to be. She said last night she lay down on her bed to go to sleep and felt something under her. She peeled back her sheets and there was a bed of cockroaches beneath her. When she came here and got told she couldn’t have the Chinese guy’s room (even though he’s almost never there) she refused to stay here. It was two hours till dark, and Andy told her about the bandits-on-the-road story we’d heard. My biggest worry would be everything else that is on the road--donkeys, cows, goats, children, old people, broken down truck--and the serious potholes. Although it did make her even more anxious, she was determined to be on her way. We could tell she needed something good to happen in her day, so we gave her the last two of the little Lindt bars Emily brought us back from the Duty Free shop in the Dubai airport (aha, we know Doug Bush’s secret!). We’d been rationing, but when you see someone in need . . . (Besides, I’d already eaten all the dark chocolate ones in the first week.) We also asked her how she got photos of people without them looking right in the camera smiling or waving, which we can’t seem to avoid. She gave us some tips. Andy asked how many she exposures she would go through to get a good photo. She said, "Out of 75 rolls, I’ll probably get five that are saleable. Saleable, mind you. You’d probably think there were lots of others that were pretty good." That’s rolls of 36. What would she have to make off each exposure to finance a trip to Ethiopia? Five thousand apeice? She said she had two homes, one in California, one in Aspen. Andy wanted to ask her if she knew John Denver. "I cross the line between fine art and journalism. Some photos I blow up," she sliced the air to show a four foot by four foot box, "and they’re knock-out. Really, They’re knock-out." She uses Velvia chrome, 35mm. That’s my favourite too, 100 speed, but I doubt I’ve shot 75 rolls in my life total. The photojournalist left in a weird, hasty, abrupt scuttle to her car. "Do you wear your seatbelt?" Andy called. "You should wear it tonight."

The medical missionaries I struck up a conversation with while Andy waited in the hall. When the coast was clear and a connection established, I gave him the signal and he came back in. They’re doing cataract surgeries, and he lent them his otoscope so they have a spare. They offered us a tour of the prison. I would love to go, but they’re going to be there tomorrow while we’re out at the villages.

The Koreans speak English as their second language or maybe speak Amharic. Whichever, there doesn’t seem to be the same natural reason to meet them as there is the Western feringes. Maybe its racism.

The francophones are a set of skinny, tall men in their late thirties probably, with dark hair. The first night, they called, "Bon soir," to Andy and I when they passed our table on their way out. I answered, "Bon soir," and I heard the last guy go, "Francophone?" but he was on his way out the door and obscured by a waiter, so I didn’t answer. I haven’t had the guts to say anything to them in French. My bet is they work for Medecins Sans Frontieres in Boditti, the first town north of us. Andy thinks it would be obnoxious to ask.

This evening, as the sun went down, fog descended off the mountain onto Soddo. I noticed out of the corner of my eye a milky white motion in the perifery. I thought it was smoke, but when I turned to watch it, it was filling the courtyard and bringing a new, wet smell, not a city smell. It floated and swept through and then it was just cloudy and then it rained some more. We’ve had much rain, most of it at night. It was so loud last night, the rain thundering on our tin roof, Andy and I clung to each other in the center of the bed like superstitious Greeks, imagining that by disguising ourselves as one person instead of two, one very still person, we might trick Zeus into passing over us without blowing the roof off, or soaking our toilet paper through the bathroom window.

For the second night this week, I had boiled sweet potatoes for dinner, the white ones. They are now my food of choice here. Because they ususally make it to us cold, I eat them plain with just salt. They’re divine. We bought them at the market the first time and Nado took them back to the kitchen. They served us and then ate the rest apparently, because when we asked for more the next night, they laughed and laughed. I think they should have at least replaced them. We brought them more tonight, and they returned the uncooked poatatos in the bag as we were leaving.

Tonight was our last night of freedom. We’ll be working hard everyday but the weekends until we leave after this. It’s been lazy and relaxed and nice. I miss housework though. Miss puttering around in my own place doing things for myself--making our own food, cleaning and doing laundry for ourselves, working in the yard, organizing--just doing the things you do in a home that is your home. We brought dishes and cutlery from the hotel and made our own lunch in our room today which we ate out on the covered walkway, and it reminded me how much I like to prepare my own food. We could eat so well here if I could do the food. And CHEAPLY, unbeleiveably cheaply. I bet we could both eat for 1 birr a day if I could prepare the food. That’s about 12 cents American. I bet we could. I bet we could eat for 70 centimes a day. Actually, if we were making fasting food, I bet we could eat for 50 centimes. Six American cents. I bet I could do it.

07.10.04

Home switee home, back in Soddo at the Bekele Molla hotel. After two days away where it’s misty and wet and cool, it feels hot hot hot. On the way home we stopped in Shashemene and bought some oranges and a pineapple. It is like no other pineapple I’ve seen before--a beautiful orangy-pink colour and so fragrant, it’s noisy the way a hyacinth bloom is. I’ve got it sitting on the table here beside me so it scents our whole room. Its funny how good it feels to be back.

