Catching Up.

You might possibly notice that I have taken a little break from writing about our time in Ethiopia – a moment to think about what I have written so far, and about how writing these entries has influenced how we think and talk about our experiences.

I love that this exercise has given us a reason to talk about our life in Ethiopia, both between ourselves and with our families and friends. With twenty years of distance our memories have definitely faded, but it has been so interesting to converse about what we remember, to try to re-establish a timeline in our heads, to look at pictures and ask each other, “Wasn’t that…?”, and especially to compare and contrast our recollections of the same person or event. I am flattered when I receive compliments, comments, or questions from readers, especially from people who didn’t know us back in those days and are hearing these stories for the first time.

However, I have also been a bit frustrated, mostly by the sense that words aren’t adequate to represent our thoughts and feelings about our experiences in Ethiopia. I think that’s why I waited so long to write about it and why I have been slow to continue, especially after writing about our first visit to the countryside. It’s not so difficult to describe the facts of the matter as far as we recall them, but the feelings and sensations are much more complex and difficult to communicate. Honestly, I don’t think exploring and communicating feelings has ever been my strong suit, and I don’t really believe I can accurately represent feelings from twenty years ago. So I have had to shift my perspective a bit, and recognize that I am writing about my/our current thoughts and feelings regarding what I/we remember of our experiences back then.

But! As a (partially) trained historian, I have also taken some time in the interim to track down some primary source material. Many thanks to my fabulous sister Lisa, who not only had the foresight to save every single e-mail message we exchanged starting in mid-May of 1995, but also was able to locate them and took the time to copy them and send them to me. Here’s a paragraph from my first e-mail message to her, sent on May 12, 1995:

“Of course, very little has gone as planned since we arrived! We spent the first two weeks here in a guest house because our apartment had to be checked out by the government and then painted. Then we were out of town for two days, so we finally spent our first night there on Tuesday – with no running water, because the faucets leaked. The plumbing was fixed on Wednesday (a holiday), and we actually got a refrigerator and stove into the place, but the floors are still muddy and we have only a kitchen table and six chairs to hold all our stuff! We hope to rectify that situation this weekend, and to buy some curtains for privacy. One whole wall of our living room is windows and a door, which is very nice in term of light but not so great for privacy.”

(My dad has also been a great resource for me, but his collection starts later, in January 1996, and we are pleasantly surprised and grateful to find these notes from the very early days).

So we are months behind schedule, but I am looking forward to writing a lot more in the days to come.

Down Country, Part Two.

So after several hours on the road we came to the turnoff that would take us across the river and to the FH/E project site at Cheha. These days there’s a Wikipedia page with all kinds of information about Cheha, but back then we had to learn everything on the fly.

Cheha is a woreda or administrative district located in the Gurage Zone of Ethiopia. The zone is named for the Gurage (pronounced “goo-rah-gay”) people whose homeland it is. Remember how I mentioned that there are dozens of different people groups and languages in Ethiopia? As of 2007 there were about 1.8 million Gurage people in all of Ethiopia, about 2.3% of the total population. Cheha is home to about 116,000 people of whom 99% are Gurage (and those numbers haven’t changed much since the 1994 census, right before we got there).

Down Country, Part One.

I have been dithering for a couple of weeks, trying to figure out how to write about monitoring and evaluation in a not-too-boring way, in order to lay a foundation for our much-more-interesting first trip “down country”, to the FH/E project site at Cheha. But honestly, it’s not like I could have connected all of these dots for myself at the time so maybe it’s a better idea for me just to write about the trip and let the M&E thing explain itself in the process.

So: we found out, to our delight, that we were going to visit the Cheha project along with our coworker, Joy, and a consultant, Walter, who came from Kenya to help train FH/E staff on monitoring and evaluation, specifically how to create and conduct a baseline survey. I remember only a few details about Walter – he had a strong Kenyan accent and a verbal tic where he would add the phrase “isn’t it?” to the end of almost every statement. And like my memories of Walter, twenty years later, most of my memories of this trip are vague impressions.

The first order of business was to learn the correct expat jargon to describe the trip. In those days there were only six main roads in Ethiopia: two went north of Addis Abeba, two went south, and one each went east and west. So if you were traveling north – to the highlands – you were going “up country” and if you were going south you were going “down country.” (I never went far enough in the other directions to find out what that was called, except maybe “crazy”). We were heading three hours south on the Jimma Road which was still only about halfway to the town of Jimma. Our destination, Cheha, doesn’t appear on maps but it was in Gurage country, past the village of Welkite (Well-kee-tay), just across the Omo River.

Our guide for the trip was Salfiso Kitabo, the Cheha Project Manager. Salfiso was a good-natured and likeable man, probably in his early thirties at the time we knew him. He was also a very good driver so we were able to gape and marvel at the experience without any fears for our own safety – and, by the way, we were well set up in one of the big fancy Toyota Land Cruisers, traveling in style, a step up from Salfiso’s usual ride.

