Travelogue 110 – November 18
Strange Quarks

It’s raining again – a bit of kerempt after a solid month of glorious sunshine. It’s cold, and the kids are staying indoors for lunch and playtime.

I went out this morning, in spite of the weather, and I managed to get some dry time at the café. The clouds were low, telegraphing their intentions for the day. Alarmed ibises flew overhead, making their strange, honking call.

People look gloomy. I get more hostile stares now than I used to. People here feel let down by the West. I’m imagining an increase of general suspicion. I know that suspicion was like oxygen under the former Communist regime, when nothing could be said directly or openly. The populace will revert to this practice now, I’m sure. Many of them still remember. They remember the many Russians in town, well-trained in Amharic. Now it’s the Americans, they will think. Meles is a client of the America. A soldier on the street calls me “trash”. Is he testing whether I understand?

At the café, I watch the clouds, wishing they would break. I lazily turn to some work I’ve brought along. I get a call from my new girlfriend. It’s one of those girlfriends that I pick up without knowing it. Romance here is something like elemental particles, some positive, some negative, careening, matching soundlessly, and breaking away, all somewhat anonymously. I found out one day I was supposed to call this woman, though I barely knew her. Now she phones me daily and chides me for not calling.

I think we went on a date the other day. She had badgered me for a meeting, so I agreed to tea. She is dressed up, and she brushes against me as we walk, with a big smile. We don’t talk much, but that seems standard for Ethiopian dates. At the café, she gazes into the distance and looks so sullen that I feel obliged to try some small talk. She isn’t very responsive. But she proudly walks beside me afterward, and before parting, she reminds me to call.

I don’t really want a girlfriend, but this liaison seems harmless enough: I forget about it most of the time. Our phone conversation is brief. “Why didn’t you call?” “Oh, well, busy-busy.”

Next, Abdurazaq drifts toward my table. He finds me out whenever I’m at this cafe. He likes to chat, this nice old man who studied in the States in the 60s. He’s had one of those erratic careers that characterize the last forty years of Ethiopian history. He studied in the States and in Japan, served the Empire, the Communists and the current capitalists, a smart and reliable worker, but not a good ideologue. So he never served at the level he should have. He rose once to become a Vice-Minister early during the current regime, but quickly found himself odd man out and retired. Overeducated, underappreciated, now he lives on a pension of about $70 per month.

He likes to tell me about America. He ponders with his milky eyes turned slightly skyward, and starts his story, “In 1968, at the State University in Buffalo, ….” He was popular in Buffalo, among students and staff. He was offered work at the university when he graduated, and he could have stayed, but he was his mother’s only son.

He’s Muslim, but religion was ruined for him by 60s America. He tells me often of the rabbi in Buffalo who encouraged his flock to think critically about the Ten Commandments. He also tells me about the time he scolded a fellow student, a Pakistani, who forced his American wife to wear full veils. Christianity and Islam are both sick religions, he confides to me. My time is up this morning. I leave him there in Buffalo in the 60s, a place he inhabits with great peace and grace and pleasure.

It’s back to Addis Ababa of the 00s for me, where we all bounce along, according to invisible laws of uncertainty, clinging to the pleasures we encounter. It’s back to the kids, who are sheltered from the coming rain, at least for one afternoon.

Travelogue 109 – November 13
Salam … ?

The week that began in chaos ends in peace. Life seems to have returned to normal.

Tuesday the taxis appear on the streets again, materializing as though magically. I’m on the mobile, talking to Sophia. She is telling me that Meles, our beloved leader, has threatened to start rescinding taxi licenses. He has sent soldiers around to bang on the doors of closed and striking businesses. Cheered by this merciless tactic, expecting good things soon, I hang up and stow my phone. At the moment, I’m walking home from Saba’s, which is a good distance in the midday sun. Suddenly, taxis round corners from either direction, wayalas crying for customers with voices already hoarse. It feels a bit like a movie stunt, but I gratefully board one for home.

The next day, the cafes are bustling. People are smiling. I can think of nothing more African than this brisk transition. One day war, the next day laughter. And tomorrow? Well, let’s drink today’s macchiato first.

The café’s regular shoeshine boy is back. Actually, he’s a man. He has two kids and a wife, as he feels compelled to tell me today, in bits of Amharic and fragments of English. He’s also pointing repeatedly and unambiguously at his anus, looking up at me with much earnestness. He’s a thin man, and he sits at my feet with knees up in the air. He really wants me to look closely and appreciate that something is wrong down there. I’m nodding with a sincere look of concern, hoping this subject passes quickly. But he’s insistent. Is it worms? He’s saying something about medicine, and opening his mouth wide, so I can see the discoloration under his tongue. He’s pointing south again. “Right. Okay. Ayzu,” I say. I assume this is an appeal for money, and it’s working. I give him a big tip and wave him away. Yes, it’s back to business in Africa.

Thursday is “Little Eid,” something I hadn’t heard of before this year. It appears that really serious Muslims are invited, somewhere among the words of Allah, to fast for six more days after the close of Ramadan. Their reward is heaven, and a second celebration. Since “Big Eid” fell during the troubles, I’m invited to Eman’s family for the little one.

As always at Eman’s family’s house, it’s good food and good company. Arab channels blare on the TV: Oprahs in Muslim headdress, or chatter about explosions. We sit on the floor and gorge ourselves. Eman’s mother tells me I’ll be Muslim some day, “inshallah.” Today, she says, “Bush and Meles: one!” with a grimace of extreme distaste on her lips. “One!”

After Little Eid, I have to rush to a wedding. John calls me that morning: he needs a witness. I rush to Mezzagaja, or City Hall. It’s my first time inside this 60s monstrosity on top of its hill overlooking Addis. We’re searched; we’re questioned; our cameras are confiscated; we’re waved in. We push into a crowded hall to present papers. We fill in some more, watching “The King and I” on a TV set in the corner, sweating and gasping for air as we glance at the many hermetically sealed windows. John’s Ethiopian bride is eager and happy, dressed to kill. John, an old-school Brit, sports a vermilion tie against plaid. He makes many a dry crack about the romance of the place. They are shunted about, from window to window, and finally, exhausted, we are all led into a chamber decorated with heavy white and red draperies and plastic roses, sat at a formidable black table, and we all sign in the thick register, clapping as the man and wife scribble their signatures. Before we get too comfortable, the smiles vanish, and we are ushered out. In the dusty, glaring little courtyard outside, we congratulate and shake hands, and off we go. Brusquely, but no less sincerely, life asserts itself again.

So what next? As coffee is sipped between bitter words about wounded democracy; as our beloved leader contemptuously dismisses foreign calls for leniency, and demands that opposition party leaders be tried for treason; as foreign investment dries up; as life nonetheless rolls pluckily on – birr spent, marriages consummated, worms happily burrowing up their dark cavities – what next?

Well, those who are already bored glance northward, where the proudly insane leader of neighboring Eritrea lustily waves his battle flag. He has dismissed UN helicopters from the border, and troops are mustering on both sides of the vague line between them. One army is “performing exercises,” the other is “helping with the harvest.” Five years of arcane diplomacy after the last war has proven unsatisfying to hypertrophied adrenal glands in the Horn of Africa. We prepare for the next circus. Stay tuned.

Travelogue 108 – November 5
The Rubsha, Part Three

We settle in for the long haul. So it seems.

Disturbances continued into Thursday, particularly in the neighboring district of Faransae. Troubles spread to other cities in Ethiopia, but news is scanty.

All of the night between Wednesday and Thursday, police scoured areas like ours, knocking on doors and grabbing young men and boys, taking them to jail. I hear there have been 5,000 arrests. The prime minister has said nothing, apparently acknowledging that the Ethiopian people are his enemy. Truckloads of soldiers, guns trained, still cruise the town.

Opposition leaders are in jail; their houses have been busted up and burned. One reason Faransae was a battle zone was that it was the location of one of these houses: that of Birtukan, the young woman who was vice president of the Kinijit. An inspiring story (unconfirmed) has it that a crowd of men from the district surrounded her, protecting her from the police, and escorted her to the nearby French Embassy, where she is holed up still. High casualties.

Taxis have stopped running. The government bus system is functioning, despite the loss of some buses to bonfires Wednesday. Most businesses are shut, and no end to this undeclared strike is in sight.

I walk down the hill every day, trying email, fighting boredom. It’s very quiet now. A steady stream of people walks from one place to another, but the streets are comparatively empty. The mood’s not entirely grim, though the heat doesn’t help.

Some kids glare and comment. One says, “You are faranj; I am Abasha; what do you do?” He says it at the edge of audibility, behind my back, as many do here. I confront him. He accuses my government of not helping. I counter with my dual objections: what am I supposed to do, and whose problem is this, anyway?

I’m disgusted yesterday with all parties. Disgust with the government hardly needs explaining. For the rest of them, it’s an old story of chikachik and shaybuna. A general strike? Great: more time with the family and at the café, talking about everyone’s evils but our own. My staff checks out, without a qualm for the kids or for unfinished business.

I march back up the long hill in the midday sun, about three kilometres, back to the school. I collect my two security guys and we start the afternoon’s spontaneous mission. I’m going to visit every one of my students and their families, bring some bread, make sure they’re all right. It takes us four hours, but we visit twenty-six of them before the sun begins to set. The families’ homes are spread all around the nearby hills. The two guys are good sports, putting up even with my minor asthma attack, miles from my medicine.

Everyone is fine, though several of them have lived through some scary days and nights, stray stones peppering their roofs, police banging on their doors in the search for boys to arrest.

Some of them live better than I do: furniture, TVs. Most have bare rooms of mud with essentials. Some live in tragic squalor, in crumbing rooms they can barely fit into, down alleys of mud and stone smelling like sewers. The kids from one house will lead us to the next. Sometimes, I have a crowd of little ones to escort me. Always the stories of street battles, always the surrender, always the beautiful hills around us.

In one, Grandpa sits in a pit dug into the ground, behind a loom. He may sleep there. He obviously doesn’t move by himself, judging by the state of his gnarled feet, long nails curling. His hands are permanently cramped, but he can thread and pull the loom. He wears a greasy, old military cap. His hair and beard are long. The natalas he weaves are lovely.

The police stop us. One of them is the same guy who arrested me last spring. I could never forget his face – the cold, hateful stare and the bared teeth, even in the grimace of a smile. He retains us for a while, with questions and challenges, reading over our IDs repeatedly. Eventually, with his staring, death’s head grin, he lets us go.