These are the fruits that grow here: mango (not quite in season yet), guava (or zeituun; this was the hard green fruit with seeds we had a couple weeks ago and didn’t know what it was--it was just unripe), pineapple (which I didn’t think I liked until I tried it here), oranges (deevine--the big ones have green skins, but are ripe and sweet and juicy inside), avocados (big purpley ones, and smaller green? ones), limes (it amazes me to think of how different places can have the same ingredients and not come up with the same foods--makes me wonder about what I’m missing with the foods I eat), lomi (corresponds to lemon in our phrase book, but looks like a lime on the outside and like a sour orange on the inside), and papaya (don’t like it, never will). And bananas. Nadu says there are three different kinds of bananas. There are the little teeny ones about as long as a finger, that are sweet and somewhat firmer or more fibrous than I remember bananas being. He calls them feringe bananas--foreigner bananas. There’s also the kind that is longer (but not as long as Dole bananas) and thicker (a little thicker than Dole bananas) that we bought on our way out of Wando Gennet today. These have a tart edge to them and leave a lingering sweetness on your tongue once you swallow them. Bananas I also thought I didn’t like until I came here, with their ugly, bland, uniform sweetness and viscous mushiness being one of the reasons. These second bananas answer those concerns, and I like them a lot. The third kind I haven’t seen yet.

Insects here: flies with a special kind of audacity--what makes them think they can just land on the corner of my mouth or in my ear or on my cheek or eyelid? repeatedly!; mosquitos of course, though I’ve seen only about twenty total. I inspected one of the ones I’d found in our room and swatted--smaller and sturdier than the Northern Ontario variety I would grow immune to every summer. It looks more potent, the way smaller strawberries are sweeter and more flavourful. We have seen several people with malaria while we’ve been here. One of them was the woman who was waiting in the hotel restaurant while Nadu was on break last weekend. Every morning we felt so bad for her because every chance she got she would go in the back room and sit down, and whenever she was up, she looked so stooped and so tired. Almost all she would say to us was, "Eshi, eshi." It never occurred to me that she might be more than tired. It was Nadu who told us she had malaria when he got back and we asked where she was. We asked if she had medecine and he said yes.

Another woman we saw with malaria was in an out-of-the way hut we went to because she is also one of the patients for the study. She hadn’t showed up at the CHC for the appointment, so we had come out across the green fields and through the narrow roads/trails to find her. In her hut in the dark and smoke, she was on her back on a kind of bed, wrapped up in several gabis. We’ve seen some pretty sick people when we go to their homes to find them, but because this seemed like such a clear case of malaria and because we were close to the paved road and close to a CHC and pretty much done with the work for the day, Emily said, "Let’s see if she’ll go to the clinic." Oftentimes when they have offered in the past, they’ve been turned down either because people would rather see a traditional healer first, or because they don’t have the money to pay for the clinic once they get there, or because they don’t have a way of getting back to their home when they’re done at the clinic. The woman was shaking hard with chills because of a fever, was grunting, and couldn’t walk by herself. She looked really sick. Emily asked if they would go to the clinic if we paid and then sent the other car back out to drive them home. They agreed. Andy, Emily, Baileliin the opthomic nurse, and I got out and the sick woman and her husband and two other guys got in the car, and we started walking north back to Soddo while they drove the woman and her family south to the Humbo clinic. An hour or so later, Andy and I drove back out with Abayneh in the other car and brought them home. Although the woman had the classic symtoms for malaria, her blood smear had come out negative so they were treating her for both malaria and typhus, and they gave her a shot of dextrose in the arm, which Andy says can burn. The bill was something like 6 birr, not even one US dollar. Absurd.

Thought: I wonder if keeping your house full of smoke is one way of keeping mosquitos out?

Other bugs we’ve seen: enormeous bees--almost as long as my thumb and a little wider than it--with big loud voices. Andy steers clear of them and I like to look at them. We’ve actually only ever seen one, it was stumbling along on the ground, more fuzzy black than yellow. There are colonies of biting ants. These are also incredible. They create these roads, these two-inch-wide and quarter-inch-deep thouroughfares with exit ramps to minor holes on the sides, and serious tunnels at each end. They may be twelve feet long, and they are packed with scurrying little normal-shaped ants. Then there are medium-sized ants with a different head. It’s big--maybe the size of a green lentil and flat like a lentil is, but although the thorax-connecting part is round, the top is squared away with two mean-looking points on either side. They seem to be the highway patrol and the incident management teams. When I threw a leaf on the freeway, they were the ones who leaped at it and removed it. When we stuck a big rock in the middle of the freeway, they surrounded it. On our way back from our walk (we went up Soddo mountain on Sunday to find the church and holy water up there) there was no detour around the rock--the ants had tunneled the freeway underneath the rock and the medium ants had made an interlocked ring around the perimeter of the entrance. I can just imagine the vast complexity of their world beneath where we were standing, and the numbers of ants who live there. It’s a little spooky actually.

