Travelogue 128 – March 19
Durba

I haven’t heard of Durba until this morning. It’s a cloudy morning – part of a cloudy month. I’ve traveled over a mountain ridge in the company of Saba and two prospective business partners. The ridge is the one that looms over Addis Ababa, that rises above my house and the school. It’s Entoto, king of the central Ethiopian highlands. It’s a clean ridge, too. No switchbacks on the other side, no perennially shaded vales between rugged peaks. No, you climb steeply up from the city, the limits of which end at the divide, and the other side is a gentle slope into broad swaths of sunlit eucalyptus, and, further on, into yellow, unfenced pasture lands.

Our aim is little Chancho, a roadside town nestled among a cluster of round, brown hills. It’s a government center. We approach the officials with African humility and fear. They respond with suspicion. There’s always a need for schools out here. Chancho itself is well provided for by some Baptists. But in the countryside. And then there’s Durba.

It’s a growing town, almost as big as Chancho. It has a cement factory, and the Dutch have moved in with their flower farms. There’s another factory in the plans. The only way to get there is an erratic, crowded taxi down a dirt road. The taxi only comes back if there happen to be enough passengers.

Our colleagues search for another way out there, a driver of our own. By the uniformity of the haggling, I’m guessing we aren’t the first faranjis this way. After an hour, we find a van driver willing to drop his price to something only mildly offensive. It’s not a bad road, and the mellow hills develop real beauty as we head out of brown Chancho. The driver stops to pick up farmers.

People in the countryside dress very eclectically. Wide-brimmed hats, or none, walking sticks, blankets over their shoulders, shorts or slacks, shoes in all ragged styles. There’s a certain type of thick-woven, country bumpkin suit coat that you will find all over Ethiopia, even in the remotest hills. The shepherds we pass, with switches in hand, are wearing suit coats.

Contracts in Ethiopia, especially with drivers, change color with the passage of the sun across the sky. Our business concluded, we find we have been passed off to a truck driver leaving the cement factory. We cram into the back of his cabin. He and his comrade are salt-of-the-earth, contented guys in no hurry. They stop for a mother and child. They stop for an old man, though we have to stop in another hundred yards to eject him because he is incoherently drunk. To our good fortune, the truck is headed to Addis, so we stay with them, bent into the space behind their seats. The driver makes my companions laugh, so it’s all good.

Durba is one street and a few lanes. We stroll the length of the street first, spotting the kebele, or government, office with its dirt courtyard. We take pictures; we talk with locals. We follow a mother and child down a narrow dirt lane that turns to parallel Main Street. I stop at the turn. “What?” Across a small field of baby eucalyptus, the ground drops away. Across a dramatic red valley are Arizona buttes. Mist drifts from the mouths of distant canyons.

The kebele folk are a dapper young guy and a tall, clumsy policeman leaning on the rail of their porch. The young fellow has an easy smile and sleepy manner. It feels like Andy Griffith, African style. After a few jokes, we get to business. They had tried setting up a kindergarten a year ago; it hadn’t worked out. They have some land set aside for the purpose. He leads us behind the kebele office. “What?” My jaw drops. The plot of grassy land sits at the edge of another, more dramatic canyon. I beg our host to let me take some pictures. Ethiopian officials have a strange phobia of cameras.

It’s time to go. We are led to our new chauffers. They are idling on the grounds of the cement factory at the end of Main Street, talking to some sleepy guards. Our unfaithful first driver and his friends want to placate us with a little nature walk. I follow sullenly along a grassy little path. “What?”

This time I am awestruck. We emerge onto a narrow spur of land hundreds of feet above a scene that stretches for miles and miles to a hazy horizon, a ribbon of pale blue river water meandering through the middle of a grand, yellow valley, Arizona plateaus marching along in the distance out to the clouds. We are stunned – and successfully placated.

Snug in our diesel-choked compartment behind the truck driver, we look at each with round eyes and whisper, “Durba!”

Travelogue 127 – March 12
A Saturday

Lidya is the first one to school on Saturday morning. She knocks on the gate. Naturally, I’m the only one around. She sets her timid round eyes on me. “Good morning, Mister.” She’s clutching her lunch bag to her breast. I’m sure I look a little wild after a long sleep.

She marches into the classroom and puts her lunch on the shelf. She marches out again, straight to the swing. “Mister Dana, gufan,” she says. It’s a refrain I hear daily. “Push me.” And suddenly, the shy girl I’ve known for a year and a half transforms. She chatters. She wants me to push her so her feet touch the corrugated iron of the sheltering roof. She squeals every time I pretend to send her flying. I stand in front of her and tap the toes of her worn boots. She’s full of little stories, this child who always stands apart from the other kids.

It occurs to me that little children here are rarely alone. She lives in the mess next door to the school, the patch of mud around which about ten families live in their tiny earthen shacks.

I leave her to her fun, and after a while she follows. It’s time for breakfast – a few crackers in the pocket of her heavy grey dress. It’s as heavy as wool, and has lines of tiny faded roses down its skirt. It reminds me of “Little House on the Prairie”.

She has me open the package for her. Stuffing one biscuit into her mouth, she runs to the swing, turns around and runs back, holding one out for me. “Nibla,” she says. “Let’s eat,” the polite offer of food. No, thank you. She runs away.

More students arrive. Saturday mornings, Martina comes to tell stories to the kids. Martina is a German student of education, and she loves our well-behaved children.

I start to tell Carla about my kids. I’m visiting her on the weekend because the visa monster is chasing me out of Ethiopia before the end of my Italian course. She will tutor me so I can take the exam early and collect my certificate.

She doesn’t tutor me. I arrive during Fernando’s tutorial. Fernando is a fifty year-old UN official from Spain. He has the piercing eyes and the accent of his countrymen, and a severe gentleness of manner that contrasts starkly with Carla’s. She interrupts, she scolds, she smokes, she tells stories, and spits when she speaks.

Fernando is working on prepositions. He reads sentences aloud, and I notice that with his Latin-trained tongue, he can rattle off chains of words in a way that I will never master, but his pronunciation often slips into Spanish.

Carla encourages us to converse in Italian, but when she leaves the room, we chat in a mixture of Spanish and English – mostly complaints about the peculiarities of Italian.

Carla and I begin wasting Fernando’s money in earnest, going on about the exam and about my approaching trip to Italia. She rhapsodizes about Italian cities and history and culture. As long as she’s rhapsodizing, I get her started on Dante. I recite the first tercet, and she carries on with ten more, tears welling in her eyes. We catalogue authors and artists, and pretty soon, it’s time for Fernando to go. He pays and leaves quietly.

Carla asks how I like Ethiopia. I’m ambiguous in my reply. She has to know why I’m not married, and I laugh. It’s a question I’m used to from Ethiopians. “Are you married?” and the subsequent moral diatribe are integral to introductory conversation here. I have no reason to hide the story of Leeza. I want it to lead to the kids, but somehow these exchanges never get past Leeza. When I search for words about the kids, there aren’t any. What can one say about kids, really? We sadly conclude. I say, “Baka.” She says, “Cosi.”

Travelogue 126 – March 4
Word Play

Francois has just returned from nearly a month in Tigray, a region in the north of Ethiopia, dusty, poor, and religious. He was visiting churches and holy places for his research on that elusive piece of the Holy Cross that left a long trail of miracles across medieval Tigray. They speak a different language there. In Tigrenya, Francois’s name sounds like “fresh beer”, which is delightful to northern priests who drink a lot of the homebrew.

Francois and I have many epithets in the streets of Addis. One that makes the kids hysterical is “gamash faranj, gamash Abasha,” meaning half faranj and half Ethiopian. Others simply call us kayu, meaning red man. They don’t normally say “white man” here, unless it’s in imitation of the American term. Kayu fits Francois pretty well, since his face is always red from the sun. I’m a small part native American, so I feel I’ve earned the honorific. A name I’ve picked up from the shoeshine boys and beggars in my neighborhood is dembenya, or “the regular.” Kids I’ve never seen try it on me, seeing that I respond.