In day’s last light, we arrive home. I haven’t eaten all day. My housekeeper didn’t come in. There’s no food in the house. I devour some bread left over from the mission.

What was it I accomplished, really? I’ll sleep soundly from the exertion, anyway.

Travelogue 107 – November 2
The Rubsha, Part Two

Wednesday evening. We’re cozy enough tonight at the school. The five of us sit in tiny chairs in the classroom. Bakalech makes coffee. She’s burning it’an, the incense that accompanies the buna ceremony. The boys tease Wogayehu. One would hardly guess at the brutality of the day.

Wogayehu and Bakalech have to spend the night tonight because all transportation has stopped. She’s been here since morning, when parents brought their students. Everyone was just a little late, including Wogayehu. I sadly watched the clock as 8:00 a.m. approached, with Girma the guard as my only company. The first to arrive were little Yonas and Genet, followed soon afterward by Wogayehu and then Bakalech. More kids appeared. To me, their faces shone with hope and resilience. I was touched more than I can say by the sight of them all.

I left them to their school day and went down to Arat Kilo. After a while, I called the school, and all they said was, “Come back now.” Everything in Arat Kilo was peaceful, but I obeyed. Little did they know they were calling me back into the midst of the danger.

The taxi up to Shiro Meda swerves aside some half a mile from my neighborhood, and they kick us out. The taxi swings around and speed away. It’s the last taxi I see. I walk home. The streets are nearly deserted. At the top of my street are army and police trucks. Stones are in the street. Police are spread out, guns held high. I pass one who is coming up an alley, shooting into the air. Down my street, people are standing mute, looking up behind me, watching and waiting. No one at the school knows what’s happened yet. The kids have been sent home.

We can hear from several directions the sound of guns, people wailing and howling and whistling. We stand outside the school. Francois comes: he was supposed to tutor the kids in French today. As we watch, several boys run up the hill, throwing stones. As they run back down, they are followed by army men shooting at them. It’s my first time seeing men shoot at human beings. I don’t think they hit anyone. We witness several waves like this from both directions, boys running and police or army shooting. They are accompanied by the hooting and whistling of women in their houses. It’s the very sound of shame. Shiro Meda eventually calms down, but beyond the hill, the shooting goes on a long time, including several blasts that are bombs or big guns.

Muluken is also trapped at the school. After we all have lunch together, we resolve to walk down to Arat Kilo. Muluken wants to walk home to his family. I’m concerned about Sophia, whois trapped in her office at the university. Listening to the echoes in the hills around us, the fighting seems to have stopped. Indeed, people have begun to emerge. On the main road, many are walking home from work or school. We find that Arat Kilo is fine. Several stores and cafes have remained open. We meet with Sophia and have tea. All seems well, except for the trucks full of troops passing every few minutes. The soldiers sit facing outward, guns ready. Several tanks roll toward Piassa.

We manage to flag down one of the sparse taxis for Sophia. Francois and I are not so lucky. We have to walk back up the long hill as the afternoon wanes. He has decided to try for home, so our paths diverge. I worry about him. Desalegn tells me that a faranji was killed today in another part of town.

The violence that began in our neighborhood, one of the northernmost, spreads throughout the day, southward through many areas of the city. Presently, they’re fighting in several of the southernmost districts. It seems that something like twenty have been killed today, and over 500 injured. Buses and police cars have been burned. Meles has retreated outside Addis Ababa.

Huddled around the radio, we listen to the Voice of America broadcast, which waxes and wanes among static and radio-chirping. I feel for a moment like I’m in Prague, 1968.

Travelogue 106 – November 1
The Rubsha, Part One

It seems the rubsha we’ve been dreading for so long has broken upon us today, with pent-up fury, though as I write this on Tuesday evening, I have only sketchy details.

The day had an odd tone to it from the start. At 7:00, I’m still half asleep in bed, when our teacher, who always arrives early, concludes that she should clean the toilet. The bathroom is right next to my bedroom. She’s scrubbing and sloshing water by the gallon from a bucket into the toilet. “Wohayehu?” She turns with a charming smile from her position over the toilet bowl. “Good morning!” She tells me a dirty toilet bowl is bad for my sinuses. All right, then. Hazily, I wander outside. There are clouds in the morning sky, something I haven’t seen for a month.

I was supposed to start work today. I’ve been pursuing a work permit since I arrived three months ago. Whether I am closing in on the document or not, I’ve discovered work: back at the school where I taught last winter. Maybe, in this bent place, the work leads to the paperwork.

I’m killing some time before my noon class, drinking coffee, soaking up every fleeting bit of sunshine, when Muluken calls. They’ve shut the school; all the staff has left. There’s something brewing in the Mercato. This is all the information I have for hours. The Mercato district is where those forty poor souls were gunned down by the army last June. Sure enough, I notice now that the school across the street is mobbed by parents picking up their kids. There’s a subdued sense of panic. Everyone is on their mobiles.

The mobile network is clogged. I can’t get through to my employers. I assume I had better go, so I take my usual stroll, which leads me by the prime minister’s palace. Where yesterday troops were thick as pedestrians, now there are none. I take that as a bad sign.

I meet Shimeles, my taxi driver. He doesn’t know anything. We head toward Bole, both of working our mobiles. Halfway there, I make contact. The school is closing. We turn back.

The balance of the afternoon is woven of strange peace and pleasure. I’m selfishly glad to be released from work, and I return to my café for lunch. The streets in Arat Kilo have thinned out, but there is no trouble, just that unnatural peace. The few people sharing lunchtime with me at the café are clearly in the same strange, adrenalized, exhilarated state. They watch the street with a light in their eyes.

Gossip arrives. It’s a bomb. It’s a fight between taxi drivers and the police. People are dead. The battle’s still raging. No, all is quiet.

Back home, I enjoy the fading of a quiet day in the hills. Shiro Meda is untroubled. Kids are playing outside. I look over the newspaper. Ten dead in Kenya in clashes with police at a rally for constitutional change. Protests over election results in Zanzibar. Burundi threatens force against rebels. Next door, the dictator of Eritrea continues to rattle his saber. Recently, he banned UN peacekeepers’ helicopters from his side of the border.

By nightfall, news takes on more substance. Police have killed as many as six in clashes in the Mercato, possibly provoked by CUD’s call to honk horns. At least two policemen were killed. There are barricades and fires. Kids are running rampant in several other districts, throwing stones, causing havoc. CUD leaders have been arrested. More arrests are coming. One rumor has it African ministers have started leaving.

If the moon says so, tomorrow is Eid. It’s impossible to predict what will happen. I’m stuck in the hills. Desalegn has arrived. He’s the extra security I brought in last time. He just shows up. He knows. “Naga?” I ask. Tomorrow? He just shrugs.

Travelogue 105 – October 31
Is it Just Chikachik?

It’s Halloween in America. Our teacher, Wogayehu, hasn’t heard of it. I try to explain but I get distracted by my own discourse about history, All Saint’s Day, and all that, and she gets confused. “It’s for Catholics?” “No, it’s for kids. They dress up in costume.” I’m not even sure she understands about costumes, beyond traditional dress for Ethiopian dances or rituals. “You know, it for fun. Ghosts and witches and what not.” Okay. Well, just write it in your calendar: Halloween.

The government knows what day it is. The federal police are out in droves again, in their blue army costumes. They stand in pairs along every major street. Actually, most of them slouch against a convenient wall. They eye me, fingers on the triggers of the semi-automatics in their laps.

It’s hard to say what motivates their redeployment. Undoubtedly, their supervisors would say it’s the African Union conference this week. Several motorcades with police sirens pass me by this morning. They’re all heading up to the American Embassy, apparently, to pay their respects before the conference gets going. The US Embassy is just above our school. I pass it every day when I go to town.

It’s a bit eerie when Arat Kilo – that swinging little city hub down the hill from us, next to the university – when Arat Kilo is stilled. I’ve mentioned in other blogs the spooky stillness on holidays. Today, it’s the motorcades: police stop all traffic for their approach. Cars idle; everyone watches. But it’s something more. People are expectant.

The Kinijit, our main opposition party since May, has been dormant. They’ve cited Ramadan as their excuse, though they can’t quite keep reports of splintering at their core out of the papers. They balance them with statements that they’re studying the best methods for peaceful protest. These are usually countered with blunt government statements that aren’t much subtler than, “Don’t even think about it.” Meles, our prime minister for fourteen years now, is developing an Arab brutality to his rhetoric. No colorful name-calling, no snakes, scorpions or Satans, but lots of heavy-handed challenges and accusations.

Suddenly, though the conclusion of Ramadan is still half a week away, the Kinijit leaders let loose with calls for protest. Today, every supporter with a horn to honk during morning rush hour is supposed to honk. A rather unimpressive launch to a movement, I thought, but last night the government broadcast the usual threats. Remember, this is the government that has so far refused to either investigate or apologize for the army killings of demonstrators in the streets last June.

Did they honk? Nothing. Other calls for protest this week: don’t talk to your friends who are government supporters. Or boycott government services. Right. This is what we get from a party led mostly by college professors. And our government ministers? By and large, guerrilla soldiers who emerged straight out of the hills up north after almost twenty years of insurgency. It makes for a lop-sided debate.

Eventually, we’re supposed to warm up to a general strike. This, as I’ve reported before, is what worries me. Every day, I ask my taxi drivers and baristas, “Is the strike coming?” But for the fervent YES, all answers vary. This week, next week. One day, one week.

Sophie and Saba, government supporters the both of them, say it’s chikachik: all talk. And these days, there’s a small glint of doubt in the eyes of my Kinijit friends. With a laugh, Meseret says very sad things about what fools she and all Ethiopians were to think things could change.

Still, there’s a tension in the air. This week will likely tell us something about the direction of national politics. Blended into the city hubbub is a strange silence. Everyone turns their heads to watch the Mercedes with dark windows race by, the African dignitaries, police motorcycles ahead and behind them. They watch with unusual melancholy.

Travelogue 104 – October 28
Stoned

The mabrat, the electricity, cuts out on me three times first thing in the morning when I have to get some computer work done. The battery for this laptop failed months ago. After many exclamations of frustration that small children shouldn’t hear as they arrive to school, I finish my project.

