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.