“Tafa,” they say. This word is a standard part of greetings here, best intoned in a lazy way: “you disappeared.” Don’t take it too literally. People will say it even if they’ve seen you the day before. The proper response is allo, a phrase I dearly love. Every night, when I greet Girma, the school guard, and ask, “How are you?” he says, “allo.” I’m not sure how to translate it, other than “being.” In response to “Tafa,” it means, “I’m around.”

“Tafa,” they say at the cafe if I miss a day. Ijigu is my dembenya waiter. I used to ask him about soccer results. Now I ask him about his training. I promise to bring my Sauconys for him to look at. I found out recently he’s a top-notch marathoner, trying to make the national team. He tells me his time in change, “two and twenty-five cents.” It’s funny how your image of a person can change. He has a kind of slack, farm-boy face, and I never thought much of him before. Now, he’s a star. I tip him extra. His name, Ijigu, means the Best.

I made a date with a waitress the other night by accident. That was at the hotel next to the Italian Center. She brought me my mineral water and my fries. I was cheerful. There was a nice movie on the TV, something fun, something with Brits being naughty in WWI-era London. I playfully say, “Nibla” to the waitress, an invitation to have some fries. Polite Ethiopians never start eating without offering some of their food, even to strangers. She declines, and I think she’s saying that she gets her dinner break now. She’s pointing toward what must be the break room. I nod agreeably. When she returns, I ask how her dinner was. There is some confusion. Apparently she hasn’t eaten. But maybe another time. Ah, I see. Yes, that would be nice. She’s being shy and sweet. Her co-workers are stealing girlish glances at me. Well, why resist? She’s cute.

The law is words, and yet words fail here. They dissolve into the pea-green gloom of Immigration hallways. We’re back. This time we’re being led through by our companion, the guy with bad teeth who looks like he would sell hot gold on the pavement. We wend our way through the rooms, by all the same desks, still slowly, still confronted with the impertinent questions, and yet things seem to resolve with a wrinkled brow and a wave. We make it to the dark angel’s office. Our gold broker goes in alone. The door, usually left open, swings silently shut. I see a fellow teacher from happier times, a Brit whose Ethiopian ex-wife has had his residency cancelled. Apparently, he has little recourse, even though he is father to her baby boy. We discuss the stench of evil pervading, until the door slowly opens, and our ‘advocate’ emerges with a swagger. No words. We simply leave.

Travelogue 125 – February 24
Things in My Hair

The night before my mid-term exam, I wake up and a huge beetle is tangled in my hair. I pick it out and hurl it across the room. An hour later, he’s chewing on my arm. I have to smash him, though it’s a pity because he’s an interesting looking creature. I can’t get back to sleep after that.

I’m early to class, so I go next door, as I often do, to the Samen hotel. I sit in the lobby and read, and have some mineral water. There’s always a curious collection of people in the lobby bar, dazed couples staring at the TV, bubble gum-popping prostitutes, well-dressed pairs self-consciously perusing the Watchtower and glancing around to see who is falling for the bait.

I study for about ten minutes before I give in to the Elmore Leonard in my backpack. I either know the material or I don’t, I tell myself, decades of life after school sliding away.

The Americans arrive. There’s little missing them. They enter to proud trumpets. They saunter into the lobby bar and spread across the room, one stationed in front of the TV, one at the bar, one stays in the next room by the registration desk, several take seats at different tables. They carry on their conversations right across the intervening space, as if there were no one else there.

Ethiopians are generally quiet and mild-mannered. They politely watch and listen to the Americans. The men are overweight. All are ageing but the one carrying the laptop, a swarthy man with a thick black beard and a ponytail. The women have sour, puffy faces and sit as though their vertebrae might spill.

There’s no tuning the conversation out. They’ve been out all day on some charitable expedition, somewhere down a long, rough road. They’re proud of their sweat and tired muscles. They grin like cowboys come in off the range.

The sad thing is, they’re nice. Their smiles are kind. Their dialogues are innocent. They bear none of the contempt or malice I’ve seen in German tourists treading on Eastern European or Turkish soil. If these Americans are offensive, it’s entirely their obliviousness. They really don’t seem to see anyone else in the room. They’ve strolled into a friend’s lodge after gathering some award-winning antlers, and now’s the time for friendly boasting. Very strange. I wonder about this American capacity to inhabit happy, hermetic worlds anywhere they go.

I can’t delay my own brave destiny. I leave the hotel and go next door, to the Italian Cultural Center. It’s exam time in the second level language course.

Some time just after New Year’s I signed up for this evening class. I’m the only white guy, and I quickly established myself as the nerd of the class. It was inevitable, since the instructors made a lot of my having studied in Perugia, and since I’m the only foreigner in the room besides the teacher, who likes to wink at me and sit next to me while someone is at the blackboard.

Carla, our teacher, is from Torino. She’s a tiny redhead with lively eyes, clearly the bellissima in her day. She has a smoker’s voice and a tint of grappa on her breath. She sends kisses to anyone who answers well, and she likes to cradle boys’ heads against her breast. The modest Ethiopes are overwhelmed by her. But she’s a good teacher. She’s been here for twenty years, and has traveled far and wide. She tells me about Central America as though we have something to share. None of the Europeans I’ve met here, by the way, has ever been to the US. It’s a point of pride.

The students are very nice. I’m reminded of my teaching days in Ethiopia last year. The men are professionals, shy, but eager to try. The women, all but the wife who comes with her husband, are painfully desirable. Their trips to the blackboard are entrancing. Everyone is cooperative, and everyone has a good time. And yet none of us makes too much progress.

It’s that way with these projects – attendance problems, long days, lack of time for homework. It’s all for fun, and Carla knows that, though she may huff at us. She winks and all is forgiven until exam time. Della, dalla, alla –the Italians take the field with their temperamental prepositions. Thinking I passed, though without impressing Carla, I rush home to the solace of my many-legged family.

Travelogue 124 – February 19
Sickness Unto Death

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We’re chugging forward, uphill in the taxi, almost home. There’s a loud screech of brakes in the road and exclamations from fellow passengers. I turn in time to catch sight of a car shimmying to a halt on the other side of the road, bouncing against the curb. The car is flying a banner across its hood. It’s a scarf or a shawl. A man leaps out of the car and runs back. There’s someone in the road. Our taxi slows to a stop. There’s an old woman lying in the road. She’s motionless and sprawled in an awkward way. The driver runs up, slowing to an unsteady walk. His face is twisted in vivid grief. People are running up from all sides. No one touches the old woman. Her face is very quiet.

I’m wrestling, like everyone in the taxi, with what to do. I have an impulse to jump out. I’m used to having faranji power. I have money; I have authority. But now, I can’t come up with any thing I can do. There is a crowd circled around the scene already. The taxi starts moving again, uncertainly, then gathering speed. Passengers are chattering wildly, but I can’t make any of it out. I don’t know how it happened. I find myself unable to ask, though I’m sure someone here speaks enough English.

We’re quickly at my stop, the end of the taxi line. Everyone gets out, me last. As I’m stepping away from the taxi, a shoeshine boy passes, walking in the street, wailing bitterly. This can’t be related to the old woman, but the sound of his weeping oppresses me, like a heavy blanket on my shoulders, like darkness before my eyes. I see the old woman. I’ll never know if she died there on the road while I scanned the street, trying to decipher the commotion. I’m walking downhill, away from the tarmac, and my heart is very sore. I’m feeling sick.

His face is so malevolent, it evokes the same churning in my stomach, like the body wants to purge itself of a lifetime in this world.

That a human being could soak in that much malice day after day, his spirit suspended in so much alkaline hatred, evokes profound wonder in me. I stare into his burning eyes. This is where you find evil, in the most mundane of places, where the power indulged in is the most trivial.

I’m back in the pea green halls of Immigration, taking my monthly turn through the revolving door of my visa issue. I’ve prepared myself for days: I will smile. I will breathe deeply.

I smile to the guard of the inner sanctum, a grim specter who glares at all the unfortunates huddled in the outer hall on miserable benches. I breathe deeply at the desk of the first minion, a lady with an evil gleam in her eye. She grins as she misreads everything in the worst light, and then she spots the real sin. She looks up at me and licks her lips.