These ants eat and run. I had one go up my ankle and take a nip. I yelped and hauled up my pant leg and tried to rip off my shoe and sock standing on one leg. The kids around us giggled and watched. One boy casually stuck his big toe in the middle of the ant road, cooly scraping them off on the ground or picking them off with his fingers when they started climbing on him. We both liked to put on a show.

The biggest ants (they look like the med. ants but even larger heads) make webbed canopies over parts of the road with their interlocking arms and arms and legs. Occasionally you would see see one traveling the freeway with the little ants, unweildy head lifted at an angle support it, but usually they were sitting in one big clump with a bunch of others, webbing something.
The other bug of note was a huge moth, the size of half a dollar bill, browns and creams with one round "eye" on either wing, and other stripes. I’m not sure why it wouldn’t leave the crack at the bottom of our door at Wando Gennet--maybe because of the peanuts we’d left there? Anyway, it was big and beautiful and then a monkey snatched it up when it also came for the peanuts, stuffed its juicy parts in its mouth and left broken, feathery wing shards on our door step that blew into our room. We shouldn’t have been feeding the monkeys, but our ethic of doing what is best for the community was overcome by our selfish desire to see the monkeys up close. They are so cool. I don’t mean to always be talking about testicles, but the males--their testicles were this glow-in-the-dark lavender, the color of a white teeshirt under black lights. It was the weirdest thing. I did a double take at first, thinking I was seeing something reflecting underneath it. Their other under-parts anatomy was bright pink.

Afraid to get closer than a pane of glass, we fed them through the crack under our door. Did I say how cool monkeys are? You watch their little fingers grab things and put them in their mouths, swing them from the ground to the rain pipe up to the roof gutters, from tree limb to fence post. I watched a mama monkey with a tiny black clinger wrapped around her middle, hang out on a fence post, walk the fence, and end up silhouetted against the sky. Another grown up swung up to her, greeted her, settled the baby between them, then began fingering through her hair, square centimeter by square centimeter. They were very thorough--head, back of neck, arms, armpits and back. It was lovely to watch silhouetted like that. Two other monkeys, little ones, had found a springy cedar tree-tip they took turns jumping down onto, catching hold of and flinging each other up and down. I’m supposed to ask Marge about Andy’s primate phase--he says she’ll remember it better than he does. He did get pretty excited about drawing in and watching these monkeys--"They’re so freakin’ awsome."

Is it immature of me to notice with fascination monkey nipples (they look like matching black Good n’ Plenty’s) and mating chickens (right outside my door every morning and every afternoon--couldn’t avoid it if I wanted to)? I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like a revelation. (I can hear Rob laughing. Okay, not a total revelation, but I feel as if with animal reproduction being a mystery, I’m missing one of the fundamentals I need for understanding the world I live in, world I come from, the essence of something.) It’s the same feeling of puncturing though the cellophane cleanliness of the meat department to knowing where meat really comes from in death, as knowing where these adorable little baby everythings I’ve seen around here come from. I know that meat is dead animal, just like I know how kittens get to be, but just knowing that sentence isn’t really knowing something. In the States, at least in my experience, mating animals are as private as people. (Maybe more private than some people.) (Except for Izzie.) I think one of the big differences between here and the States is the daily, constant awareness of life’s beginning and ending. Fecund everything. In the States, fertility and reproduction is something to be controlled, like we can say "stay" and "go," to dammed water. Here, everywhere you go there are animals answering the call to perpetuate their species, family planning be damned. But also everywhere you go, there is a constant reminder of how temporary animal life is, how uni-purposed it is. Food. Maybe it’s just that I don’t see many animals in the States in the first place.

Birds: I’ve probably seen at least 30 varieties of birds without even trying. Even Andy has admitted to having this place change his (dis)interest in birds. He says they fly differently here. Also on our hike up the mountain: the big black birds that look like a cross between ravens and magpies, only with fat beaks, were grouping off in twos or threes, diving up, then falling on their backs, flipping and twirling together like falling leaves, again and again. I could have watched it all day. They never actually touched each other, and weren’t diving, they just fell and flipped and swooped around each other, an amazingly graceful and loose and spontaneous plummet, but always with a deliberate catch at the end--body straitened, wings out, and upward swoop.
There’s a bird the color of irridescent turquoise, the size of a chickadee, with a long, slender beak, hooked like a sickle. It sips hibiscus. There’s a bird the size of a crow that is a deep, iridescent blue, and one the size of a robin that is iridescent teal that live in the drier plains at the bottom of the mountain. At the pools at Wando Gennet, there were birds in shades of negative--striped charcoals and grays--who hopped around the edge, nabbing up drowned yellow-winged insects floating on the surface. There are the buzzards who mope in trees en mass, their huddled, brown, ovoid bodies sadly hiding their sharp, bald, greedy little heads. I’ve seen at least five birds the size of pelicans or larger, some of them so big they hang out with the herds of cows on the edge of Lake Awasa.

