05.11.04

Andy woke up and spent the hour and a half before we left for the office in the bathroom on the toilet. He made a gallant effort to get out to the field, but needed to be dropped off once we passed the hotel on the way out of town. Last we saw of him he was running from the Land Cruiser to the public restroom in the hotel.

I had assured him I could handle the kids myself today, and had the kind help from Tadesse and Baileyin when we got to the village we were going to, forty minutes away. We pulled out the electric scale and bottled-water weights and tared the scale. We got the height-measuring stick and head and arm tape measures out. I thought I saw a baby waiting, so I pulled out the
rope and hanging scale, and tared that too, and the "measuing bed"--a board with a perpendicular footboard we press the screaming little kids down on to get their length.

Fortunately, we weren't that busy. There was only one family with two boys, six and seven. They weren't even scared. Unfortunately, as soon as I got done reading their measurements, I saw a funny little fuzzy sparkle right where the numbers on the measuring tape should have been. I watched to see what would happen, but it only got bigger. What a drag. These things always seem to start just as I've gotten into the swing of my day, gotten where I'm going. Usually Layton, this time Gebre's village.

I finally got the guts to tell Alemush that I also seemed to be getting sick, was there a way Tadesse could possibly bring me back to Soddo, and if not, fyi, I'm going to be useless to you today anyway as I can't see. Baileyin asked why I didn't just take some Ibuprofen, since we'd brought some for Wenchet whose jaw was swollen from an infected tooth--a cavity. I
explained I would once it got to the pain stage. Alemush considered for a sec--this threw a loop in the day's plans; thought maybe they could find a school where I could spend the day. I just said, whatever. I'll be here sitting in the car b/c there's not much I can do. Then the car started moving and she poked her head in and said Tadesse was just going to bring me back. We met up with Abayneh on the road, who took me into town. Andy was surprised to see me, and said I had freaked Abayneh out a little--he asked if we needed to go to the hospital. I couldn't think and couldn't talk right, and knew I wasn't making sense.

So then Andy took care of me and I lay down, then I barfed, then I slept. We were both in bed sleeping when at about 4pm Nadew thrust open our window saying, "What has happened! What has happened!" Since we were both lying there in our underwear, Andy told him firmly to please close the window. Nadew's concern would not be put off. Andy said, "Please get out! Close the window!" "Close the window?" Nadew confirmed. "Yes. Go out. Close the window." "Ok." Nadew closed the window and opened our door and came in.
"Andy what happened? Are you ok?" Again, Andy: "Go out! Close the door!" "You want me to close the door?" "Yes. Close the door." Whereupon Nadew closed the door, Andy threw on some pants, and stepped outside. Turns out Alemush called when the team got back to see how we were, and Nadew was the messenger.

I heard Andy tell Nadew he thought he got sick from the goat yesterday, but Nadew adamantly denied it saying, "No, I told you God has permitted us to kill goat like this." Andy thinks its maybe a bug from when he was poking around with the goat innards. My illness Nadew attributes to being scared while watching the butchering yesterday.

When we ran into the road engineers in the restaurant tonight, they also thought we had possibly gotten sick from just watching. The village guy said it happens to him: "I'm serious, when I see something with a lot of blood or if I see a man die in the street, I am very disturbed. I don't like to eat afterwards. It's true." Though they also were pretty astonished that we hadn't seen it before, and thought it funny when we were astonished that they
all had killed sheeps before.

The rules are, they tell us, that the killer can't be a woman, and must be fasting beforehand. This means they must eat no meat for a few hours before the deed. Also, in addition to saying, "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," when you slit the throat, you must make the sign of a cross over the animal. When I asked how this was different from the way Muslims kill their animals, (they also say, "B'ism Allah") they said Muslims
cut all the way through a goat--will take the head all the way off. Christians don't eat meat from Muslims butchers here, and vice versa probably.

Nadew gave me a copy of the rooster butchering photo and it's hot.

04.11.04

Finally watched the goat butchering this evening.

Events:
Three men and a goat walked over to the far wall. They called for us to come if we wanted to. Andy scrambled on his shoes and scrammed over, calling, "go fast Joh, go fast, you're gonna miss it, this is your chance, grab the camera." When I got over there, the goat was on its back with the two young men, Nego and Abera, each holding a pair of legs, up and tight in the air. The goat was lying there pretty serenely--didn't seem to be struggling, didn't seem to be wild-eyed or desperate the way the sheep at the Barn were that time we tried to load them into a truck to go be shorn. His funny little goat eye and his whole body waited.