My stamina is weakening by the time I make it to the dark angel of the building, the one who won’t look at you. His face is drawn in ash. It droops with years of disappointment. His clothes are rumpled. He doesn’t bother leaving this airtight room anymore. I’m not allowed to finish a question. He names my transgression with all his soiled indignation. He says I have ten days to leave the country. I begin another question, and he abruptly refers me to another building, where a superior awaits – someone in whom the final spark of life was smothered long ago.

No one is waiting to see him. He has a full secretarial staff with perfected sneers. They wave me in with disgust. He sits at a two-ton desk and chats on the phone. He has a companion who sits in front of the desk, with shades and a Hollywood smile.

While the owner of his soul is occupied, the little apprentice wants to know all about me. I resist, but this far inside the Inferno, my strength is sapped. I mention I help children. This enrages the corpse behind the desk, who hangs up and seizes my papers. “This is a tourist visa. Why are you helping Ethiopians?” He thrashes the paperwork around. His teeth are bared.

He stares. I can find no answer; the illogic of his rage is unassailable. He threatens court. He demands it. He scribbles furiously on my papers. He tosses them back and grips the edge of the desk, poised for something, like a cobra upright and swaying. The eyes gleam. I’m fascinated, and slow to understand that I’m dismissed.

It only occurs to me later that the absurdity may have been a signal for a bribe. I recall that the little companion demon is shaking his head with a wry smile as I leave.

I don’t continue on into the next circle of Hell like I’m supposed to. I leave the complex. I stand a while at the head of the imperial stairs leading up to the gateway into Immigration, waiting for Saba to return for me. Above, the sky is blue as innocence. Below, the beggars are swarming for me. “Why are you helping Ethiopians?” he asks.

Travelogue 123 – February 14
Actors

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Welcome to Valentine’s Day, the Western calendar’s celebration of self-consciousness. I’m not immune to it here, though it’s a forgettable day for most Ethiopians – especially those without money.

I decide I should make the rounds, delivering chocolate. It’s such a nice gift. Chocolate is beyond the budget of many people. You can only find it in a few select groceries, and in those places they know my face.

Yes, I’ve allowed myself to be cornered by a few more girlfriends. It’s a pleasant enough corner. My girlfriends are pretty and sweet, and they don’t seem to expect much. There are the knowing smiles and flirty eyes, the minutes of stilted chit-chat in bad Amharic, the occasional phone calls saying nothing. They get to daydream about life in America, lots of dollars and cars and a big house. By some coincidence, all my girlfriends have applications in for the Diversity Lottery for a US visa.

One of them took a step out of the proscribed dance of our ‘relationship’ to invite me to a play! I was touched. It’s the first time one of them thought about what I might enjoy.

We go on a Sunday afternoon. I feel like I’ve stumbled into a corner of the old world, something Shakespeare would recognize. The theater is popular. It’s a Sunday afternoon and people, young and old, are lining up in the lobby of this imperial-era theater, which is located in the back of the city hall. It’s one of the major theaters in the city, and well worth a visit for a look at the vintage 60s lobby – high square columns tiled colorfully, black shiny floors, wood fluting up the side walls, cushioned benches built-in underneath art deco flares in the partition walls. The broad windows frame the traffic circle outside with its statue of the emperor Menelik in an attractive almost unfamiliar way.

What can I say about the play itself? I understood very little of the language. But what my friend didn’t whisper to me, I picked up fairly easily: a group of high-school classmates reunites in an Addis Ababa hotel. The stiff guy in the wheelchair went to America and made a fortune, but he was in a car accident recently. He wants to bequeath a bunch of money to one of his friends. Everyone begins scheming. Murder plans are bred.

It’s an old-style melodrama with heightened language and long speeches. There are bits of music piped in with the softened lights, something Celtic sounding, something that sounds like the beginning of “Desperado”. But there’s a good portion of humor written in, and the acting is very enjoyable. Apparently, everyone but the hotel waiters is a famous actor.

Almost four hours we sit there, until the bad guy is finally led away by the police. The good guy, by the way, is a painter and doesn’t want the old man’s money. I like that touch, although he is prone to tedious expositions of his angst. Almost four hours we sit there, without an intermission. And everyone is with the production to the end. Maybe that’s what most reminds me of another era.

Outside, the sun is about to set. We push into a crowded cafe to wait for my regular taxi guy to show up. Everyone watches us. We don’t have much to say; we’re never alone with each other. Our audience is impatient, staring in that baleful African way. I clarify: so what happened to everyone else in the plot? Only the one guy gets hauled off to jail. Oh, they were all pretending. I see. We’re quiet. How’s your mom? She’s fine. All rightie. Well, the taxi’s here. Curtain.

Travelogue 122 – February 7
Trouble

It seems I have a better nose for trouble than the locals. It’s no fine science. They just have a reflex for denying it.

It’s almost midnight. We turn onto Saba’s street. Everyone is looking the same way, toward us, past us, as we weave among them in our taxi. Two policemen with big sticks march by with grim countenance. “Chigir,” I say. “Trouble.” No, no, everyone in the car answers. “Sakaram. Drunks.”

Granted, Saba’s neighbourhood, Piassa, is always a bit of mayhem at night. There are as many bars per square meter as Wisconsin, but the vibe is less mullet and more cheap gold, stilettos, and smudged mascara. It has the aura of tired, boozy thrills. There are lots of cheap hotels with young faranjis, who are surrounded by slick new Abasha friends.

No, no trouble, they say as they pile out of the taxi. They think I’m a worrier. It doesn’t matter that most of the times I’ve predicted trouble, I’ve been right. It’s just the fact that I’m concerned about it.

I’ve been out with the family: Saba, her mother, and her brother, Dalul. It may be the first time we’ve all been outside of their house together. And what united us in this venture? Football! It’s the quarterfinals of the Africa Cup. Saba and Dalul are big fans. Their mother doesn’t much care, but she tags along cheerfully enough. I’ve invited the family to the Ghion Hotel, where the game is projected onto a big screen.

This match is between Cameroon and the Ivory Coast, two powerhouses – the former a World Cup veteran, the latter a World Cup qualifier this year. Saba roots for Cameroon, Dalul for Ivory Coast.

Brother and sister aren’t talking. For reasons I don’t completely understand, Dalul has dropped out of school. It has something to do with a fight he got into. He has some rough friends to match his homemade tattoos. He himself is a lanky, shy boy with a sweet smile. He sits with his mother during the game, and the two of them talk the whole time. I’m happy. I know he’s caused her a lot of grief lately.

I decide in the first minutes of the game that I’m an Ivory Coast fan because Drogba from Chelsea is on the team, abandoning Saba. The TV screen is huge. I start a stream of treats coming for everyone. The only trouble with the plan: the screen is outdoors, in a broad patio area by the hotel pool, and it’s getting chilly. No, no, Saba’s mother protests, no problem. She has her gabi wrapped tightly around her.

The game is a match of defense. No one scores. The moon climbs high into the sky. Groups of beer-drinkers get loud. We shiver as the game goes into extra time. Both teams immediately score, one after the other, in the first five minutes. The tie endures. No, no, Saba’s mother protests, no problem.

Extra time expires; they launch into penalty kicks – twelve rounds of them! Men are pacing the patio area like men outside a delivery room. Eto’o, Cameroon’s golden boy, is the one who finally blows it, on his second penalty kick, sending the ball sailing over the net. Drogba follows up with a cool, straight score. Done.

We stand, all a bit stiff and dazed. The family is smiling, grateful. I’m exhausted. Soon, we’re passing through the stream of anxious faces in Piassa. As the taxi makes it way out of the neighbourhood, people are all looking toward some epicenter, drifting toward it with chins raised.

The taxi driver gets a call on his mobile. It was a bomb. That’s all he can communicate to me in his staccato Amharic.

Saba fills me in the next day. There’s a blast a block away from her house, at a utility building. Later, I’m asking a friend who’s behind it. Nobody knows. “Oromo?” I ask. The liberation movement? No, my friend assures me. They aren’t smart enough. Okay.