On the taxi down the hill, a crazy man settles next to me. He behaves for a while, just mumbling and staring. He can’t contain himself; he has to scream at the faranji. “Techewat!” he shouts: Let’s talk! Everyone turns in their seats. “Where are you going?” “Here,” I reply, and I walk the rest of the way to the internet place.

The electricity is out. Everyone is sitting indolently about. A candle is lit. Almost every day is some saint’s day, and shop-owners often light candles for their favorites. I’m curious. She says it’s Stephen’s day. “The first martyr,” I comment. “No. You don’t know Estiphanos?” “Sure,” I say, “The first Christian martyr. Stoned.” “Really?” I wonder why she likes Stephen when she doesn’t know who he is. I describe what a martyr is. She promises to look him up in the Bible. The girls look at me with religion in their eyes. Not my intention, really.

I walk slowly and without purpose along, feeling a bit bruised by the day already. At the café, I read Homer. Hector hectors his brother, Paris: “The Trojans are all cowards, or you would have had a coat of stone long ago for the evil you have done.”

So he’s afraid to go mano a mano with Menelaus; so he has a weakness for women. So he has a funny name. My position is that stoning is an extreme option.

Francois takes me to a concert a few nights ago. Oliver Mtukudsi is playing at the Alliance Francaise. It’s a beautiful evening, and the concert is outdoors, in the luxurious courtyard of the complex. The place is crowded with white people, come to see the famous black Zimbabwean. I’m stunned, as I always am when I stumble upon more than two or three white people. It’s been three months since I’ve seen this many gathered. I wander among them in a daze. “White women are beautiful!” I whisper to Francois. He laughs.

I have a difficult time concentrating on the concert. I’m intent upon the exotic life milling about. Where did these people come from? You don’t seem them in the street or in cafes. You’ll catch a few of them in some restaurants, if the stars are aligned. Francois is bored with the music, and so am I after a few songs. It’s a lot of that happy South African strumming, and some loose-limbed dancing on the stage. Mtukudsi is likeable, but that’s not enough for two hours.

The next day, God speaks. At my internet spot, Stephen has moved on to heaven, but in his place, there’s a white woman! She’s blonde, and she has a sunny smile. She is Italian! She is Antonella from Napoli. She is here, just like Francois, to study Ge’ez and early church history. Her accent is magical.

I’m in love! I’m in love with Italian. One evening, we go to the Italian Cultural Center in town to watch a movie. (Beautiful movie: “Io Non Ho Paura.”) This place can’t compare to the Alliance. It’s a plain, 60s set of buildings, painted mustard yellow. Inside is one tree, shading a corner of a dusty soccer field. But people in line speak Italian. I can’t stop smiling; I’m high as a kite listening to them. “In Paradiso, parlano l'Italiano,” I declare. They laugh, but no one disagrees.

Antonella whispers in my ear for half the movie, but I find I’m catching on. It’s a wonderful date. But for those of you concerned about my innocence, don’t worry. Antonella has a boyfriend back home. My affair is with her language. Che bella!

Travelogue 103 – October 19
Lazy Days and Distractions

My life has become pretty sedate, and, by and large, I find that agreeable. I sit on my front step for the last hour of the day. Sometimes I stay into night. I watch the bats come out among the eucalyptus trees. I watch the sky flush with royal blue. I watch Venus come out, and then Antares.

The other night, a full moon rose over the horizon, climbing over the high hills behind our bathrooms, climbing up the yellowing sky between two tall black eucalyptus trees, climbing so quietly as not to rustle a leaf. Almost as neat a feat as Francois climbing over our front gate a few hours later.

Francois found a house to rent. Actually, it’s a few rooms in a weedy compound in Faransae, the district next to mine. He has decided he likes the hills on this side of town. He takes me for a walk one afternoon to take a look. We descend the slope below the school, along roads laid with rock, along dirt paths, down to the river that divides our districts. One of its banks is all high eucalyptus over bare red earth. A few dead trunks are propped so that the local boys can ride them like bucking broncos. They invite us to join in on the fun.

Steeply uphill we climb then, along curving lanes, into Faransae, into “Yesus,” an area high above the city, named for one of the twin churches that command the neighborhood. Both churches are new. They’re painted the colors of the Ethiopian flag. One is the traditional hexagonal shape. They share a bell tower, painted silver to look like an Iowa grain silo. A priest stops us to ask for money. Francois takes off after some kids who are pelting a retarded man with stones.

Tonight, he’s climbing my gate. He had to leave one of his bags for a second trip. It’s 9pm, and I’m ready for bed. He taps at my window. I’m not sure which is more disturbing: that Francois so easily jumps the wall, or that my guard is nowhere to be found.

With nights so peaceful, my mornings are early. I rush outside to see the rising sun cast its light on the other side of the tree trunks. These days, mornings and evenings are clear-skied. Midday, clouds push harmlessly by overhead. I work; I watch the kids come in. I catch the taxi down to my internet place.

This morning, I notice that the cute internet girl, for whom I had a burning crush some time ago, is pregnant. I am reluctant to point to her swelling stomach. It would be typical if I were mistaken and then had to stammer apologies. But I do inquire, “Lijj? Baby?”

“Whenever you like,” she replies in Amharic.

“Mm,” I say, and let it go. I want to contemplate that sweet exchange for a while. She doesn’t understand. She thinks that I’m resuming my earlier invitations for a lunch date, and instinctively she humors me. I’ll leave clarification for another day.

After the internet work, after some coffee, I return to the school and meet with staff. Muluken, Saba, and I drag our chairs out of the office. I set up in the sun, they in the shade, and we pursue the topics at hand in as desultory a manner as possible, spiced with lazy banter and useless tangents. We drink buna, we drink shai, and we gossip about the rumblings afoot about more political troubles. Saba absolves the prime minister of all sins, while Muluken castigates and wrings his hands over the fate of the nation.

Jack yips at a bird. She yips at the child who runs to the bathroom. She prances around at the end of her leash, and pants, and distracts. I’ve changed her name from Jack to “Jib-snack.” Jib means hyena. Unfortunately, all the staff loves her now, and I’m having a hard time convincing them that Jack’s got to be evicted. They don’t find her at all annoying.

I have to admit she has her cute moments. When no one else is around, we play with the leather collar that she chewed through. I toss it for her, and while it’s in the air, she turns quick circles looking for it. I hold it high and she jumps, with little concern for landings. Thump! she’ll fall on her ribs, and then bound up for more.

So it goes until another night, and the bats take over, and Venus inches her way east, and the moon wanes below the hills, and the internet girl waxes with child, and Francois disappears into the hills, chasing bad boys and girls, and I pray for no more yips and no more taps at the window.

Travelogue 102 – October 10
Waiting for Francois

I’m sitting in the school courtyard, waiting for Francois. It’s the last of the afternoon, when the world is in an uproar. The church is blasting hymns. Kids are screaming all around the neighbourhood. The birds are in a riot, chasing bugs and diving for Jackie’s food. She’s bouncing at the end of her leash, issuing her squealing yap at the intruders. The sky is gloomy. It’s been raining the last three days, though kerempt should have been over weeks ago. I tell Saba that someone exchanged the Congo for Ethiopia in the night. Whither has Ethiopia gone?

I’m waiting for Francois. When will he return? Girma, our guard doesn’t come until sunset, so I’m alone on the premises in the Congo’s gloaming. I have to unlock the gate whenever Francois knocks. He said he would be back in the afternoon.

I’m waiting. I met Francois in the internet café a week or so ago. He had just arrived from Nantes. He’s a thin, bright-eyed young guy with slight whiskers and Rasta hair, with an infectious and innocent grin. He has lived in Ethiopia before. He was a real Rastafarian back then. But it’s hard to maintain an image of Haile Selassie as God once you’ve been here a while. So he says. I’ve never tried.

This time he’s here to launch his PhD work with some study of Amharic, and of Ge’ez, the predecessor of Amharic, the liturgical language, much as Latin used to be for us. He studies the history of the Orthodox church here. He likes to tell stories from the semi-mythological record of Ethiopia’s religion. He tells Sophia and I about King Ezana and his conversion in the fourth century by two ship-wrecked Greeks. As if the story weren’t fabulous enough, his wonderful accent gives it just the right folkloric touch.

I’m waiting for Francois. He arrived in Ethiopia only days before, and he’s staying in a hotel until he finds a house to rent. I offer him a room at the school. He can stay in the kids’ nap room for a little while. We make quite a pair strolling down the steep, rocky street to the school, he in his Seuss hat and I with my long hair, getting more 70s every week, among the muddy, staring kids and the grandmothers in their white shawls. But that’s one thing about travel in Ethiopia: the way has been paved by many a weirdo, and there will be many more to come. The unique is organically blended with the mundane in the image of the faranji here. Francois tells me yesterday there’s a black Rastafarian in the neighbourhood who fled New Orleans six years ago, predicting disaster. “You see?” the man says now.

Waiting for Francois, I savor the last, fading sensation of my own uniqueness. Last week, I had finally made it: I had become a writer. My cough had become so violent and so prolonged that a doctor had recommended tests for TB. The tests eventually came up negative, but for a few exalted days, I had joined the ranks of Keats and others, a host of wheezing, fragile authors shambling their brief paths through the past. Of course, Keats had produced volumes by the age of 26, when he died, but that was back when artists were encouraged toward excess in all things, including work.

No, I was so content to have made it, I laid down the pen and peacefully closed the laptop to watch the breeze in the treetops and contemplate my success.

It’s Columbus Day in America, and a momentous day here, as parliament is called into session, and the main opposition party refuses to join, citing election fraud and a laundry list of other government offenses. At the café this morning, the radio broadcasts parliament speech after speech. They sound as dry and far from reality as any American political speech.

And I’m waiting for Francois, bereft of my dream by doctors, while the trees become silhouettes against the deep blue dusk. I wonder if he’ll ever come.

Travelogue 101 – October 5
A Miracle in the Ribs

There’s singing and wailing over the wall this afternoon. It’s a luxo, a wake. I’m daydreaming on my front step. Singing is not so unusual in these parts. I don’t notice at first. When I do, I reflect on its beauty and solemnity. And only later do I realize what the occasion is. I doubt many American funerals go unrecognized. And fewer strike a bystander as beautiful.