The next part, in the end, I turned away for and didn't actually even watch after all this. The older man, also the entrance guard, leaned over the neck and with no fanfare, only a few words in Amharic--"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,"--slit open the soft skin with his big sickle knife. Then his part was finished and he went back to the hotel
entrance.

There was a wide gaping slit between the chin and the chest now where you could see the vertebrae of the goat's neck. Nego and Abera let go of the legs. The goat was on it side and its legs kicked and ran. The blood pumped out of the carotid arteries in wide orangish belches and sank into the grass. The eye looked a little more desperate now, and its mouth opened and closed though no sound came out.

When it looked like the goat had pretty much stopped moving, Abera grabbed one of the rear hooves and slit the skin inside the leg down across the rear. He did the same with the other rear hoof, meeting in the middle. Please oh please oh please let it really be dead by now. With a slice across the anus area, he had a beginning peeling point. He started a slit from the
rear end towards the throat, separating the skin tissues from the muscle tissues with quick practiced whacks of the curved knife. When the skin was off the stomach so that the two hindlegs were just bare meat, (he had already sliced and broken off the hooves at the ankles) he strung them up on a rope and he and Nego carried it over to the tree by the laundry shed. They threw the rope over one of the branches and hoisted it up. With the back legs and stomach free, all they had to do was turn it around and give a yank and the skin came off the back. "It is a coat," said Nadew, who had joined us later. Only tricky part left was cutting around the ears.

Skin was off. Next they cut off the head. It sat on the cement block beside the skin and metal kitchen pan. Then they cut open the stomach to get the innards out, which they left in a pile, except for the stomach, for the birds and cats to eat--"It is their dinner, you know? It is like a gift." After they gave us an anatomy lesson. The stomach was HUGE. Seems like most
of the goat was stomach. There's just not much meat on these things. (I guess. I mean, what do I know? I only see meat in lumps.)

The lungs they threw up on the wall for the cats who had shown up, along with two pearlescent testicles the size of large roma tomatoes. Off came all the different parts till all that was left was a long, not-so-meaty, spine. The last thing to do was to disconnect the stomach and clean it out. Its just this big stretchy bag, so Abera flipped it inside out and dumped the contents--lots and lots of chewed up grass--and then took it over to the
water barrel spout to rinse, scrubbing and squeezing and juicing all the green out. On the inside, it is a grey-brown color with all these little knobby pills, like the inside of an old cotton sock. It looks very much like a stained old cotton sock on the inside. The outside is smooth white skin looking. It's very very stretchy. This is what tripe is. They cook it with peppers and spices.

And then that was it. The pan of meat went inside, the head I don't know what happened with it (though they assured me they don't eat it--they only do that in villages), and the skin gets sold. Finished.


Thoughts:
The guys were confused why we were so excited to see this. Haven't you ever seen an animal butchered before? We tried to explain that in our country, you just don't see farm animals the way you do here, and that all our butchering is done in factories. Factories, you know, like the places where they make clothes. I think it might have translated. "But what about in rural areas?" With limited language, it is impossible to explain to them what a Western grocery store is like and what "rural" means in most of America. Though there are exceptions, it doesn't mean self-sufficient/kill your own meat. Andy says this is actually a pretty cruel way to kill an animal--sure the blood may be drained, but the brainstem is still intact the whole time. You don't know what the animal is still feeling or thinking the
whole time.

Funny how quickly something goes from being an animal to being meat. When I said this only confirms my disinterest in meat, Andy said I should be excited about this; this is my dream meat. If I'm going to eat meat anywhere it should be here: this the freshest I'll ever see it, it's locally grown, range-fed, and free of antibiotics and growth hormones. True. I suspect
there would be a way to prepare it that would make it worth eating it. But with so many other things tasting so much better, why?

I've been making my first effort at reading the Old Testament while we've been here, and seeing a goat actually be killed makes much of the incomprehensible Mosaic law and symbolism throughout it a little more real. Suddenly, blood sacrifice is not an abstract. Makes me respect and like the fact that someone says something over the animal as it is being
killed--shows respect for the animal, for life. Add that to my list of musts for perfect slow-food meat: Fresh, locally grown, range-fed, free of antibiotics and growth hormones, and killed in a properly appreciative spirit.