Well, the organizers wouldn’t pass any terrorist’s competency exam, anyway. The same bomb in rush hour might have killed dozens. As it is, when I pass the offended building the next day, there are only broken windows. Not even a police cordon to dignify the bomber’s work.

Travelogue 121 – January 30
Horse Days

I’m sleepy. I daydream. Some days I might be back in Covina, the suburb outside LA where I grew up. I could be sitting in the tall grasses on the hillside above a neighbor’s corral, throwing clumps of it down to the ponies.

It could be summer. Sometimes I wake from a daydream, and Jackie is watching me with peppy eyes, tongue lolling. I’m standing. I’m twitching my legs like a horse does to shake the flies.

We’ve turned a corner among seasons in Ethiopia. A week or so ago, the clouds that had gathered day by day, like old men poolside, finally let loose with a night of rain, and that was that. Now we’re into the lazy brown-grass weeks – Phase Two of the Ethiopian year. The brilliant skies become hazy. The evenings become warm. Clouds drift like mountain sky lily pads, softening the glare of the haze. And the flies appear, proliferating suddenly, dodging around your eyes and lighting on any open skin. You develop horse reflexes. I remember this cycle from the last few years, January to April.

Soon enough, I’ll start the manic travel again – in another month and a half. Some time in March, jarvis hits the road again in earnest, and will be moving for a good three or four months. Readers are encouraged to stay tuned, as there are sure to be plenty of misadventures.

Saba and I will be poking around the Ethiopian countryside, scouting for school locations. Soon afterward, I have to leave the country, having impaled myself on yet another internet airline ticket deal. I have an Addis-London leg I have to redeem before it spoils in cyberspace.

In the meantime, I’m happy in my idylls, my afternoon spells on the front step, days during which I alternate the haze of my laptop screen for the haze of the world. Inside, my life is the chikachik of planning documents. Outside, it’s the ring of Jackie’s chain against the pole of the swing-set, the whistling cry of hawks, the rustle of eucalyptus leaves, the warmth of blurry sunshine on my back, the itch and whine of flies.

I look up at the flag that my staff forgot to lower from its height. It registers on me that we’re probably committing some unforgivable treason in flying this flag. Every regime has had its own variation on the famous tri-color scheme of the Ethiopian flag. Haile Selassie’s featured an imperial lion in the middle. The current regime features a five-pointed star, vaguely sinister, the origin of which no one seems to fathom. The Communist regime in between flew the colors unadorned. This is the flag we have hoisted. The taxi drivers would approve: so many of them paste portraits of Mengistu, the tyrant of those good old days, onto their dashboards.

Smoke pours over the wall. The neighbors are cooking or burning trash again. Jackie circles anxiously, looking at the cloud descending into our courtyard, her ears cocked. It drifts toward me, blue and aromatic. This menace to my lungs used to bother me. Now I shrug it off. It’s a change from the smell of rotting meat that wafts over the other wall, where those neighbors keep their dogs. These monsters bay constantly, and when they move, their chains rattle like an angry man looking through his tool chest.

On top of a wooden pole for electrical wires that looks like the leg of a fallen dock, two doves preen each other. Nearby, a tiny yellow weaver assiduously pulls a long bit of fiber out of the leaf of a false banana tree. I notice now the long leave is broken into many small segments, torn apart by the little nesters.

And so on: life primps and sighs and rages around me, and I’m free to shrug it off. I’m greedy for my idylls. In one idyll, I dream of the next. In the next, I’m nostalgic for the last. I ponder the history of idleness, and I regret that in my many years of practice I haven’t realized my dream of the perfect indolence. I believe it’s out there. I think Plato had a nightmare about it. It was Jung’s shadow. It was a mote inside a glint of grief for Nietzsche. He spied it in the eye of that horse. I can wait, searching the skies like a good, quiet hunter. Minnesota had big skies, too.

Travelogue 120 – January 21
Ol’ Blue Eyes

Thursday nights at the Alliance Francaise are an occasionally regular affair: Azmari Night. Something of a misnomer, really. Azmari is the traditional art form in which a raffish gentleman with a masinko slung over his shoulder strolls around the stage, or among the audience, improvising insulting tunes about his audience or other musicians – ancient rap. The masinko, by the way, is a very cool instrument, kind of a one-string cello that looks like a square, goat-skin banjo, held vertically and played with a bow. It is surprisingly versatile and is capable of some very interesting noises, sometimes sounding like a Beatles backward loop.

The Alliance version of Azmari is designed for faranji: it’s just the standard, cleaned-up tourist act, with a band made up of traditional instruments and with dancers who perform cultural dances from a variety of regions in Ethiopia. It’s worth the twenty birr, since the performers are very good.

Stop by, if you can find a taxi driver who knows the way, or if you can direct him yourself. It’s in Piassa, near Catedral, tell him. First, you’ll have to talk him down to half his original price. He’ll cite the price of benzene per liter. Ignore that, make some jokes, strike dramatic poses. Once you’ve agreed, allow him take off in the wrong direction. That’s all right. His price remains the same, and the program will start late anyway. Eventually, you’ll convince him to turn around.

You’ll wend your way west again, into the last crimson light of the day, back to Churchill Road, the broad scenic avenue that runs a kilometre or two downhill from City Hall and then back uphill to the old train station, gathering a fine sample of Haile Selassie-era buildings along the way. You’ll cross, passing the stark and sooty Italian cathedral – no grand duomo, should you miss it in the gloaming. You’ll swing around a traffic circle, head toward Mercato, and just where you would least expect anything but hovels of corrugated iron, turn left down the narrow dirt alleyway. Pay the driver at the gate of the Alliance.

Step inside and experience cross-dimensional travel – from the dirt and cacophony outside into the European courtyard with meticulously tended gardens, spacious and peaceful. People play elegant. The central building consists of three long and narrow rooms in a row. One is a café – a beautiful spot to enjoy haughty French negligence from the Abasha wait staff – and the other two are commonly used as galleries for local artists. The middle one is made up for Azmari Night.

The room is decked out nicely in traditional Ethiopian style. We sit at a round table on traditional wooden stools hollowed out in the seat, designed by village elders so that your back will ache in an hour. It encourages quick decision-making or standing up to dance.

We get our chances to dance. The professional dancer works the crowd, stopping by every table. She is dressed to the hilt in traditional attire. She knows every style in Ethiopia. There’s the chicken step. There’s the chicken drinking water. There’s the pecking in the dirt. Someone will stand up at every table and start the shoulders going. The pro will raise her arms, draped in white cotton scarves, in a final rooster’s challenge.

Tonight is a special occasion. A superstar is present. You feel him enter the room. Or you unconsciously pick up on the flush of glimpses. He sits at a table across the performance area from you, with his retinue. There is some magic to celebrity. You’re sure of it now. It isn’t even your culture, and you can feel it. He’s been a star of Ethiopian pop culture for more than forty years.

It so happens that one of this man’s sons has been a friend of mine since my first visit to Ethiopia. I’ve never met the iconic father, but I’ve been familiar with him and his story.

Tonight’s lead singer, a minor star in her own right, finally convinces the bigger star to stand and sing. He is charismatic. He’s tall; his hair is white, but his face is clear and young. He has that perfectly longing, playful glance – something between melancholy and mischief – that makes for a great crooner’s visage. And he can sing.

I’m not big on the singing style here, sentimental and punctuated by showy Arab gargling, but this guy has a powerful voice and he connects with the audience. It’s a night with Sinatra. The women are entranced. The audience murmurs in waves of assent and appreciation.

And in an instant, I find out I’m behind in my gossip about the old man, when he summons his third wife from the group at his table. She sways with him as he sings – a classic tune of his, the title of which translates into “Memories” – her head on his shoulder. With her in his arms, he brings the Azmari to Azmari Night, improvising lyrics while his admirers sigh and laugh and applaud.

What’s more, he pulls it off. This much schmaltz in a lesser man, and he would have been thrown to the hyenas. A tip of the Tin-Pan derby to the old stalwart.