To conclude my Meskel narrative, I can only say that the holiday itself is somber in comparison with its eve. No singing boys romping around, no joyous processions of young people in traditional garb, clapping and chanting. It’s hard for me to gauge whether that is because Meskel itself is no big deal, or if everyone is hungover and tired, or whether it’s the news of the clash with police in Meskel Square the previous evening.

“Ethiopia is a land of miracles,” one taxi driver tells me. “So many miracles!” He’s remarking that no one was hurt during the clash. The police didn’t shoot this time. He tells me that a previous demonstration was called off because of rain. He says that that time the police did shoot and forty were killed last June, a sudden shower stopped the situation from getting worse. Judging by my experience this summer, I can hardly call rain in Ethiopia a miracle, but I don’t comment.

The taxi drivers are fired up. Every one of them I encounter rails against the government. They all say they’re going to the demonstration Sunday. “It’ll be dangerous,” I comment. They simply nod, with no bravado or rage. They’re going.

Sunday comes and goes. I decide to hire extra security and stay at home, partly for comfort, partly because I don’t want to be seen by my community as fleeing. It’s an empty gesture. The government decides to negotiate, seemingly spurred on by the opposition’s call for a general strike beginning Monday.

On Monday, everything is open. I go to the clinic to get a chest x-ray. I’ve been coughing for a month now, leaving green junk from my lungs all over town. Sitting in the clinic, abandoned to an old Michelle Pfeiffer movie, I muse over the metaphysics of a strike in Ethiopia. I never do see the doctor that day, but I do see the x-ray man.

The whole afternoon is lazy and distracted. The friend who volunteers to take me to the clinic does little more than drag me along on her and her friend’s errands, eventually dropping me at the clinic and promising that she’ll call to check on me later.

One of our errands is at the post office. The driver and I stay in the car. I’m feeling suddenly gloomy. Looking into the sky, I blame the incoming clouds. Most of the sky is still blue. Without really thinking about it, I glance repeatedly up at these offending clouds. They seem fairly harmless. How can they cast such a pall over the city?

The friends return. “Did you notice the eclipse?” one says. We try the old pinhole in a piece of paper trick, and sure enough, the sun is a thin crescent on the hood of the car. A drifting cloud veils the light just enough for us to look directly. So strange.

“It’s beautiful,” gushes the x-ray man in the parking lot of the clinic. “We are so lucky. We are so lucky.” He is laughing. He is holding up an x-ray to see the sliver of sun. He lets me look. He shows another woman, who is shocked. He laughs. “It’s a miracle!” We stand together gazing at the crescent of light gleaming through some guy’s ribs. “We are so lucky!”

Travelogue 100 – September 30
Burning Crosses

The holidays come and go with sound and fury. Meskel is one of the biggest of Ethiopian holidays. It celebrates the finding of the true cross, “meskel” meaning cross. It also happens to be my birthday. Abasha find it funny that I make a big deal of the day I’m born. “Meskel is my birthday!” I repeat shamelessly until they understand it’s important. A lot of Abasha don’t even know the date of their birthday. But they indulge me.

As with many ancient holidays, Meskel’s fun has drifted forward into the eve. The day before Meskel, we celebrate the demera. I awake that morning to the sound of Girma, our guard, pounding through the concrete of our courtyard. He’s making a hole for the cross. A tall stick is stood up straight in the hole. Other sticks are braced against it, tepee style, and then those bundles of sticks, the cibo, are laid around the whole of it. A crossbar is attached to the central stick to make it a cross. The pile is decorated by grass and clusters of Aday flowers, a bright yellow daisy-like blossom that is emblematic to Abasha of the new year, and there is your demera.

Before any other festivities, there is the matter of my birthday. I’m invited into class, where they have arranged all the chairs in a circle, with one seat of honor in front of a huge, round loaf of Abasha bread that Melesech, Leeza’s mom has baked. The kids sing one line of the Happy Birthday song to me over and over, clapping. Then, in single file, they come forward with drawings they’ve made for me. Each shakes my hand and says, “Happy Birthday.” We all eat cake.

It’s time for the demera. “Wendoch, over here.” The boys follow Girma and pick up cibo, which are taller than they are. Girma helps light them on fire. Barely able to maneuver the burning bushes, they use them to light the demera. Quickly, it’s ablaze. The kids stand back and watch. They clap and sing traditional songs together.

Not exactly up to American safety codes, I realize – a fierce bonfire in the middle of our little courtyard, kindergarteners gathered round – but we pull off the old ceremony without a hitch. The demera burns quickly, and the charred cross inside falls toward Saba. The direction the cross falls signifies something, though no one call tell me what.

Of course, the demera is supposed to happen at night, but the kids are dismissed at noon. I was planning on going down to Meskel Square in the afternoon to watch the lighting of the big demera. This tradition is what gives Meskel Square its name. But I am getting reports throughout the day that there will be trouble. The big demonstration is planned for Sunday, but it seems some opposition types can’t wait.

Traveling across town later in order to meet up with some people, I pass through Meskel Square, and I get to see the monstrous demera prepared for the evening’s ritual. It looks to stand about fifty feet high. There are blue-clad federal police standing with guns ready at intervals of about ten feet throughout the whole square.

Sure enough, we hear later that protesters have assaulted the police with stones, sending tourists and other innocents running for cover. Fortunately, the police haven’t opened fire.

I go with some friends to watch the demera at Kidane Mehret (kidan-EMret,) a church up the mountain from me – the one I hear voices from every morning. It’s dark by the time we arrive. The winding road is clogged with people in their church whites and carrying tall yellow tapers, the flickering stars of which flow in a stream up the hill. We have to park and join the slow crowd. The demera is already burning, and the cross inside, about twenty feet high, is leaning. It lurches forward at one point, sending the crowd on that side surging backward, crying in delight. There are perhaps a thousand people pushed tightly together. A group of teenage boys is dancing around the demera. One beats a big drum. They’re singing something about the power of God.

We leave before the cross actually falls. News of the violence at Meskel Square is reaching us, and some in our party are nervous. Predictably, we find Norm surrounded by a large group of little girls, smiling his sweet, saintly smile. He’s having Henok take picture after picture of them all. We tear him away and rejoin the stream of candles.

Travelogue 99 – September 23
The Kunicha

Rumors are flying. Police are marching. Maybe they are army. I can’t really tell them apart. The costumes of these various branches of armed men are as arcane as the colors of the Orthodox priests. The ones that predominate in the past few days are dressed up in blue, blotchy pseudo-camouflage. Who thought up this design, anyway? Arctic camouflage for Africa? Or marine camouflage for a landlocked country? Anyway, they are everywhere.

The major opposition parties have called for a demonstration one week from Sunday. It’s what I’ve been dreading. Everyone is speculating on the odds of violence. Muluken says the people will not stand by idly this time if the police fire on them. Saba says it will be an excuse for thieves and trouble-makers.

The catalyst for demonstration now is the approaching convening of parliament. The opposition parties have protested the elections, saying candidates were intimidated and polls were rigged all around the country. Election observers from the EU and the Carter Commission have judged the elections as unfair. And, indeed, it seems to be the general consensus on the street, except among staunch and belligerent government supporters, that the CUD party won the elections in something like a landslide.

The CUD formally protested. The government-appointed elections board eventually ruled against them. Now the question that has dominated political news and gossip for weeks has been, will the representatives from the opposition boycott the parliament? The international community has urged them to sit in; the people have been urging for a boycott. No word yet on their decision. But they have called for a “unity” government until new elections can be called.

It seems the departing parliament, heavily dominated by the governing party, passed a few new rules of procedure. My favorite is that it takes a convenient majority to introduce a bill in the parliament.

The parties here have little nicknames. The governing party, which has been in power for fourteen years now, is called Yehadek. Their real name is something long and faintly ridiculous, in a way reminiscent of the scene in Life of Brian where rival Palestinian liberation movements kill each other. I believe the initials are EPRDF.

The CUD’s nickname is Kinichit. You see this name scrawled on the back of taxi seats everywhere. They won hands-down in Addis Ababa, where observers were thick on the ground. It happens I learned this name, Kinichit, the same day I learned the name for fleas, which is kunicha. So I started asking people if they were yehadek or kunicha. Muluken found this amusing, but he has lectured me numberless times on the difference, never considering that I may be having fun.

So next weekend, I face a tough choice. Do I flee from home for a night or two, stay in a hotel? If things get out of hand, I will be isolated. Taxis went on strike last time, and nobody that I know lives nearby. Nor are there any sizable markets or restaurants nearby. If things really get out of hand, there may be looting, and I’m sure the lone faranji’s house in the neighbourhood will be a prime target.

I don’t know what to do. I can’t say I’m too impressed with anybody who runs this country or who wants to run this country. The governing party has shown no finesse, blithely excusing itself, for example, for firing on civilians in June, and openly insulting the EU commission. The opposition calls for a demonstration that it knows full well may provoke violence. Meanwhile, the nation has had a record five years of peace – a tense peace at that. And the economy is sliding through the floorboards again because of this crisis.

What can you do? I haven’t decided what I’ll do next weekend yet.

Meanwhile, I’m content to stay at home and watch the afternoon school routine. The kids nap. Saba and I have buna. I sit in a pool of new year’s sunshine, and I watch a bird wash in a puddle left behind from Jackie’s bath. The dog glares at the bather, shivering with cold at the end of her leash. Birds are her nemesis. They like to swoop in and steal the bits of bread that the housekeeper leaves for her. Above, a strong breeze hisses in the leaves of the high eucalyptus trees. I watch the trees sway. All is peace.

Travelogue 98 – September 17
Addis Amat, Part Two

I sleep right through the midnight festivities, oblivious to the fireworks down the hill at the Sheraton. It’s the biggest party in town, of course, bankrolled by the richest man in town. The most famous Ethiopian pop stars are performing. The ticket is 1150 birr, over $100, well over the monthly salary of most Abasha I know.

I wake up to the sounds of a normal day, birdsong and chanting from the church, but in addition, there is singing and clapping from around the neighborhood, mostly kids. It lends a truly happy air to the day, unlike the stale and sullen vibe of most American holidays.

I’m due at Leeza’s family’s for lunch. I get going in a very leisurely way, ambling out the gate in late morning, joining the sparse crowd in the streets. There are the gory piles of sheepskins everywhere, typical of holidays here. People are smiling and weaving even more aimlessly than usual. Many are dressed in beautiful traditional clothing, especially the elderly and the children. Men are in spotless white, from the gabi over their shoulders, to cotton blouses and pants, down to white sandals or shoes. They carry the traditional fly-swatter, horse-tail on a stick.