Plants: too many to mention. So much blooming greenery. Whole poinsietta trees with red blooms. There’s a giant tree of bright lavender blooms--so many, they look like leaves. They are gradually shedding, but even on the ground they don’t lose their colour. They collect in a circle around the trunk like a bright shadow. Tall trees with an umbrella of huge poppy-red flowers that poke out of the top, adoring the sun. Skinny trees with hanging branches, like a bunch of hair, dropping red-flower ropes. Trees full of of fuchia-purple flowers. Down off the mountain and on the way up to Addis when we go through the Great Rift Valley, there are tall trees of pipe cacti, whole walls of big flat-paddled cacti, flat-topped acacia? trees with small, thick leaves, great thick lumpy "ambo" trees, and spiky clumps of yucca-on-steroids. On one of the village roads one morning I saw one of these "yuccas" just at the right angle so the sunlight illuminated a fantasy doily of innumerable threads connecting each sharp stiff leaf to every other sharp stiff leaf.

I wish I had a good plant and bird and bug ID manual

Every night it sounds like there is a rockin’ high school dance happening in the gas station behind our hotel room.

Andy just finished his other 1000-page political bio--this one on Lyndon B. Johnson. He’s occasionally read excerpts aloud. LBJ, he was, um, quite a guy. Now he’s reading though all the source notes.

06.10.04

Emily left yesterday for good, and we’re in Wando Gennet for two days while Abaineh drops her off in Addis. I think Andy and I both feel like the training wheels have been taken off our bikes, or like we’re in the pool for the first time without waterwings, floaties, now that she’s gone. We’re going to miss her. For the next four weeks, we’ll be here interacting with the team and getting data without an old hand.

Wando Gennet is a "resort" in the mountains above a beautiful valley on the east side of Lake Awasa, where several hot springs flow off the face of one of the mountains. They meet a cold stream on the way down and in several places--"Menelik’s shower," where a funneled bit cascaded off a small rock face into a clear pool, and the famed hot-spring pools that are the raison d’etre for the hotel/resort we’re at--are collected for swimming. Our delightful guides today, two 11-year-olds we met yesterday, told us from what must be a whole repertoire of small jokes they’ve been learning since they could hear, that "this is the farmer’s washboard." It made us laugh, but also made me wonder if they understand the humour--have they ever seen or known laundry to be cleaned in any other way besides in a stream like this? In Wolaita, it seems to be the only place for people to do laundry, in streams, or culverts.

The first day they followed us despite our attempts to be alone. We ignored them when they tried to tell us what different plants were, took the other path when we came to a fork and they tried to lead us somewhere, and refused to take their hands they offered for balance while they walked in the stream water and I picked my way across on stones. Jerk. I know. But it’s about PRINCIPLE. We had asked to be alone, and the rest of the crowd had respected our wishes. We liked them by the time we came off the mountain, though, and because it was dusk by then we had let them point the way home. I felt horrible and didn’t know what to do. Andy came up with an inspired solution.

When we got back to the hotel gate, they lingered. We waited to see what they would do. When they asked for money, we told them, "We did not hire you. We wanted to walk alone." Their little faces looked up at ours, eyebrows raised and forehead wrinkled in disappointment. Their little arms hung loosely at their sides. "Because we did not hire, we are not going to pay. But tomorrow, we would like to hire." Transformation! Huge happiness, excited agreements. We would meet tomorrow at 1:30pm, 7:30 Abesha time. They said they got out of school at 1pm, but I think we saw them hanging around the gate the whole morning.

Our second trip up the mountain was a different, much better, experience. They began by taking us to their home (they’re "best friends" with the same polygamous father and different mothers) and introducing us to their mothers who kindly offered us coffee while we sat on a bench in the dark across from a little calf. Shushing their little siblings who started singing and chanting for money, they led us up the road to the trail up the mountain, excitedly pointed out an avocado tree, warned us about stinging nettles, took us to the top to see a view of the valley and Lake Awasa spread out beneath us, walked us down past a field of chat ("Is not good for the cerubellum"--where did they learn that word?), to the source of the hot springs boiling out of the earth ("Eighty-five degrees Celcius.") and back to the hotel. It was really fun. Andy ran to get the camera so we could take a picture with them, and they asked if I was listening to music--I’d had little headphones in my ears the whole trip. I let them each have a listen, whispering into the microphone I was carrying. When they got that I’d been recording the whole thing the whole time, they started giggling, looking at me sideways, pausing and starting up again, unable to stop. It makes me want a translator for the lengths of space where they were speaking to each other in Amharic.

02.10.04

“Large worms may wander into the appendix, pancreatic duct, biliary tree or even appear at the back of the throat. Large parasitic loads are so common in children living in poverty that it is difficult to know the significance of the worms’ contribution to the development of malnutrition.” --M. D. Seear, Manual of Tropical Pediatrics, 151.