Travelogue 119 – January 16
Old Man and the Soil

The old man sleeps in a box made of corrugated iron, slightly larger than a coffin. In the morning, he emerges and rolls the box away, out of sight. It’s not long afterward that I arrive. He’s cleaning at an outdoor faucet. He is still wearing his pink towel turban.

The old man has a classic face, marked by deep lines, but sharply defined, with a strong chin and cheekbones. He has large, round eyes that are nearly menacing. He is tall, and though he moves slowly, it isn’t for lack of power in his limbs. He looks like he’s former military, which many of these city guards are.

The old man is guard at the café where I start my day. My guard at home is asleep when I get going. I’m sure he wouldn’t stir if I threw rocks at his door. The lanes outside my gate are uncrowded. The trees on the hillsides are throwing their shadows toward America. Clouds are catching the sun’s first red light. Yes, we’ve getting some clouds lately. Still no rain. I can think of one time it’s rained since October.

The taxi boys are playing around at the top of the hill. One says something silly to me and salutes. Silly comments in Africa are like pebbles on the mountainside; they roll a ways and stop, and you walk on. I’m listening instead to the alluring calls of the morning birds.

Down the hill, it’s the lions I’m listening to. Some mornings they roar as I stroll by the lion’s zoo. It’s a thrilling sound. It echoes like it’s from miles away. The sun is up. Its rays pour through the limbs of the trees. Shoeshine boys run by. They stoop by a clogged street drain to fill their little plastic containers with brown water for the morning’s work.

My morning ritual is a science. I sit at the second table in the farthest row, next to the narrow garden under the hedge. In a matter of minutes, the sun will crest the café wall behind me and warm my back. Without need of consulting me, the waiter appears with cake and coffee.

Like any ritualist, I’m disconcerted by a change in routine. Today, the old man strolls up and slides past me into the garden. He begins digging with a hand hoe, turning the soil over. I’m distracted. I sit in front of my blank notebook page and watch. His motions are soothing. They are sure and measured.

At some point he turns his head slightly and gives me a sly look. He says something I don’t understand. He says, “Africa,” with more volume. He stands with a clod of rich earth in his hand. “Africa,” he says. His voice is husky. It matches his rough hands. I think he’s rhapsodizing about home, about the fertile soil, about the men of the earth – a one-word pastoral ode to his beloved land. I nod with what I hope is a sentimental glint in my eye.

He continues. He speaks haltingly but loudly, as though I’m deaf as well as handicapped in his language. I catch a few words: “sleep,” “work.” He simplifies. “Africa sleeps.” He piles a few clods on the concrete base of the flagpole – the tall flagpole that never flies any banner – and he says, “Europa.” He carefully pushes this pile of earth together, compacts it on the concrete. “Europe works.” I wonder how the pile illustrates his point. “Europa like this. Work. Africa sleeps.” He shrugs with sad irony, and he drops the soil in his hand into the garden. I nod again with a different sentiment. He slides an eye toward me with that first sly look. He bends back to his work.

I think of the vision I had one day, months ago, as I walk to the café, looking up into the violet dawn air. Banks of flowers catch my eye up the hill by the university, by St. Markos Church. At that moment, an angel reveals the future of Addis Ababa to me. Maybe it was St. Mark himself, maybe it was the angel of hunger and coffee, but the vision was vivid: Addis Ababa in fifty years or more, when Africa is past its wars and famines, when Africa has banded together economically and discovered its strength. The city is all flowers, living up to its name, home to a powerful middle class from all over the continent, expensive and attractive as an African San Francisco or Denver, peaceful and hip as the gentleness of the land would order if it were given a chance. That was the vision of Mark, and maybe of the eagle-eyed old man.

Anyway, this isn’t what I wanted to write about. I was going to write about Frank Sinatra.

Travelogue 118 – January 9
Holiday Blur

The holiday season churns on without respite. After the faranji holidays come Ethiopian Christmas on the 7th. Tomorrow is Eid-al-Adha. A week later is Temket, or Epiphany, which is as big as Christmas in this country.

Where do I turn? In the US, there are many thousands of sympathetic solitaries who hate holidays, many with more fervor than myself. Here, the concept gets blank stares. “Gana alwedim,” I say. I don’t like Christmas. I haven’t received a reply yet. It simply doesn’t register – (a technique to file away for cutting through the prolific African chatter.)

Santa gets his revenge. This year, his curse is a plague of gundan. They climb up the wall in a long line, and they spoil all the food I have for the long weekend. So I eat a lot of peanut butter for Ethiopian Christmas and the day after Ethiopian Christmas. I’m reminded of the Christmas in Minnesota some years back when the heat in my apartment building went out. Landlords, other tenants, friends are all out of town and there’s nowhere to go but to a movie for a few hours to warm up. I’m not fond of holidays.

Santa shows up at the school to taunt me with a rollicking dance. It’s our Christmas party. The kids are all there in their paper crowns, sitting politely at the tables set outside, a candle lit in front of each of them. Half of them have come in their holiday whites, most of the girls in their pretty white cotton dresses. Tiny Kalkidan sits at the head of the table because it’s her birthday.

Santa knocks at the gate. He strolls in with a hearty “Ho, ho, ho!” He has a thick sheet of cotton taped to his face. He’s wearing shorts and sandals under his Santa coat, and he has hairy legs. His hat bulges in a strange way. He has a strange accent.

Santa spent a long time in make-up back in the kitchen, all the women hovering around him, attaching more tape to his cheeks and forehead, pushing his hair back inside his cap. It’s taken us quite a while stuffing his copious dreads into the pointy red hat. I’m coaching him on English Santa phrases. We debate long and hard about whether to let him wear jeans under the little red shorts. Myself, I prefer them to the pale legs, but the women veto the jeans.

Somehow, the kids are fooled. They stare at Santa with wonder and dread. They whisper, “Thank you, Santa,” when he gives each of them candy. Santa’s a little perturbed by this somber reception. He tries to loosen them up. He leads them in Christmas songs, most of which they only know one verse to. He gets a few of them to giggle when he cavorts around the table as they sing.

They never figure it out, even as he slips in and out of his funereal Santa tones to flirt with the lady visitors. “I don’t believe you’ve been a good girl, this year, Sophie,” he says with a sugar-coated dose of French savoir faire. They don’t suspect a thing when Santa dozes at the table as the children patiently wait for their cake. I circle the table with my video camera, catching their wide-eyed responses to this cavalier angel.

They don’t get it when Francois shows up five minutes after Santa has to get back to work. “I missed Santa?” he cries out when they tell him. “Oh no,” he groans melodramatically. “And what did Santa give you, Sophie?” he purrs.

And so on. This is how holidays unfold all around the world. Isn’t it? The guy in the costume opens the ceremonies with false words and a wink for the ladies. And then it’s time to dance. We put on the Amharic pop and the kids start to skista, that fetching dance of the highlanders here, all shoulders and alluring looks. We put Kalkidan on the table and she lifts her pretty skirt from her feet, shrugs sweetly and shyly, tilting her head forward and fluttering her thick lashes for her admirers, like girls have done for centuries of holidays.

Travelogue 117 – January 2
Holiday Cheer

Here’s New Year’s Day: a morning’s vigorous hike in the mountains under a hot sun. Francois and I have been planning this excursion for weeks. That we finally get to go has less to do with the spectacular date than with it being a free Sunday.

I’m up early and I walk into the dazzling new year’s sun, across the valley between our neighbourhoods. I bang on his gate until someone stirs, and I wake the Frenchman up. He’s cheerful. He’s packed a lunch, and he’s ready to go – after he meticulously packs his long dreads into the Seuss cap. I should have watched him do it; it must be a curious process. But I’ve become immersed in a book of his with transcriptions in Geez, the ancient Semitic daddy of several major Ethiopian languages. Amharic uses the same alphabet. I sound out words. I discover that many haven’t changed too much, particularly those dealing with royalty or religion. Saint So-and-So died in the XXth year of King So-and So’s reign….