We had observed, in our city driving, that size matters where motor vehicles are concerned – that is to say, larger vehicles always have more respect and the right of way over smaller vehicles, no matter what the traffic laws might indicate. Out on the highway, the same rule applied – except that big fancy Toyota was one of the smaller vehicles out there. The highway was populated with overloaded buses, lopsided long-haul trucks, and beaten-up pickups that had seen better days. The road itself was a two-lane swath of crumbling tarmac with unreliable edges and enormous potholes. No matter which direction they were heading, most vehicles tried to stay in the center of the road where the surface was more consistent, moving only at the last possible moment to accommodate oncoming traffic. Even more terrifying was the prospect of passing a slow-moving bus or truck since you couldn’t always tell how much room you had on the other side. I never once drove on the highway so I don’t know for sure, but J tells me that we probably averaged 35-40 miles per hour on the road on trips like this.

I have been looking fruitlessly through our photographs – and I know for a fact that I don’t have all of our pictures from this trip – for an image of one of those city-to-city passengers buses, which were the means most people used to travel outside of Addis. They’re hard to explain but I have to try. Imagine a well-used flat front school bus, covered with dirt and rust and mismatched paint. There’s a roof rack piled high with bundles and blue plastic jerry cans, ringed with a fringe of live chickens that are tied to the rack by their feet, hanging upside down over the shoulders of the roof. When approached from the rear, you can see not only the back end of the vehicle but the entirety of one side as well, because the alignment is so off-kilter that the bus is driving diagonally down the road. When it hits a bump the entire assemblage – passengers, freight, and chickens – shifts alarmingly, like a Weeble that hasn’t quite made up its mind.

There was a lot to look at during our first trip out on the highway. In addition to all of the other vehicles, there were herds of tough African cattle alongside – and often across – the road. Groups of donkeys trundled under loads of hay, wood, or charcoal to be sold in the nearby market town. We had to slow down through the ramshackle villages, watching out for children and loose dogs and garis – haphazard, two-wheeled, donkey-drawn conveyances that served as taxis in towns with few automobiles, and inevitably drove down the main road at donkey speed. Our route took us through several small towns – Tefki and Tulu Bolo and Waliso – and you knew how tiny Cheha was going to be, even smaller than any of these places that were at least large enough to make it onto the map.

Background Information.

Anyone who knows anything about Ethiopia knows that there was a serious famine in the country – “The Ethiopian Famine” – for a couple of years, roughly 1983-85. Those of us who are old enough may recall the heartbreaking images of starving women and children; perhaps we remember Live Aid and Band Aid and “We Are the World”. Western countries sent bajillions of dollars in aid – cash and commodities – to mitigate the crisis. In the end, despite the humanitarian response, it’s estimated that about eight million people were affected and one million people died as a result of the famine.

Along with the aid money, The Ethiopian Famine brought hundreds of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to Ethiopia to help deliver food and medical assistance to people in need. Food for the Hungry was one of the many organizations that came into Ethiopia to provide short-term humanitarian relief, and subsequently expanded their programs to include longer-term development work. By the time we arrived, ten years later, FH/E was operating at three locations (I am sure there were three, but I can only remember two of them – Cheha in the south, and Gondar in the north), providing a wide array of services including food-for-work, child sponsorship, health care and health education, agricultural assistance, reforestation, water access, and veterinary medicine to the communities where they worked.

I have to acknowledge that I do not know exactly where FH/E obtained all of the funding for its work. Some – a lot – came from USAID and other western governments as part of their foreign aid packages; some came from churches and individuals who sponsored children or supported specific programs. Some of it must have come from the international fundraising efforts of Food for the Hungry International.

At the time of The Ethiopian Famine, and for many years after, the need was so urgent and obvious that there wasn’t a lot of accountability for where and how aid money was spent – cash and commodities were sent to Ethiopia, feeding centers ministered to people in crisis, lots of people lived and some people died. Donors were just pleased to know that their funds were making a difference. There was minimal oversight from the Ethiopian government in the form of the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC), which directed the work of NGOs operating in the country. But nobody asked how much of every dollar was spent on overhead; nobody questioned the cost to purchase and transport food and supplies. With a population in turmoil, nobody could follow up to find out how malnutrition might influence the long-term health of individuals affected by the famine, even if they had wanted to.

But by 1995, the situation had changed. Other humanitarian crises had diverted Western attention, and a lot of aid money, away from Ethiopia. Individuals were developing “donor fatigue”, reluctant to give to the same cause over and over again with little indication of positive movement. Worst of all, it had become clear that a small number of charlatans were taking advantage of the crisis, lining their own pockets with contributions while their brothers and sisters suffered.

As a result, FH/E and other NGOs became responsible not only for developing and implementing programs, but also for demonstrating the effectiveness of these programs – to the Ethiopian government as well as to international and individual contributors. That’s the reason FH/E created the position of Research Officer, and that’s the reason they implemented an organization-wide training on monitoring and evaluation, shortly after we arrived in Ethiopia. More about that next week.