03.11.04

Took Mamush to dinner tonight and got him his own plate of injera. Andy and I usually split one. We all lined up at the water bucket off to the side to wash our hands, and he scrubbed and scrubbed until a guy behind us finally told him, "bekka"--enough. He scarfed most of his meal and drank a whole bottle of Pepsi. He also insisted on feeding each of us some of his "potato chips," and shared his aleecha with Andy. I was already too full. Each of our plates came with a full, long green chili on it. Mamush took a bite of his and then hucked it over the wall to his pals who were waiting without. We gave his ours to do the same with, but it was a bad aim and it landed inside. We split the popcorn that arrived after the injera, with Mamush
discreetly licking the plate when we'd already stood up and passed him to go pay. At that point I foolishly pulled out the 100 birr note we had, crisp and clean and new. It was all the change we had. He wanted to hold it, inspect each side, hold it up to the light and look through it.

We had Wynerg wrap the rest of his rolled-up injera and sauce in newspaper for takeaway. While we were waiting for the change, Mamush picked off pieces of the newspaper wrapping with his teeth and mouthed them into spitwads which he projected a considerable distance in the air. He also kept pointing to my shirt, I thought. I tried to figure out what he was motioning. The words on my shirt? The colour? No and no. He finally touched me where he had been pointing: my breast. What? I withdrew in weirded out surprise. Andy pulled down Mamush's shirt and pointed out his tiny little black nipple as if to say, "It is this." What in the world? Mamush may not speak, but he's an eight-year-old street kid and this is certainly not the first time he's seen a woman's shape. I of course assume he's indicating the same whatever the Misrak girl felt she had to indicate. It was weird. Like he wasn't laughing or embarrassed, and he poked them in front of Andy and this other guy in the restaurant. What was going on?

Mamush doesn't talk around us. We thought he couldn't talk for a long time. He doesn't seem to know any English except Come on!, as unlikely as that is for a street kid in Soddo. (I mean they should at least know mother, father, one birr, feenuts (which they sell unshelled by the handful), and at least one unpleasant directive.) So he only uses gestures around us, like a mute mime. He gets pretty elaborate with them, which can be amusing. We did have
qualms about the precedent we were setting with him, and the fact that we didn't bring in the other two kids with us. And then I pulled out that 100 birr note. Oy. It's difficult to know. Anyway, it's over now. As Andy says, Mamush has a special relationship with the Orbis feuringes.

The director at the school we were by today crossed the road to where we were doing exams and approached Andy and I. Andy exits when he smells a solicitation, so I heard him out myself. He explained their need for money to support the school's HIV club, etc. They could use anything. Even tires for the bikes they use. Would we give some? I told him the line I've
rehearsed to myself, to Andy, to other people who have asked us. My husband and I have decided while we are here that we are only supporting the organization we are with, as we are unable to support every worthy cause we come across. Half valid, half lame. He continued to be very polite and asked if we were with the Lions club. No, I told him, this is a research project from an American university, not a charity organisation unfortunately. Did I
have contact with other organisations? he asked, and if possible, could I let them know about their need. I asked how I or they would contact him. Was there a telephone number? Or PO Box? He sort of laughed/snorted and explained carefully that this was a remote area, there are no telephones, duh. So how would they contact you? I asked. If they will come to the
school, they may come into my office and we can talk, he said. I will try I said. Then he thanked me and left. It was so polite and formal and sincere, it made my heart ache. I watched him walk away and thought of the all the different things we waste, of all the budgets wards and other orgs. have for plastic tableclothes and doughnuts and crappy ice cream. It just isn't fair. Abundance may never be equally distributed, but at the very least we have to realise that abundance is no excuse for waste.

Lots of people ask us for money, but this man was different. He wasn't begging. He was filling out a grant application.

02.11.04

There was a light rain early this morning that plinked on our tin roof and woke me up about 5:30. I decided to get up and out at 6:00 when the birds also got up and the sky was beginning to lighten. I walked out front and sat on the patio for a bit. Not long after, Genet popped her head out the front door and asked how the election went. I said I didn't know. She asked if I wanted to turn on the TV and watch. I ran to get Andy, whose last words to
me last night were, "I wonder if I could pay them to let me sleep in the bar and just watch CNN all night." He was lying awake in bed. He hadn't been able to sleep either. When I told him they'd opened the bar an hour early for us to watch, he sprung (really, I know that's cliché, but he did spring) out of bed and threw on clothes and grabbed the papaya I bought yesterday, to share with everyone up there.