We’re under way. First there’s the kilometer uphill to get out of the city. Unfortunately, we spend much of this time discussing women. The road peters out; we’re given a choice of dirt paths, and we head west. The path becomes winding. It empties out into a rocky riverbed, dry but for a trickle from some high, persistent spring. The talk has turned to happier subjects, like the early Egyptian monks.

We jump around the riverbed. I’m reminded of my childhood in southern California. He of idylls in France. The city ends very abruptly; there’s not a soul around – except three ragged kids who want to follow us and shout, “Money!” They make it difficult to sustain my California feeling. Francois tells them we have no money. He tells them to go away. He tells them he’ll throw rocks at them. They’re enjoying all this. Their voices bounce from the walls of the little canyon.

In desperation, we start climbing up, scrambling up steep walls of rock and loose dirt. It does us no good. We become stranded on a lonely outcrop of rock on the wall’s face. The children cast their echoing laughter at us. We resign wearily to our fate, standing like Egyptian martyrs in bold relief against the towering rocks, gazing out over the dramatic view of Addis Ababa.

We do eventually manage to escape. We jog down shaded trails, bound along the tops of more rocks, this time below a nearly dry waterfall about fifty meters high. We find the top of the ridge and meander among dry grasses. We stop for a doze in a small clearing at the top of a hill, where the blue sky is vast. I lie on the short, yellow grass and listen to the breeze among the eucalyptus saplings around us. Eucalyptus are great wind trees; they whisper drowsily. I pick a few juniper berries, and their scent evokes many a gin-and-tonic evening back home.

No, there’s no big party for New Years’s Eve. The closest thing I get to celebration is the afternoon gathering of my odd crowd in the Razel Café in Piassa. Francois is there with his friend Adonijah, a black American and a doctrinaire Rastafarian. He’s from New Orleans, but has lived a while in Minneapolis – small world. He’s been in Ethiopia for six years now, living meagrely but happily off the sales price of his life in the US. He has a few kids now, here and there in Ethiopia. I love his soft, slow accent. Tall, with a bit of grey in his long beard, he leans into the table, quietly smiling.

Saba is there, shy and struggling to keep up with the English. We’ve come around to politics, as is inevitable in a country so unstable. Martina is asking in a loud voice, “Why?” or “What do you mean?” Martina is German, and she insists on definitions. Her pale blue eyes stare at you earnestly, and she poses stern questions. Martina is a kindergarten teacher, and she volunteers at our school. At the moment, she’s demanding an explanation from me.

I had rather cavalierly posited that Ethiopians will have to live with this government until they learn how to organize. The present opposition parties have an air of improvisation about them, and once they crumbled, people gave way to moaning, “No democracy for us.” I become nervous under her steady, schoolmarm gaze. But I rise to the challenge: I’ve actually thought about this one. Very seldom do you see people here bond together to work voluntarily toward a common goal. In work situations, they wait for orders. On the street, they wait for handouts. Everyone but Martina nods. I give examples, beginning to sweat anxiously. I offer up the NGOs that are teaching Ethiopians in the countryside how to organize coffee cooperatives as models of indirect tutoring in political action. She finally nods. “I see what you mean,” she says, and we all sigh.

Martina rants with her frustration at the arrogance of the police here. She tells of challenging them. The other faranji wince. We’ve all been here longer and had unpleasant encounters with officers of the law. Francois tells of seeing a cop beating a woman with a baton as she clasps his knees. He stands to illustrate the story. Saba laughs, “Ay, Francois.” Francois sits, and for a moment is unusually sober. He’s not sure how to respond to Saba’s mirth. She doesn’t hide it, though all the faranji are silent. Francois looks at me and gives me a Gallic shrug.

Travelogue 116 – December 24
Blinked and Missed the Genocide

The rubshas have started up again. The police are invading neighborhood high schools and colleges. Sometimes they arrest; sometimes they don’t. On my way home Thursday, there are stones in the street. Police cars have arrived. Parents come to the school for their children, like they did a month and a half ago. Friday you can hear the shouting from the technical college up the hill. They are accosting the federal police, who will not leave. It sounds vaguely like cheering at a football game, and yet you feel somehow the ominous undertone. We’re silently listening. The staff tells me not to worry, misunderstanding my questions and my expression. I’m just sad.

This round of disturbances is touched off by the trials of the Kinijit leaders. Kinijits, you may recall, are members of the main opposition party, the CUD. The leaders were jailed on charges of treason after last month’s rubshas. If the logic or humanity of this move by the government seems dubious – jailing a bunch of meek PhDs for inciting violence against the government because teenage boys threw stones and were shot down for daring – read on.

Kinijit leaders are ushered in for several days at the federal court next to the university – right away, an interesting strategy. Students gather by the thousands in front of the courthouse, blocking the road. The leaders are a little wobbly: they’ve been on a hunger strike for weeks. Of course, the menu for their hunger strike reads like a Berkeley happy meal, with fresh fruit juices as a staple. Several of the leaders are absent because they are ill. Hailu Shewel, a 70 year-old diabetic from the US, the party’s leader, is now in critical condition. Our esteemed prime minister seems quite content with that, though lesser men might deduce that this is a poor ploy for popular support. What do I know about politics?

They are charged with: genocide, high treason, armed uprising and civil war, attack on the political and territorial integrity of the country, outrage against the constitution and the constitutional order, obstruction of the exercise of constitutional powers, and impairment of the defensive power of the state. A number of the defendants are in America.

Genocide? Did miss something? The only people I remember dying were the ones who died at the hands of the police.

“It’s Africa,” people say with a shrug. Soon we’ll see whether our juice-purged professors will get the death penalty.

I think I’m following local protocol by shaking my head and carrying on. I visit Desta, an American I met this summer. She was passing through Ethiopia at that time, but has moved here since. She wants to show me the house that she found in Piassa, a short walk from my regular internet-and-coffee neighborhood. The house is a good find. The yard itself is worth the rent, a long expanse of grass with peach and lemon trees.

Desta will not live in this house. The place is for the street kids. She’s begun a little business helping the poor children in Addis. I say business because she keeps her good works informal, cloaked behind the front of her business. Before she had the house, she met with the kids on the street. They gathered around her. She offered food. She collaborates with local artists to teach them art. They talk.

Desta is relentlessly sunny and upbeat, but in a way that isn’t cloying or aggressive. She is a Rastafarian, and one whom I assume ranks highly in whatever organization there is in that faith – just as she was very successful in American society, as a professor and executive of a wealthy foundation.

We stand together in her sunny yard, the successful black woman and the white slacker, far from America, and we share a smile of relief at being exiles. We both sense that something’s gone wrong back home. We would explain it differently, I think. She might quote the Bible; she might see Ethiopia as the New Jerusalem; she might quote from the well of topical political discourse. I’ve heard these arguments from Rastas before. My evidence would be insubstantial, impressionistic. We don’t bother with reasons. We nod in tacit agreement. We talk about how we hope we can do things differently here.

The words are naive. Solomon’s ghost, so alive in Ethiopia, the land of Sheba, whispers about the nature of things under our sun. But I’m as naive as my words, so it doesn’t matter. The sun and the blue sky look bright and new today.

Travelogue 115 – December 16
The Girls

Suzanne stops by. She’s an HIV/AIDS counsellor in Chicago. She’s in town to do some trainings at the university. Sophia has told her about the school, and she wants to see it. At the gate, the children gather around, like they always do for strangers. They shake the American’s hand. Erubka introduces herself in a mousy voice, “My name is Erubka.”

“What was that, sweetheart?” But Erubka is too shy to repeat herself, at least in that moment. Other kids crowd in. In a few minutes, she appears again, “My name is Erubka.” Suzanne hears her no better than she did before, but she says, “Nice to meet you.”

This is Erubka. She was one of our first dozen students. She is one of my favourites. She has a very happy grin. She charges me when I arrive at the school. She runs for me when I pass in the street. I make her scream and laugh when I act like I’m going to grab her.

She’s not great at jump rope. One morning this week, there’s no one to watch the kids for a few moments. I step in. My job is to hold one end of the jump rope and swing it when Medhanit says, “One.” That’s an ambiguous signal, I think. I don’t do a great job. Medhanit is diplomatic. She blames whichever kid is up for my mistake.