I pass through Arat Kilo and Piassa on the way to Saba’s, and I’m astounded at how deserted they are. These are commonly the most crowded and bustling parts of the city. It’s pleasant; I take my time.

I’m in Saba’s neighbourhood a lot these days. Dr. Mickey’s office is just down the road. I pass the old Cinema Ethiopia, which is a Haile antiquity, gold and hulking. This sidewalk is usually impassable, with taxis swerving in, newspaper vendors, people lining up for the movie. Today there’s nothing.

Turning a few corners, I come to the broken alley between buildings, where shanty huts of thin wood and mud and corrugated iron are crowded together in several lines. It’s paved with fragments of stone and concrete leftover from whatever was here a long time before, and it stinks. Leeza’s family lives in one of these huts, a room about a hundred feet square, with a common kitchen in the back. They’ve invested in new furniture since Saba has been working with us, so the place is crowded with several couches, a cabinet for the new TV, a bunk bed. There’s little room to maneuver on the buckling linoleum, covered in long, green grass to celebrate the holiday. A stool is set up with a low table with cups. This is where Melesech, Leeza’s and Saba’s mother performs the coffee ceremony. First they have to stuff me with food: lots of meat, because it’s a holiday, and lots of injera, the spongy bread with which everything is eaten.

The coffee ceremony is only a ceremony in that it takes a long time – roasting the beans, crushing, brewing – and in that it’s repeated every day, with the same little mortar and coal stove and traditional, thin-necked coffee pot. My favourite part is when everyone has to take a whiff of the roasted beans. The host walks around the room with them, and everyone pulls the smoke toward himself with a wave of his hand.

It’s a family day. There’s a neighbor’s baby on the bed, rolling around and exercising his little hands and staring at me. The mother is helping prepare the food. I can’t tell if she’s acting as a servant or just lending a hand. Melesech is kind of queen of this little subdivision, a designation she’s earned with kindness, as I understand it. There’s a mother on the couch with me, impassively feeding her three children at once. I can’t help picking one up and playing with it. She fits in one hand. Here eyes are wide and curious. She has claws already and clings to the skin on my hand. She has tiger stripes. She bites my little finger. Everyone here prefers dogs. I tell them I’ll trade this tiny one for Jackie. Jackie has started eating her poop and looking up at me with bright eyes while she does it.

The sky opens up with a powerful rainstorm. We can’t hear each other talk. We can’t hear the singing from the TV, where a fascinating pair from northern Ethiopia are singing traditional songs. It’s an amateurish video – one stationary camera set up in their home. The woman is hypnotizing. She looks straight into the camera and rocks gently back and forth as she sings. She doesn’t blink nor smile, just sings on and on.

Travelogue 97 – September 12
Addis Amat, Part One

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I have a gunfan, a chest cold. Still, I’m out at the café, trying to get some work done. I’m trying to jot some notes into my notebook, but I’m having difficulties. I have a huge blister on my index finger. I had a battle with an aerosol can the other day. I had gotten my hands on some bug spray at one of the markets. When I got home, I gleefully started spraying down everything in my bedroom, with something like Nazi intensity. I noticed that my finger was burning, but I didn’t care. I was envisioning fleas and mosquitoes and flies and bedbugs and silverfish all turning belly up, and it was a terrible sort of joy. When finally I had spent my bloodlust, and I looked at my finger, the tip of it was frozen solid. I was stunned. I don’t remember this hazard to spraying insecticide.

I’m nursing my frostbite in Africa. Outside the café, standing in the light rain are the newspaper boys. One of them has a chicken in his other hand. It’s New Year’s Eve, so chickens are everywhere. Tomorrow we all feast on doro wot, chicken stew. Some jolly guys at one of the tables tease him. He takes it well. It starts to pour. He takes that better than I do. I shut my notebook for the day. I listen to the roar of the rain on the iron roof. I watch people dashing by. When it dies down a bit, I head home.

I spend the afternoon at home. The rain moves on, leaving louring clouds in their wake. We have a few hours respite, so I can sit outside and watch my laundry dry. I’ve already discovered that my housekeeper has pulled her old trick and washed all my bed linen, on the day I’m sick. It’s all on the line, dripping with the latest rain. I’ll be sleeping under a gabi tonight. A gabi is the white cotton traditional shawl that men and women wear, especially on holidays like New Year’s. They’re not all that warm to sleep under.

All around the neighbourhood, you hear the cry of roosters who know the end is near. Next door, the dogs have been baying for days at their new family rooster. The unfortunate bird manages to fly up to the top of our wall. It blinks at Jack and I with fear. Within seconds, the old lady is banging on our gate. I have to shoo the poor chicken back to its fate. We hear the last of its clucking sometime around sunset.

From behind the wall on the other side rise the day’s billows of bitter smoke. Every afternoon, they light up this noxious blaze. Today, it must be a whole tree, along with all the neighborhood’s plastic refuse. The wind is against me; our courtyard is a blue haze and my sinuses are burning. I pray for the rain to return. That’s a safe prayer these days. It starts up again, eventually picking up into a downpour, nearly dousing the fire. Somehow, it still spits out meager clouds of smoke.

Just as it gets dark, Girma, the school guard, brings to the house two tall bundles of sticks. “Cibo,” he says. It’s a New Year’s Eve tradition. We stand in the courtyard and we each get a bundle of sticks. With the help of his little water bottle full of kerosene, we light the ends of the sticks on fire. Normally, this is accompanied by songs and dancing, but we just watch the fire creep up the sticks.

“It’s the old year,” I say in Amharic, resorting to metaphor to see what the meaning of cibo is. He agrees complaisantly and laughs. “In America?” he asks. No, we don’t do cibo. “Rockets?” Yes, that’s it. There’s an envious light in his eye.

The sticks are a little damp, so we run out of kerosene quickly. Still we persist, like little boys intent on the fire. We use up newspaper and matches keeping the fire alive, eventually turning all the wood to ash. We crouch over the embers. “Malkam Addis Amat!” Happy New Year.

Travelogue 96 – September 7
Stomach Zero

“Congratulations,” I said and raised my little cup of buna, or coffee. My school staff roll their eyes and laugh in embarrassment, but they do it. “Congratulations on a job well-done!” We touch buna cups and drink. One academic year completed! The kids have just left, and we’re sitting in the courtyard. There’s some hazy sunshine, and I’m the only one sitting in it. Even after three months of rain, all the Abasha would rather sit in the shade.

The kids are sweet. Before departing, they hug and kiss each one of us. Only that day have we finished the video that we’re sending to our new sister school in England. We caught the last two kids who had been absent, saying hello in English, waving, staring in bewilderment at the camera. Metsananat forgot his name. Waving like a zombie, he says, “Hello. My name is Kalkidan,” repeating after the girl who went ahead of him.

One year done! We take two weeks off for Ethiopian New Year (September 11) and then we start up again. To celebrate, I offer to take the staff to see Lucy at the National Museum on Monday.

Monday is gloomy. We’re supposed to meet in front of the nearby St. Mary’s Church at ten. I’m not surprised when I see none of them. I’m standing alone among the usual swarm of vendors and beggars who gather in front of the gates of churches. I’m shaking my head, wondering whose bright idea this was. I stray toward the small vendor’s stalls down the road, followed by three boys whom are regulars along this strip. They introduce themselves repeatedly, “This my name is Biniam. Hungry, please. One birr, one birr, bica. Stomach zero.” Their lovely smiles and playful demeanors undermine their plea of desperation, despite the practiced whine, but the cute factor helps them. I ignore them and shop. I bargain over a dog-eared copy of a biography of Thomas a Beckett.

“Mister, stomach zero.” Okay. Nobody’s come to meet me yet. I take my boys over to the bread shop across the street and buy them a huge loaf for 25 cents. They’re all smiles and thumbs-up. I leave them at the church and cross to the museum. I’m reading about the martyr in front of the museum when I get a call at 10:20. “We’re at La Vera Cucina. Where are you?” “Muluken,” I reply, “no one ever said anything about La Vera Cucina.”

We finally make it to the museum. Everyone has a cold but me. It’sthe first time in Ethiopia I’m the healthy one. We’re stopped at the gate and searched. The guard’s baby daughter searches me, at least up to the knees. Everyone laughs. It’s two birr for Abasha, ten for me. Inside, we immediately go downstairs to the fossils. I read again with disappointment how fossils aren’t really bones; they’re just the mineral deposits left in the place of bones. Even Nature is a fake. Even Lucy is a fake. They’ve taken her off to Washington DC, of all places. She’s a fake of a fake. I study the man-made bits of bone that wasn’t bone from the skeleton that held her up 3.2 million years ago. The pieces couldn’t hold much up now. Why did they coffee-stain the fakes, if we know they’re fakes, I wonder.

I take the ladies upstairs to look at Lucy’s husband, whose head is kept in a display box behind a staircase. A reconstruction stands beside the skull. He’s a truly ugly boy. I enjoy the ladies’ laughter as I point out he’s their ancestor. How come he stands only three feet high, but his head is bigger than ours – and his brain is a fraction of the size of ours?

More fun for me is the exhibit upstairs of ancient artefacts. I’m a sucker for carved rocks. We’ve got a pair of seated notables who look Sumerian. We’ve got inscriptions in Southern Arabic script from 2,500 years ago. It looks nothing like modern Arabic, and a little like modern Ethiopian. It’s the progenitor of Sabean, which develops into Ge’ez, which is papa to Amharic and Tigrenya, the language of northern Ethiopia, and of some of Eritrea. Actually, the script of these modern languages is Ge’ez. It hasn’t changed in about fifteen hundred years. We’ve got limestone cabinets with more Sumerians lords in Egyptian positions under borders made of cavorting ibex.

In a glass case, there are Axumite coins. The Axumite empire ruled northern Ethiopia for about eight hundred years, during the late Roman Empire and afterward. If you look closely, the inscriptions on the coins are Latin. There’s no one to ask about that.

Carry on into the throne room, where stands Haile Selassie’s wooden and ivory throne. It doesn’t look very comfortable, but thrones rarely do. Muluken assures me he was a short, slight man. His feet were swinging far from the ground. In glass cases are jewelled crowns of the great emperors; robes of velvet and silk, ostrich feathers and lion mane; and swords inscribed with Ge’ez.