I find it difficult to breathe when I read this part. Reading the part about worms in every book I come to is my equivalent of Annie’s old, “How did he die? How did it look? How long did he scream?” or Heidi’s old, “Back in the Genticles, back in the time, back in the Genticles everyone died”: being drawn to that which is most gruesome to you.

What I really want to say is this: NGOs are the problem.

The complaint is no different from what we hear in the US: you need to teach people how to fish, not just hand them one. “A country in chronic crisis,” spoken in a sarcastic tone, is a phrase you hear often here when you speak to people about aid to Ethiopia. Most of the westerners I’ve met here, and virtually all of the college-educated Ethiopians I’ve met, have told me they never give anything to beggars, again, for the same reasons we are often advised not to give money to beggars in the United States: successful begging breeds more begging, and for the most part doesn’t help much more than your own conscience. (There is of course something to be said for listening to your conscience--but sometimes your conscience speaks out of ignorance or fear. Sometimes what you think you’re hearing is not actually your concience at all, its your guilt-o-meter.) (On the other hand, begging is just part of the social security system here. I’ve seen lots of other Ethiopians give small coins to beggars. It just seems like because I’m white I shouldn’t give--it perpetuates a stereotype.)

What is well known it seems like, if you’ve been here, but not if you haven’t, is that Ethiopia desperately needs a long-term change in the way the world looks after it. Actually, needs to change so that the world doesn’t need to look after it. Because most people’s conceptions of other countries are built on foggy stereotypes (here, of famine)

Free food gives farmers no incentive to farm, and certainly no incentive to keep the food they do grow. They grow cash crops instead of subsistence crops because they know big bags of USAID grains will be coming in. Or cash; Alemush said the Ethiopian president requested that aid organizations give money instead of food since transportation is so poor to most places in the country that food spoils before it can reach its destination.

Free family planning is ignored. Each community health center has a worker who keeps a huge book with handwritten records of who has received birth control and when. They give women the pill, or, if they’re older or already have several children, a deppo shot. Turns out that if you give the pill for free, people won’t take it. But if you charge them for it, even just five Ethiopian cents, they will. Human nature, Alemush says.

Many years of only receiving has had the opposite effect on this country than its generous (or guilty, or both) benefactors intended. Instead of building a stronger people, instead of helping a population find its feet, free aid with no attached responsibility has created a climate where old know-how, old wisdom, old pride and self-sufficiency has been undermined, hollowed out.

Gifts are dangerous things, and ignorant compassion may not be compassion at all. You could say that any Ethiopian seven-year-old has a better idea of where some of our tax monies go, than we do; its no wonder they target white people.

(Maybe the problem is as much that although what is offered is needed, it can never be enough, so the only thing the receiver can do, knowing there is a giver, is ask, ask ask, always ask.)

The more I think about it, the more it seems like the fundamental problems of this country are really not all that different from the problems in ours, they’re just at a different scale. In the end, there will need to be some cultural--both the old and the new--changes made before all, or at least most, Ethiopians have the standard of living they want. (It would seem this would come at an environmental price, though, and Ethiopia just doesn’t have the ground to spare, like we supposedly do in the United States.) In towns such as Soddo, it seems like the sad parts of urban culture are being adopted, but not the parts with greater virtue.

I also want to revisit my question about whether people here really need healthcare if they’re used to being in pain, or used to dying younger, etc. My perspective in asking that question is almost completely obscured to me now--why in the world would I think that someone would not want full health if possible? It really struck home when I was reading through 3 Nephi and Christ, in spontaneous compassion, alters his plans and stays with the Nephites a little longer. As in Jerusalem, he offers to heal any of them they bring forward. And they bring ALL of their sick people forward--the lame, blind, halt, maimed, leprous, withered, deaf, and afflicted in any manner. Of course. Up till now, I’d always thought of those ailments as metaphors.

Though it might not actually answer the question of how or when to bring in medical care to people, it does answer my question about if it would be wanted or necessary or justified.

This whole thing doesn’t feel well though out or articulated yet.

01.10.04

(A.M.)

When you live in a place with four seasons, October is a pivotal month. It is a month of ushering, in and out: in with steaming meals and out with chilled ones; in with sweaters, out with sandals; out with cotton blankets, in with the down comfortor; in with leaf piles, and out with old tomato stalks, the lettuce heads you left to go to seed, white mildewed squash leaves.

In Ethiopia, to celebrate the beginning of a transition month, we brought in four almost-ripe mangos and brought out our blanket to hang on the line in the sun. Both of us have itchy red spots on our bodies and can’t decide whether we have bedbugs or scabies. Nasty, either way.