Then he spent SIX hours watching CNN International's live feed from CNN USA headquarters with Larry King and Wolf Blitzer etc. While I write this it's 5:42am on Wednesday morning in Salt Lake, barely even the day after Election Day there, so actually, he did get to watch the election all night. Slowly, slowly, as results came in, his excitement dulled, his anticipation evaporated. He is depressed but philosophical about it. What this makes clear to me is just how much of a bubble I've been living in for the past six months, bizarrely, in one of the most Republican states in the Union. It just seemed so sure that Bush's record wouldn't recommend him to people. I've never paid so much attention to an election, and so never felt like so much was at stake, and so never felt so disappointed at the results. This election has, along with the dialogue between family and friends, been good
for making me figure out how I decide to vote for someone and how I stand on different issues. And granted, Andy's take has only been one, his interest in the manoeverings and "politics" as much as the issues, has also been an education.

I suspect it was better for him to be a continent and an ocean away for this election, with very limited information about it. "I wonder," he says, "if this is the begininng of the slow decline of America as the strongest country in the world." But he catches himself. "Its not that bad. It's not like we're going to become North Korea in four years."

01.11.04

Tomorrow is election day. Ironically, Andy's not even casting a ballot this time around. Although we had our absentee ballots sent to the Orbis office in Addis, we never received them. Even if they did arrive, we'd have to get them down here, then back up to Addis, and then FedExed to the States all within about two weeks. We haven't heard anything about them arriving in Addis. First thing Wednesday morning though, Andy will be in the hotel bar
watching CNN.

We leave Soddo in a week, which in a funny way suddenly makes it dear. Even when it's frustrating or annoying, it's dear. I find myself trying to memorise details and learning words and making mental connections that I wished I'd made seven weeks ago. The layered tableclothes in the diningroom. The tomahto sauce that comes out hot in two stainless steel chalices. The stale bread that comes out of the cupboard, and how Genet and Nado slice it
on the crumby cutting board under the tablecloth. The cupboard that houses the silverware and salt and limes and unrefrigerated ketchup. When we first brought it back from Addis, Genet asked if she could have the bottle when we're through. She's reminded us about it once.

The path out to the trash pile and laundry shed. Always negay when we ask when they're going to butcher the next goat. The tall scented geraniums the turtle always levels instead of eating grass. The pastry shop across the street . . .

Ugh, the pastry shop across the street. "Misrak Pastrey." It was my favourite eatery until the young staff got a little too familiar. I have no idea where it came from. I don't feel like I do anything obnoxious or attention-getting or different than anyone else. Except maybe we're less demanding because we don't know how to insist like everyone else does. Anyway, at one point we ended up waiting about 35 minutes for breakfast and finally I went in and cancelled and said we didn't have time to eat anymore, at which point they handed it to me right there. The waiter, this cute young guy who I generally like, invented a story about how we ordered something and refused it so the kitchen had to make us two breakfasts, when Abaineh showed up and we told him what was going on. Then the next day, not wanting
to completely sever ties with the closest breakfast alternative to the hotel, I went in to get some bread. The whole place pivoted and watched, nothing unusual. But then whole staff started laughing, the waiter guy looked at me and ran out of the room, and one of the counter girls, the one who always gets right in my face and says, "I love you," and laughs, asked
in front of the entire watching café, why certain parts of my anatomy were so small, while gesturing to her own, the whole staff laughing their heads off.

Come on. The last time that was an issue was in grade seven at Aweres school. Stupid girls chased each other in front of the boys snapping each other's bra straps to prove they had them. I stood with my back to the brick wall and wished I lived on a different, puberty-less, planet. (At Aweres school I also learned I didn't know how to make a fist--only someone who had never swung one would tuck their thumbs in.)

I rolled my eyes at the Misrak people and turned my back and walked out. And walked across the street to our room and raged at Andy for the idiocy of some people.