Erubka can’t get the hang of it. She doesn’t stand in the middle, but to one side. I try to compensate. We swing. The rope smacks her in the heels and then she jumps. Two tries and Medhanit pushes her away for the next kid. Medhanit is the boss of the girls, like Ermias is for the boys.

Erubka stands aside and watches. She is a watcher. I’ve seen her stand quietly while all the kids play, hands at her sides, eyes intent and curious. Everything is curious. She’s in her pink, society dress that stands our from her thighs at a 45 degree angle, that is opening at the seams under her arms and on her shoulders, that she wears three days a week. I rush at her and make her shriek. She doubles up in giggly terror. The grin lingers a long time. She watches me.

Looking into her eyes, I feel the weight of my mission this month. I’m searching for placements for my graduates. They’re done with our program in June. Without my help, they go to public schools, and they lose every advantage we’ve given them. “Something is better than nothing,” one Frenchie told me last week, unknowingly turning my own words against me. It’s what I said when I first opened this school. Somehow, I have to get them into private schools.

Erubka is still cringing and waiting to be tickled. We look at each other for a minute. I let it go. When I see Erubka, I see Leeza. I feel helpless.

It’s Sintayehu’s turn at the jump rope. She stands in the middle and doesn’t move when the rope comes around. The kids laugh. Sintayehu cries. Wogayehu, our teacher, is on hand now. She takes the little girl in her arms, and she shushes the other kids. After a few minutes, she picks Sintayehu up and stands behind the jump rope. “One,” Medhanit says. We miss, and we miss again. One time, the rope makes a revolution, clearing both heads and Wogayehu’s feet. “Baka,” Wogayehu says, ishi?” How’s that?

There’s nowhere for Sintayehu. She behaves in class. She observes all the school’s routines. She plays the kids’ games. She scribbles in her notebook while the others work. And when the girls sing songs together, Sintayehu gets her turn. She has one song she loves. She belts it out for the neighborhood, and the girls applaud.

She’s holding my hand now and staring at the American lady. She squints and scrunches her whole face in that way she has. She won’t let me go. She can’t make sense of the visitor. Their eyes meet, but Suzanne looks away. She is overwhelmed by this place: by the city, by the school, by our story, by these kids. I know that look – something akin to fear.

She gives them stickers. She lets them crowd around and grab, too excited. We take pictures, and she lets them look at their faces in the back of the digital camera. Sophia tells her it’s time to go. The kids want to kiss her good-bye. One after another, they press their lips into her cheeks. She’s overjoyed. She’s confused. I know that look. It’s really not easy.

Travelogue 114 – December 12
The Frenchies

And suddenly there were the Frenchies. They gathered around me in the courtyard of the school. They were pressing in on me and insisting I follow them to Francois’ house for dinner. I objected I didn’t know a word of their infamous tongue, but they said they weren’t above an evening of English. How could I refuse?

We cross the wooded valley between my hill and Francois’. We cross the long shadows of the last light of day. Children rush us, laughing. Lovely Linda from the south of France, Linda of the melodic Mediterranean accent, of the soft southern eye, of the grip like a man’s, Linda tends to the forlorn donkey who has thistles embedded in its coat and face, whose back is a trail of infected sores.

All the Frenchies but Francois are fed up with Ethiopians. Linda and Benoit have returned early from Lalibela, site of the famous medieval churches carved into stone, utterly revolted by the begging and cheating and badgering of the locals. They and Philippe leave for Yemen in a few days.

Francois and I have only nods and shrugs for their complaints. It’s not as though any of the bad behaviours here have escaped our notice. Nor are they the first to vent on this subject. Even Kevin, the wild man I met last spring, who has seen 120 countries, even he said the Ethiopians were the most pathetic people he had encountered, and when he boarded his train to Djibouti, he did so without qualms.

Let’s talk about art instead. What a treat to banter about art with Frenchies! Philippe is himself a painter, and it seems he makes more with painting than with photo-journalism. Vive la France! We argue about Caravaggio and Rembrandt. We argue with Linda about Klimpt and Pollack and Basquiat. I’m laughing simply from the pleasure of such a conversation.

Francois is singing to the Bill Withers on his laptop. When he’s not doing that, he’s huddled outside with Benoit by the kerosene burner, where the men prepare dinner. First are the french fries. “Freedom fries!” I would like to challenge, but manners win out.

Night is well along before anything is served. Philippe has peeled and munched down all the avocadoes that were meant as ingredients in the main course. I felt obliged to help so he wouldn’t snack alone. Night is well along and chilly. The half moon glows behind a cluster of small clouds, frosting them with white.

Philippe eyes the house across the yard and thinks of Genet. She is sister to Francois’ landlord. She is a notorious femme fatale, voluptuous and sly. The family is from Harar, where the people are known for frank talk and frank sexuality. She likes to tease Francois with shows of her new clothes late at night – even when her boyfriend is in her bedroom, the boyfriend she keeps while her fiancé is back in America. Philippe is musing. His smile is gentle and sardonic, unlike the anxious grimace of an American male pondering his quarry.

These Frenchies have to be watched. They shrink from no masculine challenge. Francois tells of holding Philippe back from smashing in the face of a taxi wayala who didn’t react well to Philippe’s insults. Benoit likes to crack side mirrors of cars passing too close. Even kind and peaceful Francois is quick with words and a balled fist when kids are disrespectful.

Francois tells the tale of the Frenchie with the worst reputation in the city. He is fluent in Amharic. He lived in the north of Ethiopia for some time, studying native musical instruments. He performs azmari with the best in the country. Azmari is an ancient form of rap, improvised song lyrics, often insulting and humorous. This Frenchie’s knowledge of Amharic gets him into trouble. No comment goes unheeded.

In his last escapade, he put some poor youth in the hospital because he spoke French: it seems the night before some local masher had approached his wife with sweet nothings in French. Hearing French in the mouth of an Ethiopian the next day was enough to send the husband into a rage.

So it goes in the circles of our Latin expats. I’ve enjoyed my sojourn in their terrain. Francois walks me halfway home, guiding me along the inky stretch of dirt paths that cross the eucalyptus vale. No one is out, not even a hyena. We shrug again about our dear old Ethiopia. We say goodnight in Amharic when we part.

Travelogue 113 – December 7
The Paper Chase

I’m awakened by two hens clucking outside my bedroom window. They are persistent gossips. I don’t understand a word, but gossip is recognizable around the world. I’m sure I could guess the subject matter in twenty questions. Family? Bad behaviour? I come around and realize it’s the trash ladies, stopping by to pick up the monthly load from our garbage barrel in the back, earning their five birr a month.

I’m happy to be awake. It’s my favourite time of the morning, just as the sun rises above the eastern mountain. I take my time getting down the hill to the café, to the internet place. The air is pleasant. The crowd consists of morning people, on their way somewhere, too busy for faranji.

Things are quiet. I had another guest for a while, Michael from Austria. I met him through John the Brit and Nazim the Turk. He’s tall; he has the mischievous grin of Germanic intelligence. His voice is resounding bass; his English is precise; his accent is round and melodic. He wears kung fu pants and suede vests. He is here to market a new milling technique. The second day he stays with me, he meets with the prime minister. His comment: that man seems like a little boy with a gun.

Things are quiet. I managed to shake the girlfriend, and swerved from the path of another. The first one called and called. Inadvertently, I realized I had solved man’s perennial problem, the inattentive girlfriend. Just don’t answer the phone. She’ll never stop calling. Fate intervened, when Saba said I had to change phones. Then another girlfriend starting calling, one I had never met. She got my new number from the internet place, where my business card is saved in their computers. Saba answered once, and “Betty” never called again.

Things are quiet again. My pleasures are simple and scarce – like feeding peanut butter to Jackie and watching her smack her lips. Peanut butter is my new happy discovery in Ethiopia.

The internet place is mobbed. It’s DV time – America’s annual Diversity Lottery. The internet places help people prepare their online applications, if they have a digital camera on the premises. Business is buzzing. One day it’s a fragile man of seventy. The next it’s a clot of young jokers who don’t look to have worked a day in their lives. I realize I wouldn’t be the most generous immigration official.