Outside we sit among various construction projects on the museum grounds, and we wait for Wogayehu, our teacher, who is very earnest about this visit. She’s jotting notes in a tiny notebook. I’m feeling lonely without Lucy, and a little stomach zero. Time for bug, I decide, and we walk together toward Arat Kilo.

Travelogue 95 – August 29
Macchiato in the Time of Amputation

It’s Sunday. I wake with the roosters. I listen for rain. I check for pain, rolling my tongue across the ravaged tooth. For the first time in nearly a week, it doesn’t scream. Something Dr. Mickey gave me is working. For a few days, something he gave me was giving me fevers and muscle aches, but that has passed.

Well it was bound to happen. I’m losing a body part. After all the insults upon my body, I should have known Ethiopia would eventually claim a part of me. Dr. Mickey says in his polished accent that it’s got to go. He shows me the x-ray. Yep, the roots curve and branch ominously, and the filling made by my American dentist is too close to the nerve. The wisdom tooth that has stood by me for decades has been sabotaged.

I get up. The skies are dark. Tuesday I have the tooth yanked. Even with my newfound faith in Dr. Mickey, I’m scared. I search for signs that I’ll be all right. It starts to rain. The clouds are black. As I watch, it turns to hail.

Dr. Mickey also shows me the broken tooth from a few weeks ago. The cheap filling placed by the other Ethiopian dentist has already fallen apart. Dr. Mickey will fix that. The price for both operations will be less than the other clinic charged for the one bad filling. Dr. Mickey patiently explains all the mistakes of the other dentists. He’s Armenian, young and serious and bald. By the end of his consultation, I’m wishing all my dental troubles would come in Ethiopia.

The rain passes. The black clouds break and succumb to white ones that look like piles of vapour miles high. There are fleeting patches of blue. As an omen, I’ll choose this one over the hail. Isn’t that how omens work? Then I notice that two enormous wasps are stationed on either side of my bedroom window. Up above, they’ve started a new home underneath the eave of the house. How should I read that?

I decide I had better search for omens outside of home. I’m going out for a macchiato. I’m not sure Dr. Mickey would approve, but why deny the dying tooth a last taste of sugar?

I notice there are a lot of priests out today. I pass the patriarch’s office, where there are a cohort of them lined up, greeting visitors arriving in big cars with tinted windows. The priests are like jungle birds in their plumage, clothed in robes of black or tan or deep maroon, with round, flat-topped hats. I don’t know who gets to wear which color, but it just seems right that they dress so richly. What’s the use in having plain-clothes priests?

I’ve come to the traffic circle at Arat Kilo. It’s one of the busiest neighbourhoods in a busy city, near the university and full of coffee shops and stores. In the center of the circle is a column topped by a stone imperial lion. Colorful priests regally pass in pairs or lines of three or four among the students and bustling businessmen. I notice that a circle of blue sky has opened above us, corresponding almost perfectly with the traffic circle. Good omens, all.

And yet images of doom haunt me. I see the dentist’s chair. I hear the creepy drill. Dr. Mickey says he only needs local anaesthesia. I don’t want to be awake for this. I can’t imagine how he will get into the back of my mouth and pull. The last time I lost a body part, I was a pre-teen ready for braces. They put me to sleep. Last night, I dreamt of shattered teeth and blood.

Ethiopia is in my gurgling stomach. It’s written all over my skin, like a map of red stars, all my bug bites. I’m back to my monkeyish habits morning and night of counting my wounds. This morning, they’re on my bum. I stand scratching as I wait for a taxi. I’m travelling all the way to Bole for my macchiato today, hoping to absorb a bit of the good-times vibe of the well-to-do down there.

As I enter my taxi, a young lady has to move over for me. As she does so, she presents me with a whole lot of macchiato skin down her blouse. I say, “Thank you,” and take my seat. I feel the stirring of humanity. I take that as a very positive sign. It’s been a while. There’s nothing about dentistry that inspires those feelings, pain or cure.

At the café, sugar and caffeine coursing through my blood, I tally my omens, and say they are good. Bole gets good weather, being lower in altitude and some distance into the plain. The clouds take on a benevolent shade. And they have a good orange cake at the Café Paradiso, so sweet it makes your teeth ache.

Travelogue 94 – August 23
Under the Effects

It wouldn’t be fair to my readers if I didn’t admit right now that I was composing this entry under the influence of drugs. Regrettable, but if I don’t write now, I’m afraid I’ll end up allowing too much time between logs. I’ve already had complaints. I can’t even tell you which drug, which is sad. That’s half the drug-user’s joy: name-dropping. Back when I had my chipped tooth, the dentist prescribed these little nameless tablets. They do provide relief.

Out in the school courtyard, a summer sun beats down on the concrete. It’s not the timid sun of kerempt, dashing from cloud to cloud, weak and joyless, but the Ethiopian sun that I remember, blazing in a sky of royal blue. Is kerempt waning? Sunday was nearly a whole day like this. And then on Monday, I cheated by taking another trip to Nazarit, where the rule of rainy season is tenuous. It was hot, and I blamed the headache on the glare. Riding back in the bus, you watch the cloud front smashing darkly against the mountains over Addis Ababa.

The kids welcomed me back this morning by yelling my name and mobbing me. What can I tell you about the kids, after nearly a year of acquaintance? They’ve grown. My back explained that to me when I picked two of my girls up at once. That was the first of today’s persecutions.

I’ll skip the part about “cute and lovable,” and tell you they’re eager learners. There are days I enter the classroom in the morning, before school begins, when they are allowed playtime, and a group of them is sitting with books, sounding out each letter like they’re reading out loud. During recesses, I’ve seen them playing school. One or two of them, usually girls, stand before a semi-circle of kids seated on the ground. The teacher(s) points to letters that are stencilled onto our gate and walls, and the children name them.

They persevere, smiling and playing so consistently that it is easy to forget about the trials of life outside our gate. Last Friday we went to a luxo for the father of one of our boys. A luxo is something like a wake, though I don’t know where the body is. Benches and chairs are set up inside and outside the house of the bereaved. Friends and extended family take care of the immediate family and guests. People come at any time during the next few days and quietly take a seat. They stay for minutes or for hours. Often a tent is set up outside with benches for visitors. Walk around town routinely and you’ll see these tents fairly often, just as you’ll notice that a discomfiting percentage of women here are wearing the black of mourning.

This boy comes from one of the poorer households. He lives with his grandmother in a tiny mud hut that’s morbidly dark. The mother is gone. The father has been dying from AIDS for a while. The grandmother sits on her bench at the luxo, and she sighs and she groans. She has seen six of her seven children die.

But the kids go on, and I’m proud of them. It’s as close to the pride of parenthood as I’ll get, I suppose. And doesn’t every parent experience the misery of one disappointing child? Isn’t that part of the package? That’s where Jackie comes in. I’ve had to face the difficult reality that she just isn’t the smartest pup to grace this planet. Case in point: she’s had to learn how to live with a chain and collar since I’ve been back. I didn’t think that would be a challenging concept, even for a dog. For the first week, she raced to its length and squealed. Her bewildered eyes broke my heart, as much for the lack of wit in them as for the pain. The next and continuing stage was tying the chain in knots around the pole and staring from her inch of slack. I let her go in the late afternoons and she runs wild. We play stare-and-pace, which is her version of fetch, and I sigh sadly. Yes, I understand parenthood now.

Massive clouds are catching up to the sun as the afternoon shadows stretch. I wonder how much longer my pills will protect me. Around noon today, the headaches of the last few days exploded. I was besieged by waves of blinding pain, and in between the waves, I realized with a corresponding emotional pain that my adventures with Ethiopian dentists were not over. This time, it’s the other side of the jaw. I pray the pills carry me through the night, and through the jostling taxi ride tomorrow, and through the to the answer of the agonizing questions: why now? why in Ethiopia?

Travelogue 93 – August 14
Mr. Flower

Nazarit is balmy and inviting. The sun is out. The air smells clean. After we check into our hotel, we run our first errand: meeting a big boss in the city administration. Muluken sets out at a trot down the busy avenue. Muluken is older than I, though a touch of grey is the only indication. He’s wearing a suit, and still he’s outpacing me. We’ve already walked this neighbourhood from one side to the other looking for accommodation, but he’s off to the races again. I beg him to flag a taxi. He grimly cites the cost, but I get him to compromise. We catch a taxi-van. We ride to the end of the line, and then we have to walk another long way. We’ve gone to the wrong office. We walk back. Another van, another walk. We find the right office, but it’s lunch hour.

We go for tea. We seem to be downtown. The crowds are thick. The buildings are two-stories and full of small businesses. I haven’t seen one other faranji yet. Business lunchers stare. Boys begging and boys selling are so relentless I begin dismissing them like flies mid-sentence. They stand aside and fix dark eyes on me.

We meet our bigwig. He enters with the customary frowning formality. All city officials with authority that I’ve met bear the same load of ice on their shoulders. He sits behind his desk and invites us to present our case with a solemn nod, which Muluken does, with the requisite flatteries and humble timbre. The boss passes judgement in gloomy cadence: he’s grateful for our interest. They’ll do all in their power. He refers us to his subordinate, who has sat in the meeting with us. Outside, Mr. Ilala, the silent subordinate, is jolly and welcoming and full of ideas. He refers us to four kebeles, or city wards, where the need is greatest and where we will probably get most support. We bow and shake hands. Outside the gates, I stop Muluken and I insist on a taxi. He laughs indulgently.

Our favourite kebele is 03, the last one we visit. Kebele 03 is a cheraka kebele. Cheraka means moon. Basically, this area of the city was settled by squatters, who built their houses under the light of the moon. Now it’s accepted as a legitimate city ward. The taxi can’t take us all the way to the kebele office. We have to walk a ways down a muddy, narrow lane. The gate to the office is crowded by solicitors, as they often are. People are astounded to see faranj in this setting. They stare in shock as we pass through. The police sitting on benches inside the compound also stare. We’re led into a room by some young guys who I assume work for the kebele. Muluken explains. They send word to the kebele boss. This man enters and grabs me, shouting the Oromo greeting in my ear and laughing. He’s a bear of a man and dark-skinned. He listens benevolently to Muluken, and when it’s his turn to speak, he tells us he’s grateful for our interest; they’ll do all in their power, speaking in a basso profundo that makes the mud room vibrate. His name is Ato Ababa: Mr. Flower. The name is pronounced a little like “Bubba,” which I think might be more apt. He roars good-bye in Oromo after me.