I finished reading Surprised By Joy by C. S. Lewis today. I was also surprised, not by joy, but by how non-compelling it was. Why do people love C. S. Lewis? Andy said when he read Mere Christianity, he loved it. He observed at the Community Health Center for a bit this morning. He said about it,

"Today I didn't have to go to one of the villages so I spent the morning in the health center. They use a WHO program called the Integrated Management of Childhood Ilness. It is meant for first level providers and simplifies treatment into a few different categories--malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, mental status change. I was observing nurses. At one point they had a 9 month with vomiting for three days soon after any PO and no stool. The child looked ok and didn't have bilious emesis. They didn't know what to do and asked if I could examine him. Did you ever see "Catch Me If You Can?" That is how I felt. All these nursing students gathered around as I palpated the belly and did a rectal with some ORS solution on the tip of my finger. The belly wasn't tender but it was distended. It was humbling that the only thoughts I had were fancy tests. I referred the child for an abominal film."

He also said, "I felt like a total imposter, but I think they were satisfied because I did a rectal exam on the child." That’s the man I married.


(P.M.)

Had our first "medical emergency" this evening. I found a little hard black lump on my skin. I called Andy over to come look at it, and he first pulled out the headlamp, then his fancy otoscope you stick in people’s ears to look at them, and had a close look. He said, "Looks like a tick. I think I can get it out." I was quite disturbed. Believe it or not, for all the time I’ve spent camping the only time I’d ever seen a tick before was on a dog’s eyebrow and it was the size of a marble. Fortunately, one of us, him, remained calm: he pulled out the tweezers, lit one of the candles, and heated them up. Maybe this is common knowledge, but to remove a tick, you’re not supposed to just pull it out--they stuff their little head hard and deep into your skin, screwing themselves in so only they can screw themselves out when they’ve a mind to. A tick will get a mind to when you give its backside a taste of fire. If you just pull, they’ll leave their heads behind. In my behind, for instance. (Take home message: always travel with a loved one. What if I’d come with coworkers? Ugly, ugly situation.)

I was a little unsettled by the whole thing--an insect nursing blood from me and my husband advancing towards tender parts with burning hot, needle-sharp tweezers. Whenever I anticipate something horrible or painful going to happen, I try to distract myself with thoughts of how this is good preparation for natural childbirth, just training myself to deal with discomfort. That’s how I distracted myself tonight, and also by telling Andy what I imagined would happen next week when Martin and Becca (and Edie, Soren, and Daffodil) and Heidi and Todd (and Sam, Mag, Lil, and Ella) all arrive in Provo.

"They’ll all be in the kitchen doing art projects in the afternoon," (Andy has the tweezers in the candle), "and Dad will make a roast and they’ll eat it in the backyard," (Andy is now advancing with hot tweezers, a concentrating look on his face, while my monologue goes a notch faster and a pitch higher,) "and they’ll be kissing and squeezing those new babies and watching slides together and taking hikes in the canyon and down by the lake and going to see the new house . . ." After a while, Andy says, "I think it’s dead."

"How do you know?"

"Because it moved at first, and now it’s not moving anymore." This actually makes me feel a little better. A dead bug stuck in my skin is much better than a live one. He decides to try working it out, and little by little gets it. He shines his light on his palm where he’s put it to inspect if the head is still on or not. There are six legs and two more little pointy things coming from one end, so we assume they’re antennae and the head is intact. I have, by this point, collected myself and am interested in inspecting the thing.

It’s tiny, the size of a sesame seed. Truth is, I’m a scaredy cat.

An alcohol swab, a little bath, and a mutual tick inspection, and the threatning entomological world has dwindled back to its original, vast but impersonal, size.

Now we just need to figure out what these red spots are.

29.09.04

We had lunch at a Yemeni restaurant one afternoon in Addis. We got a half order of the “special,” and huge platter of rice and saffron rice topped with baked or broiled or fried bits of different meats--fish, chicken, and either goat or beef or both. It was too much to eat, and not knowing the size of the dish we were getting, we had also ordered a bread with honey that turned out to be a circle of deepfried doughnut with egg in the middle, about 24 inches in diameter. We gave half of it to the people sitting beside us. Then they brought out the surprise pièce de resistance: a whole cooked goat’s head, everything intact, tongue hanging out just so through its many little pointy teeth. After admiring it for a moment, this we also gave to the couple beside us who accepted it with delight. They insisted we try at least part of the tongue (I sawed some off with knife and fork--ummm, chewy!--but couldn’t bring myself to eat it. Andy finally tried it, “It tastes like bologna”) and we watched in fascinated horror as they ate up the tongue and the man cracked apart the skull and drew out several dripping forkfuls of brains he happily slurped down.

“Some pupils,” he told us, “some pupils they like some foods. Some pupils, they do not.” We did like the fact that they kindly gave us a ride back to our hotel during the downpour after we’d all eaten.

Today we were out in the field all day. I’m too tired to write tonight. Too tired to bathe, even. And I itch.

28.09.04

Writing the old-fashioned way tonight b/c the power’s been out for hours and somehow our computer is out of juice completely.

We just got back from a long weekend in Addis. It was lovely. A nice treat, not something we thought we’d say of it when we left about three weeks ago.

Tomorrow we start our real research--the stuff Andy’s going to get a paper out of. The immediate problems on doing a paper about malnutrition and trachoma around here: there doesn’t seem to be any malnutrition. There are very few kids around here who aren’t chubby or muscular or both--most are probably shorter (chronic malnutrion) than most but not skinnier (acute malnutrition). That’s good news, though different from what you usually hear about Ethiopia.