But I’m in the same boat, on the same rickety Cuban raft. I’ve been trying for two years now to get my work permit here. It just can’t be done. I’ve collected a large file of empty promises from business and school owners, but no golden letter of employment.

It finally came down to the inevitable: going to the immigration office to renew my tourist visa. I had two days until expiry. The bureaucrats were in rare form, I must say. When was the last time I saw such grey faces, such universal contempt in the eye, such utter lack of humor, cheeks swollen with such meaningless pride? It was a commendable performance.

Saba and I sat outside the office for several hours while the office guard eyed the crowd with weary malice. There was no particular order to how entry was granted. Saba finally positioned us next to the door, adjusting our stance minutely. The magic worked. We were next to receive the grudging wave of our gatekeeper.

Two more hours and five desks: that is what you’ll go through to renew a tourist visa in Ethiopia. Add a good dose of arrogance, some suspicion, and the delicate test of a supremely ignorant clerk who can’t decipher your passport. “No, that’s the date of my last entry. No, twenty-four months means two years. No, actually, January will be 2006.” All with a generous, humble smile.

Finally, a man with rancor permanently etched into his countenance stares at you and decides to authorize thirty days. “But, sir, my departure is scheduled for two months from now.” He will simply stare, and someone else will explain that you’ll have to come back. I can’t wait.

Travelogue 112 – November 28
Hora Dreams
Debre Zeit, Part Two

I shouldn’t take Saba, Leeza’s sister, away from her work. She is our school’s principal, and she does a great job. But she’s also a great travelling companion. She’s amiable. She takes care of foreign language situations. She’s a trooper. When I must have cake and a macchiato, and when the first café says they have neither, Saba leads on to the other café (and there are only two in downtown Debre Zeit) without a complaint. When I must see four of the five lakes in town, she agrees with a smile.

So when she has a request on the second day of our trip, I acquiesce willingly and gratefully. We return to Lake Hora.

Hora is the nicest of the lakes. You trek out of town a little ways, struggling through mobs of schoolchildren in their uniforms. They will be there, no matter what hour of day you travel; Debre Zeit holds firm to the peripatetic school of pedagogy. They practice their wit upon you. A dirt road leads down to the lake. You pass a staring group of swimmers in their underwear by the shore. You weather the inevitable comments, and you approach the entrance to the sleepy park. One man sits lazily beside his gun. Another sells you tickets. A third offers you ch’at. You decline, saying “It’s a bit too early in the day, thank you,” and pass on. He laughs with childlike glee.

The park is a strand of grass along the lakeside, and a rundown café. We pass all this luxury and the few staring couples. At the end of the park, a trail leads further on, into high grasses. Yesterday, I led this way. Today, it’s Saba. She is eager. We pass beneath huge, sprawling fig trees with smooth limbs and wide leaves of bright green. We pass beneath acacia trees like dusky clouds stretching toward the west. They are Saba’s favourites. Thorns in the vines and stickers in the grasses catch in our clothes. The trail eventually leads down to our tiny pebble beach. We sit there for a long time, saying nothing, gazing at the waters.

The waters of Lake Hora are a milky green. They glow with sunshine. The hills glow, yellow as still fire, dotted with acacia clouds. The hills are high on one side and mellow on the other, and you can almost imagine the trajectory of this meteor. On ancient stumps of trees in the shallows, long-necked water birds preen and doze. Everything shimmers with mild light, and you are helpless. You dream about home. You dream about faraway, hectic home, and dream about dreams, the ones you had when you were trapped under fluorescent bulbs, dreams about peace and about real light. The shadow of a cloud passes across the surface of Hora and you watch it all the way across. You surrender again to the sun. Even dreams lose their substance.

In another life, Saba and I brave dust and glare along the highway that runs through Debre Zeit, making slow progress toward the bus station. Taxis pass and taunt us, but we don’t hail them. Sometimes it’s more effort to save effort.

Our tiny bus to Addis seems to be waiting for us. We climb on. I wedge my knees in behind the seat in front. A group of country gents boards, in patched trousers and cloaks over their shoulders. They all carry walking sticks. Their eyes are feral and innocent. One breaks off a chunk of styrofoam for his companion and one for himself, and they begin polishing their teeth.

Invariably, unconsciously, I choose the sunny side of the bus on these journeys. Halfway home, I’m dizzy with sun. My neck aches from angling my head so the bill of my cap protects my face. I’ve drawn the sleeves of my shirt high. Every bump of the road echoes inside my knees. All of us are quiet. We come to the city. We sway and bump forward in low gears, through traffic. I know all the signs along this highway.

I know where the graveyard is. This is where Leeza is buried. The graveyard gate stands silently open beside a church along this road. I watch it go by. I don’t look at Saba, but turn back into the blast of the descending sun.

Travelogue 111 – November 25
The Devil’s Pit
Debre Zeit, Part One

I finally tear myself away from Addis Ababa. The same small circuit, the same old taunts on the street: I need a change. Heroically, I throw myself against the month’s inertia, and I make the trip to Debre Zeit with Saba.

Debre Zeit is a town on the way to Nazarit, about an hour southeast of Addis. We passed through it every time we went to do our research last summer in Nazarit. Debre Zeit is a town famous for its five lakes. On some primeval afternoon, presumably before Ethiopia had bred its first plague of humans, a set of pebbles cast from the skies slammed into the earth in Debre Zeit and the dry land sprung a leak.

Resolved on our excursion, we get up early and pay ten times the bus fare to the taxi driver who will take us to the bus station. Once there, we squeeze onto the little exhaust machine, wait for it to fill up, and we’re on our creaking, unsteady way. The trip is painless enough, but for the enthusiasm of the old ladies behind us, telling their family gossip with smacks to the back of our seat for emphasis.

You wouldn’t think there was water anywhere nearby, disembarking from the bus in Debre Zeit, looking around at the yellow hills. You jump in a taxi-van for the short ride into “downtown.” You walk a few short blocks to the premier hotel in town, which, behind its gate, is a wide courtyard/driveway between two, one-story blocks of about half a dozen rooms each. At the end of the courtyard, you see a restaurant with wide windows full of blue sky, and you know there’s something out there. The windows draw you. Standing before the glass, you stand at the edge of a steep drop into one of the largest lakes, Lake Bishoftu.

Later, you hear the whispered rumors about Bishoftu. It appears that Emperor Haile Selassie chose this as the site for evil rituals, meant to ensure his power. It was here that he gathered every boy he could find whose eyebrows grew together, and he had their throats slit and their bodies dumped into the lake. He did the same to herds of sheep and flocks of fowl.

Indeed, the place seems sinister. The walls of the crater are steep as they meet deep waters of a hard green color. The surface glints with harsh sunlight and shudders with gusts of wind. The hills around the lake are particularly stark, brown and nearly treeless. Sitting in the restaurant, you watch ravens rise and fall on the hellish air, and you wonder at the ugliest breed of pigeons you’ve ever seen, lighting on the window ledges. They’re over-sized, grey and copper, and their eyes are ringed by bright red, swollen and scaly skin. At a nearby table are a group of middle-aged Russians who stare covetously at your food.

To this day, locals are both scared and respectful of the place. Apparently, they hedge their prayers to happier deities by throwing chicken guts and injera into the lake on certain holidays. Supposedly, they are scared to approach the waters, and I’ll confirm that I saw no one near the slivers of shoreline. Saba asks the gari driver if Satan lives in Bishoftu, and he soberly nods to us. Of course, this is the same guy who doubled the fare he quoted us once the ride was through.

I complained and called him leba, or thief, but really the ride was fun and probably worth every birr: breathing the horse’s dust and having every bone shaken into new alignment as we are driven to the lakes outside of town. It’s harvest time. Golden piles of hay dot the fields. And out of Satan’s reach, trees spread their branches, children laugh at the faranj and chase the gari, and gojo, the circular huts with pointed thatched roofs, stand peacefully aloof.

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.