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.
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.
posted by Johanna Buchert Smith at 5:10 AM
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