(The generators are louder and more annoying than the blaring music. Who gets the generator? The restaurant in the hotel? Or the gas station next door?)

We had the weekend off--Saturday to Tuesday--for Ethiopia’s second biggest holiday: Meskel, the celebration of the finding of the true cross. Most people I ask are kind of sketchy about some detail or other--was it Sheba who found it? Was it in Constantine’s time? Where did they find it? But communal wisdom says it was found in Jerusalem around 400-600AD, was recognized as the true cross by the inscription at the top of it, and was taken to Egypt, then brought to Ethiopia by an unknown means at an unknown time. Much like the Ark of the Covenant, people cannot see this cross, though to celebrate it, Addis burns a 50-foot tall pile of sticks and leaves and the president shows up along with the ambassodors from a lot of African nations. This necessitates a peptalk in English about Aids as part of the celebration speeches.

A terrific guy from church, Akawak (more on him later) met us at the Atlas hotel and got us a contract taxi for 60 cents each (we can’t usually get on for less than 20 birr) all down to Meskel Square, essentially an enormous one-sided mud amphitheater built on the side of a hill facing a wide intersection of some of Addis’s few paved roads. They had closed the roads coming in to Meskel Square, so the streets were crowded way more than normal and I saw way more white people than I’ve seen yet. Some were twenty-something women dressed in Ethiopian-style clothing. Some were twenty-something men with curly hair in ponytails. Mostly it was thronging, pushing, pulsing young Ethiopian men. There were probably 200,000 people gathered.

We would look up and see the security was tight--police all around below and snipers on the stone wall to our backs. Once the fire was lit, the president took off in a black motorcade almost immediately. The Orthodox Priesthood etc. who had been there in full regalia, moved back from the fire, but some of them kept dancing and waving their bright fans and scarves in choreographed patterns.

I had an experience I haven’t had before--either a panic attack or a claustrophobia attack--where I felt like I couldn’t get enough air and possibly like I was going to pass out, get a migraine, and barf, all simultaneously. It was odd and I couldn’t think myself out of it. Andy kindly pushed through the crowd with me to a back corner where I could sit on a muddy curb with a woman selling a little mound of oranges. She was surprised when I took a seat beside her, but didn’t pester me to buy anything. I held on to my ankles and tried to get a whiff of fresh air.

Leaving, once we’d all seen the fire pile go up in flames, people seemed to think it was a great game to see how tightly they could pack the exits and how much pushing and pressing and jostling the crowd would take. With our shoes all wet from slick red mud--everyone had it everywhere--we slid toward the gates, down the stairs, trying to catch a surface and moment to scrape our shoes a little.

It’s a full moon tonight and I must go to bed.

24.09.04

Here is how it happened, Your Honor. We went to see the livestock sale. Some man started making fun of us, making wild crazy gestures and facial expressions and saying things in pseudo English as well as feringhi, feringhi. We left. We walked on towards the center of the market. It was about 12 square acres of stick shelters walled in ragged old grain bags flapping in the wind. In them squatted women selling berbere in three different colors and several different shapes, used shoes, rubber shoes, sweet potatoes. We could feel a crowd gathering behind us, a little minstrel parade of feringe and one birrrr and money singers. When we turned around, 20 kids laughed and called to us and put their hands out. When we faced forward walking again, someone threw something at Andy’s neck, and someone else poked him. We kept moving forward, determined not to be forced away from the market without seeing it by a band of kids. We made one round and were starting on a second tour which would take us in another section of it when the kids decided the dancing bears weren’t being entertaining enough. I felt a slap on my butt and when I whirled around to see who had done it, all the kids had backed up in a laughing semicircle. No culprit. I wrinkled my forehead and wagged my finger and warned them in English.

We resumed our attempt to walk, half deciding to just leave. I felt another slap on my bottom and a chorus of laughing and turned in time to see the culprit dash off through the crowd. This brat needed to be taught a lesson. I ran after him, my skirt hiked in one hand, dashing through the "stalls." I could feel people gathering and wondering what was going on. I reached my hand out and caught the back of his grubby little shirt and hauled him in. He was small, but probably 12 or so. As soon as I had him, he tried to slump to the ground out of his shirt, and he started making the most awful crying noises. I held his shoulders, got down on one knee right in his face and wagged my finger again, chewing him out in English. "YOU CAN’T SLAP MY BOTTOM! THAT IS NOT ALLOWED. YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED! YOU CAN’T JUST DO THAT." I could feel people all around us, could feel the circle of light above our heads get smaller and darker as watching heads pressed in closer, but I was too full of adrenaline and righteous indignation to register it all. Then I stood up and trembling, pushed my way through the crowd back to Andy. It seemed like the entire 12 acres of people had all come running to see the tall whitey gone mad. I was too trembly and angry and righteous and indignant to really see what was going on, we just decided to leave. A man in army green with a branch switch in his hand found his way behind us, and started whacking the band of kids that was again following us out.