Muluken and I celebrate at the Bekele Molla, a hotel on the Strip with a peaceful patio. We share some tibs and some fries. We toast to our success. I’m crying. It’s not the emotion of the occasion. It’s the amazing amount of dust in the air in this town. By evening, I’m sneezing and my nose is running like a faucet. The hotel patio is a mild respite, being off the street. I learn something new there: why those pretty, yellow birds are called weavers. They are busy flying around the trees of the patio. I finally notice their nests. They are little woven bulbs, like Chinese lanterns, hanging from the end of branches above. The birds enter from below. The handiwork is impressive. At first, I think they’re man-made. Then I’m wondering if we didn’t learn weaving from the birds.

Travelogue 92 – August 9
A Trip to Vegas

I arrive at the bus station at 7am. To call it a station is generous. It’s a muddy lot with rows of aching, idling old Eurobuses. People with bags are wandering around the iridescent puddles. The air is thick with noxious fumes. Muluken isn’t here yet, so I look for a café.

We’re going to Nazarit, a small city about 100km southeast of Addis Ababa. I say small city, though Muluken is quick to point out that Nazarit is number two in the nation now, in the same league as Bahir Dar and Dire Dawa. We’re investigating the town as a site for our second school.

Once Muluken has arrived, we search for our bus. We are the last two on board, so Muluken is squeezed into a sweaty back row, and I’m perched on a hard, little fold-down seat at the end of a crowded row. There looks to be close to a hundred people packed into this stout bus. We roll forward, angling around in the mud a while, among the other buses, and finally roll out onto the street.

My apprehensions about riding in this crowded a vehicle are put to rest. Ethiopians are mild-mannered people to begin with, and well-used to patience in crowds. Men read the paper. Women raise a hum of chatter. Everybody is still and cozy. A pudgy boy in front of me is particularly well-behaved. He jokes quietly with his mother; he passes out gum to his family. The man sitting next to me is an old friend of Muluken’s, which is not surprising: everywhere we go, we find friends of Muluken. Mulugeta is his name. He shyly points out sights for me along the way.

We pass Leeza’s graveyard on the way out of town. The town goes on and on after that. The bus station is at the southernmost edge of my Addis Ababa, the city that I know. I was vaguely aware that some neighborhoods stretched on from there, but it takes us a half hour to get clear of the city. Most of it is ugly industry, with the occasional ugly corporate building posing as style.

City buildings give way to the corrugated iron roofs of small suburbs, which give way to thatched roofs, which give way to fields and hills. It’s vividly green out here, in mid-rainy season, with abrupt and beautiful green peaks rising from the gentle hills. There’s not a soul out among the meadows and fields. These fields are not the vast and uniform farm fields of the American Midwest, but small, rough squares among the riot of natural greenery, obviously tilled by hand and by animal. There are no machines out there. My overly romantic imagination sees medieval Italy.

About the time my backside is too sore to sit anymore, we head down a long slope into the Rift Valley. Things dry out. The Seattle skies clear. We wind along among rocky gullies, eventually passing over a ridge that overlooks our destination. This is city number two? I wonder. It’s like entering Las Vegas fifty years ago, coasting down the one desolate road into town, passing hotels, silent desert ridges overlooking – though these are dotted with a bit of rainy-season growth.

It’s just like Vegas: there’s a convention in town, and there are no rooms. Nazarit is a business town, and also a government center. Until a few weeks ago, it served as capital for the Oromo regional administration. (In a bit of dirty politicking, the present federal administration moved it to Addis, in order to complicate matters for the new opposition party that will be taking over Addis’ City Hall.)

We walk and walk, led by Mulugeta, who has a computer training business in Nazarit and knows the town. We amble from hotel to hotel, along the dusty shoulder of the one asphalt road in this part of town, dodging taxis and the staring crowds. The one hotel that isn’t full wants to charge me a faranji fee. We pass.

Okay, so it’s not like Vegas. Dusty little boys tag along after you, peddling peanuts from a cone of newspaper. Horse-drawn, wooden two-wheelers stand idle here and there, ready to take you to your convention. Cattle with loose-skinned throats cross the avenue.

Mulugeta leads us off the asphalt, onto a wide dirt channel that will one day be a broad new boulevard, about a half mile to a solitary hotel that stands incongruously among the mud houses. It is used to being a luxury stop, but the road construction has diverted business. We get a great deal: hot water and mosquito nets, echoing walls of cinder block and plaster, a view over grassy courtyards and the open-air Pentecostal church next door, all for about six dollars a night. We drop off our bags and head to the Strip.

Travelogue 91 – August 2
The Voices

It’s not raining tonight. If it were raining, all I would hear is the steady percussion of water on my iron roof, and on everyone else’s iron roof. Every shower is a deluge here, to judge by the sound.

Instead, I faintly catch a hint of something else. I stop and listen. It sounds like a crowd. It sounds like someone shouting through a bullhorn angrily and a crowd roaring something in approval.

The day before, more results in May’s federal elections were announced. That’s why I listen intently. A few months ago, these elections led to demonstrations and the deaths of forty people when the military opened fire on protestors. The city shut down. Everything was closed, and taxis were parked.

I listen outside. The echoing shouts are eerie. I climb up the school’s jungle gym to catch the sound better. It drifts down our little valley, undulating, reverberating. The air in these little vales is thick with voices. We get them day and night, from the churches, from children’s shouts, from radios, from salesmen and policemen up the hill with megaphones. And what is this now? The night is so peaceful, I think it might be something from another time. Maybe it is; it seems no one else heard them.

We had a delegation of important visitors a week or so ago. They met our children and their parents, all huddling inside the classroom against the rain, watching the TV that Saba brought from home for the occasion. The kids shyly sang and posed for pictures. The parents watched the visitors, humbly, expectantly. They asked what would happen to their children. Our guests gushed with American affirmations: any opportunity is theirs to have. The parents sigh happily and grasp the visitors’ hands and thank them with trembling emotion. I feel guilty for having brought them. As they’re leaving, one guest puts money in my hand and says to treat them all to lunch.

Ethiopians love ceremony. A week later, we arrange for a big feast at the school. Before eating, the staff and the parents trade small orations. The parents want to tell me again how grateful they are. One mother tells us how she feared her boy was autistic before enrolling him in our program. Now, he talks and plays. He was abducted by beggars once when he was little. Apparently, they like to grab little children for begging companions and maim them for effect. Fortunately, neighbors spotted the little boy in time.

A tall grandfather with a mischievous and nearly toothless grin wants me to know how happy they are with our teacher, who treats their children like family. He wants me to know how much it means to them that I live with them in their “slum.” I make promises. When they eat, they eat quietly, and with a decorum that might be awakened by the classroom atmosphere.

It’s at this meal that I break my tooth. We staff members eat after everyone has gone. It seems that bits of bone settle toward the bottom of the pot. We rush off to the dentist. This is one business sector I was ready to boycott in Ethiopia. I find the types of pain I encounter in dentist’s chairs to be unforgivable. I beg dentists for novocaine, even for cleanings. They tsk-tsk. But now, being forced to face those murderous instruments far from home is one more reason to question God’s good will.

Luckily, I haven’t chipped it too deep. That evening, the dentist on staff, with hostile stares and incomprehensible mumbles, installs a temporary filling. It only hurts when he pours air over it, like hurrying a wet sock with a hair dryer. The next morning, I face an Asian lady who is even more incomprehensible. I stop her, drill in hand. “Pain!” I say with intensity. “No pain, no pain.” And to my credit, I surrender to the ordeal, sweating and ready to cry though I am. For the most part, she is correct. When she isn’t, I jump in a very communicative way. It’s over quickly. She peers at the filling. She picks at it and worries it with her drill. “How’s that?” the cute assistant asks. I smile. I’m discharged. A day later, my tongue is raw from the sharp edge left over. Shall I return?

Travelogue 90 – July 26
Clouds

On my flight from London, I sit next to a young man returning to Iraq. I gather somewhere along the way that he is Kurdish. He’s happy to fly. I’m judging he’s never done it before; I have to show him how to find his seat and how to buckle his seatbelt. He wants to know where the toilet is. He excitedly peeks at his cell phone throughout the flight, the screen of which features an unflattering, candid self-portrait. When he’s not doing that, he’s leaning over me to gaze out the window, his hand on my arm, even when there’s nothing to see but cloud tops. He turns to me with a wondering smile.

The innocent Kurd disembarks in Amman, a stop that the flight makes on the way to Addis, and I can’t help wondering what kind of dangers await him after his next short flight. Most of our passengers leave with him, one of them in a gurney. A Jordanian emergency medical team boards and escorts her off the plane. I don’t know what happened to her. She’s apologizing to us as she goes. After that, it’s quiet. For four nighttime hours, it’s quiet, and I’m amazed to find myself on a painless flight. We arrive at 3:00 am. Muluken is waiting for me. I smell Ethiopia in the night.

I awake to rain. I knew to expect it. We’re well into kerempt, Ethiopian winter, the rainy season. The concrete in our little courtyard is slick with moss. My breath escapes as mist. The hills above are shrouded in diffuse clouds. The hills below, beyond the wide valley, the ones that were always a desert brown, are green with grass now. Every day is the same. The sun is rare. Some time in the day, it will pour.

Afternoon is my favourite time of day. I sit on the front step of the school, facing the empty playground. It’s quiet -- except for the echoing cadences of the priest in the church up the hill. He’s preaching hell and brimstone and broadcasting it to the whole valley. At dawn, it’s a haunting voice raised in hymns. This afternoon it’s all angry words of love.

Threatening clouds pass overhead, rolling in from the south, toward the mountains. There’s no wind. The tall eucalyptus trees surrounding the house are still. The small songbirds that usually wait for crumbs are zipping around overhead. It takes me a while to spot their prey: some long-winged insect fluttering across the sky, maybe fifty feet up. They’re all going the same direction, looking hopelessly vulnerable among the zooming birds. A wing from one doomed bug floats down to us. Jackie sniffs it and tries to eat it.