Two days earlier we were walking down one of the side roads to get some fruit, and an insistent begging woman I had passed by ran up behind me and caught hold of me through my shirt by my bra strap. She was quite strong, and let it snap back when I turned to see what was going on. It's hard to describe the kind of attention you get on the street here. I mean, its not hard to describe--its hard to imagine unless you've felt something like it.
EVERYONE is watching you. Everyone you look at you make eye contact with. Everyone saw the lady snap my strap. Probably only many of them, but it seemed like all, laughed. (Ok, as did I, but it was still embarrassing. Jeez.)

This has maybe been sounding a little negative. Every moment seems like a conflict between inflated expectations for helping/giving/fixing things and at the same time being a helpless (unless you speak more language than I do) target. My dignity is often lost. I don't like that. I'm lonely for people who don't want something from me and who don't want to laugh at me.

There's a cat in heat on our doorstep. She makes noises like I've never heard before.

28.10.04

The road men moved out because they hadn't had water in 20 days. I think it partly has to do with the fact that they're at the top of the slope, and we're at the bottom, so their water pressure runs out before ours. It had been 4 for us, though longer for hot water. Because we hadn't had a shower on the last day before it went away, I probably went 6 days without one. I finally stopped waiting and washed my hair over the sink with a pitcher of water. When the water came back, and then hot water a few days after that, it was like a spa, even though taking a shower here is like taking a shower back home in faucet drips after you turn the shower off.

There are three of the road guys in particular that we usually see at mealtime in the restaurant. One is getting white hair. He's this funny, goofy guy who grew up in a village in north-western Ethiopia, probably a lot like the kids we see everyday. He makes us laugh and complains about the food. "Meat, meat, meat, everything is meat. You think I'm a hyena or something?"

Their project is a new road between here and Addis, and the big new sign about it on the corner says it's supposed to be 93 km long, and take until 2007. These guys are the Ethiopian engineers who have been hired by the international contractor based in India, who was hired by the government in Addis to be in charge of the project. The people who will do the actual road
building are a Korean firm who won the bid. The actual labourers, the people who get sunburned and sweaty, will be south-east Asians, not Ethiopians, even though labor is so cheap here. The engineers say the Koreans don't like to work with Ethiopians because they don't put up with abuse and intimidation the way, say, Bangladeshis do. It's horrible.

This is where the whole "voting with your feet" thing gets complicated for me. It's easy enough to say, "I don't support something or other about such and such a company, so I'm not going to shop there or invest in it, etc. etc." And my first instinct when I hear about labour and abuse and intimidation is to say, "I'll never use that road." But honestly, (not, "Does it really matter?" No, of course it matters. It would still matter if only three of us in the world decided something like that and acted on it) is that kind of rule for myself anything less than a superficial act? Can I
really feel like I'm standing for my principles when I refuse to use that road, but use the old one every day without knowing what kind of labour and abuse and intimidation made it?

What I realize is that it requires that I either change my standard of morality in this kind of thing, or that I at least acknowledge the limitations of this standard. How can I live in the world and not of the world in this sense? I can't. My life is too inextricably woven through things that I don't stand for, both ideologically, and hopefully, practically. Who made the computer I'm writing on, and under what conditions? Do I support everything Dell does or supports? Is that a
requirement for me supporting them with my purchase? (Besides the point is the fact that Andy bought this computer almost seven years ago, before I even knew he existed.) Who made the plastic bottle I'm drinking bottled water out of? As I look around me, I realize there are very few items in our room that would qualify for me to have them in good concience, under this
rule.

Its like the Atonement: it's not enough to just have your virtuous acts outweigh your vile ones, and its not enough to just want to be or believe you are virtuous. The most you can do, and this will have to be acceptable to you and hopefully the rest of the world, is the most you can do. You can't stop trying, even if you know you'll never completely achieve the synchronicity between how you would like to be and how you are. With the Atonement, the beautiful thing is that with that kind of effort, it is enough. Or, what is not enough, becomes enough because the Saviour makes up for what you lack.

(I think the Atonement parallel is apt, because these kinds of decisions--to use this road or not, to shop here or not, whether they be for human-rights reasons or environmental reasons--in the end they're all about moral choices and moral attitudes. This is what (well, among other things) the Atonement deals with as well.)

Even Wendell Berry, who writes with a pencil and farms with horses, still uses airplanes and telephones and recognizes he can't be completely independent from what it is he has dedicated his life to change.

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.