Odds and Ends

After two years here, my time in Ethiopia is coming to an end. It's
hard to believe; you never picture the end of these things when you
begin them, or even during the experience. It has just snuck up on me,
and now I have less than a month left in Ethiopia. There are a lot of
difficult goodbyes looming, and certainly a tough transition back into
life in the States, but I'm also really looking forward to catching up
with friends and family, and to being back home. (I'm also terrified
that I'm going to freeze to death in Denver and Seattle in
December/January!)

Meanwhile life goes on here. Thesis work is coming along apace, and
I'm wrapping up my other work. And I've had a few small adventures
recently.

Last weekend, my friend Jennifer and I decided to walk from her town
(which is 80 km south of Bahir Dar) as far north toward B/Dar as
possible. It was one of the better days in Ethiopia. Some of the
highlights:

We had a child named after us. I asked mom if her two-month old baby
girl had a name. Not yet, she said, then thought about it for a bit.
"Ayinaddis," she said (the name means new eyes), "because I'm so
surprised to see you here." Mom was 19, and this was her second baby
(#1 is three years old). She and two friends were walking back from
market in the small town of Durbete. They said that they had about a
two hour walk back to their village. I asked how many people lived in
the village. "Oh, it's big," says the man. "Four hundred people." It's
hard to imagine how life in this small town of 400, with no
electricity, a two-hour walk from the nearest market or health center,
would differ from my own Ethiopian life in Bahir Dar, less than an
hour's drive away. None of this group of three had ever been to Bahir
Dar; mom said it was her dream for the baby to make it to the city.

We met a group of three guys walking to market, and started chatting
with them in Amharic. During the 90 minute walk into the next town,
our group gradually grew to two Americans, 20 Ethiopians, and a sheep
on a leash. We were quite the spectacle, walking into town.

Were told "tenkara gulbet allachew" (literally "you guys have a strong knee").

We rested under a wild fig tree in the middle of a teff field, exactly
in the middle of nowhere. It was the only time during the whole day
that we didn't see other people walking. It was incredibly beautiful
and peaceful, and felt, really for the first time, like I was seeing
what most of Ethiopia is like. Eighty percent of Ethiopians live in
rural areas.

We made up stories to tell people who asked what we were doing. Best
story: we are a Swedish walking team, having come from the Sudan. I
was told by an illiterate farmer that I was a lier when I told her
this.

After eight hours of walking (we figure probably close to 20 miles),
we took a bus back to Bahir Dar, and hobbled back to my house. I will
tell you that walking for eight hours and then sitting quietly in a
bus for an hour before stretching is probably not the best idea. We
were proud of ourselves, though, for making it as far as we did, and
for generally avoiding the ills that we had most feared: sunburn,
blisters, and roving packs of Ethiopian children throwing rocks (this
is an odd, but common, peril faced especially by walkers and bikers in
this country).

Other bits and pieces of recent life:

* I'm coming more and more to appreciate small things about Ethiopian
culture. I helped my friend Christen move some stuff from her house to
another friend's place last week. We were both loaded down, walking
down the steep hill to her house, and two Ethiopian girls just grabbed
the extra bags and insisted on walking them all the way down the hill
with us. Then they invited us to coffee at their house. We sat around
for probably 40 minutes, drinking coffee and eating homemade bread.
What hospitality! I think that when I first arrived here, I didn't
realize that this kind of invitation was real, because it seems so
different from the way that things work in America, but now, as I'm
gaining more and more awareness of the language and the culture, I'm
really coming to appreciate it.

* I was sitting at the internet cafe the other day when some kids
walked by with a "pet" vervet monkey on a leash. I petted him and
greeted the kids when they came into the cafe to say hi to me. When
the kids were ready to leave, the monkey jumped up onto my lap, ready
to stay with me. Seems somehow like the perfect contrast of the modern
and the wild: email and a monkey.

* Went to a party this weekend which felt very much like an American
barbecue. Except of course that the sheep had to be slaughtered, and
then the whole thing was roasted (wrapped in tinfoil) over an open
fire.

* When I lay down in bed the other night, something smelled funny,
kind of like the dead rat I had found a couple of months ago in my
living room. I went on a quest to find it. Turns out that it was a
small lizard had crawled between my two mattresses, and that I had
probably crushed it in my sleep. Several days earlier, apparently. Not
pleasant.

* Was punched in the kidney in the bus station by a man who wasn't
wearing any pants. Everyone around me just stood still, sort of
perplexed about what had just happened, and the man ran away.

* Just in time for me to leave, I finished my hand-made hammock. It's
hanging precariously between a tree and one of the columns on my front
porch. Almost a kilometer of rope went into that sucker.