Jackie has grown! I feared for her when I left last spring because she was stuck in her awkward adolescent ugliness. Her body was stretching forward and backward, making her look like a scruffy dachshund. Well, in the intervening months, she’s become a pretty little dog. The dachshund gene lives on, but it looks like the weiner dog was bred with a red fox. She’s grown a luxurious coat of fire. She prances around daintily on light feet. She turns a tiny face up at you with bright eyes and huge ears, and once again, you’re convinced she is the cutest mutt to ever grace the continent.

Travelogue 89 – July 19
Bath

When I visit Pey, I stay in the topmost room of her tall Edwardian home, the home that stands in a row with other tall houses of yellow stone. It’s a cozy room under the steep peak of the roof. There are two large windows cut from the slant of my low-slung ceiling. I stand at one and look out over most of Bath, snug among the hills of the green river valley. The river is the River Avon, eagerly running toward Bristol, the Bristol Channel, and the sea. The air here reminds you of Oregon, and I think of the ocean, though Pey’s husband tells me it’s not close enough to smell.

From the window, I can see all the yellow buildings of the old town. The famous abbey is to the right, with its high square tower. You can just about make out its fifteenth-century façade, where angels climb Jacob’s ladder, and olive trees with crowns are carved to commemorate Bishop Oliver King. The abbey overlooks the hot springs that gave the town its name. The Roman ruins were only discovered in the late nineteenth century, and are now surrounded by a slightly ludicrous structure from that era, memorializing the Roman roots of the town. Next door is a Georgian structure that houses the Pump Room, where royalty and lords rubbed elbows, received their treatments, drank the mineral waters. A tour of the baths is well worth the time. The site is redolent with history, from ancient Celts to Romans to Brits. Most fun is learning how the Romans built and enjoyed their baths. There is a collection of Roman curses that were tapped into bits of metal and thrown into the springs for someone else’s bad luck. Directly across the valley from my window is the Royal Crescent, an imposing set of eighteenth century houses standing above a beautiful, expansive park and garden, mirroring in a way the younger set of worker’s rowhouses on this side of the valley.

It’s summer. The perennial cloud cover is broken, and blue shines cheerfully over the quiet town. You wake at dawn, which comes so early here. You listen to the sea gulls. You listen to the muffled roar and the clacking of the train below.

The train brought me in yesterday. Pey wasn’t home yet, so I sought out the Caffe Nero that I remembered from last time, passing along the central shopping avenue, surrendered to pedestrians. I’m numb from travel, but the short, quaint buildings several centuries old, the accents, the Italian of the visiting school kids all work to revive my spirits.

In the crowded café, an older couple shares my table. They recognize my accent, and ask where I’m from. She’s impatient when I answer, “The US.” “Of course, but where?” They love America, they tell me. They have traveled there often, particularly Florida and Texas. The man has a sweet, yellow smile. His face is deeply creased, and he looks the part of ageing sailor’s son. His voice is gentle and cultivated, and you have no problem believing his story of being lost in the bad side of Miami, asking some “colored children” on the corner for directions, and receiving quite naturally a polite reply. “It’s all in how you treat people, isn’t it?” he purrs.

Speaking with him, I feel like I’m warming up from a week in the icebox. And I don’t refer to Minnesota, which was sweltering when I left. I mean the numbing agonies of bad travel: waiting some thirty hours for Northwest to find us a plane, (as we mere passengers play pawns in their labor dispute with the mechanics,) suffering next to a fidgety teenager all nine hours of my overnight flight, stumbling from train to train on my way to Bath, slipping from brief black comas to open-eyed hypnosis as tidy, green English fields trip by. I’m deposited in fair Bath. Pey will be along later. I swing my bags over unfeeling shoulders. I walk and I listen, and slowly I awaken to Europe again. Its accents have saved me before.

Travelogue 88 -- July 11
Acceptance

I tilt away from the computer; the bed tilts toward me. Eventually, dreams make their way through the stagnant heat. I wake up at first light, dim light in the basement windows. I sleep again until the dreams stand and leave. I stand later. The bed tilts away into its concrete corner, where mould creeps up from the soggy carpet. It's always murky down here. My morning mirror is an odd bit of art someone installed in Craig's basement. They painted a rectangle of grey -- I think it's grey, but in this light, it's hard to tell -- and added daubs of white paint, in which they had a cat leave its paw prints. Among these are shards of a mirror glued to the wall. My face is shadowy there. I have to return to my 98 Imac, to watch my work flicker in the unstable screen. But I look into my eyes and say, "This is my life."

What I'm looking at are dead man's eyes. I have to go again, suddenly. Minnesota stands and leaves. It seems the foundation has a golden opportunity in Addis Ababa. I have to go meet it. Summer tilts away, just as the cicadas are warming up their instruments. Last sights are pale.

The sky today is blank and dense. I go to St. Mary's by Lake Calhoun. It's Greek Orthodox; it has a small golden dome; it stands on a green bluff overlooking the lake. The interior is light and airy, unlike those of sister churches in the Old World. There are no teenage girls lining up to bump heads with icons. Instead, there are toddlers getting out of daycare. Several are screeching outside the sanctuary door as I try to pray. It's awkward praying for another soul. I want her to be happy. She loved this church; she came here often to find peace. I look up into the dome and try to decipher the Greek. There are the four evangels, painted in modern primitive imitating ancient primitive. The toddlers are led away. There's peace.

I've gotten some calls and some emails from friends who have remembered it was two years ago she died. These messages seem to come just as the pain is most intense. When Eric calls, I'm sitting in a park in her old neighborhood. The sky is heavy and glaring, just like the days after she died, when I wandered these blocks like a ghost. Maybe I thought my ghost could find her. The sky was so flat and bright, I began to think it was night. Eric called just after I had heard a Whitney Houston song that my Leeza loved. Whitney Houston in the coop? It's never happened until today. Whitney Houston: I used to laugh at her.

Coincidences don't surprise me. There was always something magical about her. The night she died, before I knew, Troy and I walked onto the railroad bridge across the Mississippi that was close to our apartment complex. The sky was alive with the aurora borealis. It was only the second time I have seen it, and this was nothing like the first time. Green waves of light danced across half the sky.

When I got home, there was a message from Leeza's cousin. There was an accident. No one would tell the family anything. He gave me the number they were given. Yes, she was there. "What can you tell me?" I asked, full of terror. The man answered irritably, "I can tell you she's dead."

Leeza tilts away. She finds her new place. I remember that I lost all my breath. I sank to the floor, and it took forever. I couldn't find my voice to talk into the phone. Some time later, I find it again. And all it has is a long, jagged, "No!" I've thought about that cry often over two years. It was a sin. I pray to cleanse it.

"This is my life," I say to the shadow in the mirror with dark eyes. I turn back to the computer. In a while I'll eat again. Some time I have to start packing again.

Travelogue 87 -- July 4
Fictions, Part Two

It’s Independence Day, and two columnists raise their voices about the threatened imprisonment of two journalists who protected their sources against Bush administration prosecution. Instinctively, you set them aside, hidden inside the lightest section of the Sunday paper – the four-page opinion section – and root around among the real stuff. You glance at headlines – death in Baghdad and holiday traffic – and pick up Entertainment. Now we’re talking. Hall and Oates are back, and there’s a web site that analyzes box office statistics. Read why “Cinderella Man” didn’t rake in what it could have. Page after page.

“Praise Fukin Jesus” the sign says. Ben and I are taking a stroll along Venice Beach. I’m drawn to the rambling, magic-marker posters hung beside the sidewalk. There are about a dozen of them, and they rant in dense, meandering text about religion and poetry. (Behind them, bright sand to the blue ocean edge.) “Praise Fukin Jesus” crows the title of one of the posters. I’m intrigued, but I find little to grab onto in the accompanying diatribe. A long list of LA people are false, he’s reporting.

The author isn’t false. He calls to Ben from behind his table. He’s black, with short, kinky dreads. He tells Ben that he looks like Bruce Jenner. Ben pauses to chat. When the man finds out Ben is a musician, he’s full of nodding encouragement. But don’ t sell out, he advises. “Don’t walk over the gold to get to the coal, man,” he shouts as we’re leaving. “That’s what Jenner did when he put himself on that Wheaties box, man. Don’t do it.”

It’s my second trip to Venice. Carolyn brought me on my first day in LA. We walk along the sidewalk together, beside the merchants and their wares. T-shirts seem the money-maker along this strip. At one stall, you can get just about any slogan you can imagine with the word “fuck” in it. There are tattoo parlors, of course, and music vendors. There’s even a bookstore. Vendors at their tables are plying crystals and baskets and African art. There’s a steady stream of people on roller blades.

One of them wears all white, including white shin pads and a white turban. He’s playing an electric guitar and coasting along behind a pretty girl, serenading her with a blissful smile. Carolyn tells me excitedly, “That’s Harry! He’s famous.” Later, Carolyn’s brother informs me that Harry is a runner. He’s seen Harry running all the way up in Malibu, white turban and all. We come to Muscle Beach, and I laugh to see it. It’s like a petting zoo, and I wonder what attraction it has for the animals. They’re scarce today. One stands in chiseled languor, rolling massive lozenges of metal over his shoulders, apparently massaging them. We move on. I’m enjoying the sun and the sea, wishing I had brought my running shoes, so I could breathe deeply of the salt air all the way up to Malibu myself.

Craig, Eman, and I stumble out of the discount theater, having enjoyed the evening’s romp of the stars across the Sahara. The lead couple close the movie in self-aware displays of beauty on the beach at Monterey. We leave them there and lurch across the dank and peeling lobby, where the counter kids are romping unself-consciously. One has a trash bag over her shoulder.

We go to Manning’s, the neighborhood bar behind the railroad tracks from Craig’s house. They have free popcorn. A barista at my regular café sits in the booth behind us. She has an angelic face. Her smile is beautiful as ever, but her big, blue eyes are glassy and rimmed with red. They’ve been drinking a good log while. I find out she was a film major. She’s written a screenplay, something about girlfriends from different races, something “you don’t see in Hollywood.” She’s moving to Chicago to take a Master’s course in media studies. I want to ask what that is. “It buys me some time,” she says with a shrug.

Suddenly she says, “Dude, you’re friends ditched you.” I turn around, and sure enough, Craig and Eman have sneaked away. They’ll get a good laugh out of this later. The barista stares foggily after them. Her friend tells the story of being ditched by a man named Ditcher. They talk movies. Merrily, we carry on, swapping movie plots and favorite scenes for another hour.