I just didn’t want to cry in front of everyone. One girl we passed on the way was kind and said, "What is your name?" and I told her and she repeated it and smiled and didn’t laugh or throw things or beg. Another woman we passed asked in kindness, "Are you a visitor?" I said yes, and she smiled and said welcome, she didn’t laugh or throw things or whack my bottom.

We walked home, me still feeling shaky and all twiddly inside, Andy still incredulous at what he had just witnessed, and that we’d been escorted away from the market. Whatever. Their loss. It’s a freaking MARKET. You want people to buy stuff, don’t you? Andy points out that for all the thousands of people we see, the obnoxious ones make up a small percentage of them, mainly kids, so you can’t just call it culture, and I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m positive what the kids are doing is not out of malicious intent. I think it’s mainly out of curiosity, though some of it is definitely sheer entertainment. HOWEVER, I do think that when all the adults just sit there standing by while kids torment you from behind--that’s cultural, and that’s wrong, and that’s annoying. NOBODY likes to be poked or have things thrown at them from behind, it’s not just tourists. And in other places at other times, nearby adults have spoken a sharp word to the kids who were haranguing us and got them to leave us alone.

So now the question is, in a place where we stand out and are recognizable to everyone, have I just proven that you can’t push me around and won some respect? Or have I just transgressed some law of what is acceptable behavior and now people are going to spit at me as we walk up and down the hill to and from work?

I swear, all I did was hold on to his shoulder and shake my finger at him. The way he cried and wriggled, you’d think I’d wrestled him to the ground and was giving him a taste of my fists. But I did get right up in his face, and I did chase him down. I didn’t even think about it when I was doing it. It was a gut reaction.

Once in Israel, on the stony wall of an ancient seaport (Haifa? Aleppo?) this teenage boy cornered me and eventually, when I kept telling him no, no freaking kiss, made a grab at my crotch with his fat hands, whose fingertips were burned and blackened from flipping hot flatbread with his bare fingers. I was furious, but also scared and embarrassed--had I invited this somehow?--and didn’t make a big deal of it at the time, just escaped. But since then, I’ve told myself that I will NEVER not stick up for myself in that kind of situation again. Later on in that trip, I almost hoped that someone would try something dirty again just so I could use my plan on them--knock him hard in the privates and shout with all the venom I had stored and was practicing, "YOU DIRTY BASTARD." I still get some satisfaction out of saying that.

I suppose that the heat that sped me through the market and had me catch and tell off an Ethiopian kid might have been lighted in Haifa by a horny teenage Arab jerk, but it wasn’t a fire of revenge, just a healthy sense of righteousness and fed-upness. Oy.

I wonder if we’ll ever be able to step foot in that market again. Andy thought we’d see a policeman here tonight. But tomorrow morning we leave for Addis for four days. We’ll see what happens then.


Alemush invited us for lunch today, which we gladly accepted. It’s always the best food we eat all week.

One of the women we tried to find today didn’t come because she thought we were going to get her in trouble for the female circumcision she had performed two days ago on a seven year old girl. She didn’t show up at the CHC, so we drove out to her home. Amazingly, she was gone and no one knew where she was. Alemush says everyone does it around here, it is very common even though it is officially illegal and you will get fined about 150 birr (equivalent of about seventeen dollars and fifty cents) for it. All the Ethiopian women we work with have been circumcised, and Abebetch says that if/when she has a girl, she will circumcise her too. Alemush says it makes her so mad.


The little goat in the courtyard is pathetic. It bleats and bleats, lonely like crazy. I like him, despite his incessant crying. I’ve been feeding him grass from my hand, which he seems to really like. Most of all he likes Andy standing by him. Not me, Andy only. He will follow along where Andy walks if he can, his head close to Andy’s knee. If Andy lets him, he’ll rest his little forehead on his knee. He has the funniest twitchy tongue and once in a while he opens his jaw and slings it to the side as if he were reaching for something stuck in his back teeth. His little breath is warm, his little nose wet. He’s a little living creature with a personality and almost-worn-out voice from calling out his loneliness, but he’s also lawnmower and dinner. (Anatomical observation: if human testicles were the same proportion to the human body as goat testicles are to a goat’s, they would go almost to their knees. The world of sport would then be dominated by women. The history of fashion would also have taken some different turns.)

When this goat is butchered, he will hang out by the back fence from the tree limb there and the boys who I thought were just casual hackers--they will have him out of his skin, blood drained, guts on the ground, lungs and other warm bits tossed to the cats on the wall behind, and all meat and bones in a big metal pan in about 15 or 20 minutes. Baltu birds will croak from the trees and there will be a circle of them right above, awaiting their clean-up duty.

An Ethiopian woman, I think one of the housekeepers, watched us for 15 minutes as we fed and talked to and visited Little Goat this afternoon. She couldn’t stop watching or smiling.