Minamin (This and That).

I have spent the past two weeks writing about the Ethiopian famine of 1983-85, and how it set the stage for our experience as development workers -- but I couldn't bear to post it today, after an extended absence. Instead, I bring you a few more photos from the interior of our apartment, along with some random memories.

Here's J, standing in the kitchen. He appears to be posing with a potholder on his head; this is certainly not the oddest thing he did while in Ethiopia. I would guess I took this photo while seated at the dining table. You can see our cooker behind him -- the burners on the top were electric but the oven used liquid propane gas, and the little door on the right was where you stashed the gas cylinder. It was just like the cylinder one would use for a gas grill, unwieldy and expensive, and we learned to check our supply early and often since there's nothing worse than running out of gas while you're trying to make dinner.

The kitchen sink and our scary cabinets are hidden behind the refrigerator. Bonus points if you can identify anyone in the pictures on the side of the fridge.

Down on the floor there you can see (or trip over) our soda supply. Soda was only sold in volume, two dozen bottles at a time. The first time we purchased a case, we paid for the glass bottles as well as for the soda inside them, which gave us incentive to return all of the empties for recycling -- in Ethiopia, that means you wash them out and refill them. If we ever broke a bottle we had to pay for a replacement to complete our case. Some of the bottles were well used and battered, so it was kind of a treat to get one that was obviously shiny new. When we filled our case we could choose between Pepsi products or Coke products (we were a Coke family), but never a mixture of the two. In addition to their signature cola drinks, each brand made a lemon-lime soda and an orange flavored soda. So it was Pepsi/7-Up/Mirinda or Coca/Sprite/Fanta. There were no diet options.

We drank a lot of soda, but we also developed a taste for Ambo water, a fizzy mineral water from a spring in the highlands northwest of Addis Abeba. Ambo water has a fairly strong mineral flavor that takes some getting used to, but these days one can purchase Ambo "Lite" with a lower mineral content and less carbonation. It's now available in plastic bottles, though the label hasn't changed in twenty years.

Our friends Chip and Cathy sent us this Little Red Riding Hood hand puppet and other thoughtful gifts for our birthdays in June and July of 1995. (If I recall correctly, one of the pictures on the fridge is of their newborn son Nate, who just turned 20). My sister made and sent the crocheted doily on the back of the chair. It was always a hassle to get packages out of customs at the post office -- a subject that will get at least one post of its own -- but we are eternally thankful for the love and generosity of our friends.

The striped wall hanging was made locally; we might have purchased it at the craft market but I am fairly sure it came from Hope Enterprises, an organization that taught people to weave as part of their vocational training program. Hope also operated a cafe near our apartment where we could get waffles with whipped cream on a Saturday morning, and they had a shop where we could buy flowering plants as well as textiles of all kinds. We have red Hope place mats on our dining table at this very moment; if we gave you the gift of a doll or a scarf or a tablecloth it was almost certainly from Hope as well.

This picture was taken a few months later, after we had moved the furniture around a little. You can see the raveling seam on the left hand cushion of our custom-made sofa; we kept turning that cushion to hide the damage but eventually all of the seams were equally frayed. J is reading (well, marking his place in) an Isaac Asimov novel sent by our friends Fred and Kathy, who decided to use our time in Ethiopia to brainwash us into becoming science fiction fans. They sent us two paperback novels every month and we devoured every single one of them. It was fairly difficult to find English-language fiction in Ethiopia and anyone who knows me knows how much I love to read, so this was a lifesaver. I probably read each of those books at least twice before passing them along; I am sure they are still in circulation, delighting sci-fi fans, twenty years later.

About the House.

After writing about the apartment a few weeks ago I pestered J to sit down with his home design software and put together a floor plan, to refresh our dimming memories as much as to share on the blog. Here it is:

The front entrance is there at the lower left corner, next to the bathroom, with the living area and balcony at the top and the bedroom on the upper right. It’s far from perfect but it’s a good representation of the space; it's probably drawn a little larger than the apartment actually was. As I said, it was more than enough space for the two of us and the few items we brought with us, though we definitely acquired “stuff” to make it more comfortable.

Money, Money, Money.

One of our loyal readers asked last week about what the deal was with purchasing expensive imported items from a government-operated store, so I thought I would take the opportunity to write about how our understanding of money expanded while we were living in Ethiopia.

The unit of currency in Ethiopia is the birr, from the Amharic word for “silver”; one birr is made up of 100 cents or centimes. Twenty years ago, the exchange rate was about six EB to the US dollar, so one birr was worth just less than seventeen US cents. As I write, the exchange rate is about twenty birr to the dollar, yikes! Which is exactly why the Ethiopian birr is considered a “soft” currency, as compared to a “hard” currency like the US dollar, the British pound, and the euro – globally traded currencies that are expected to maintain a relatively stable market value over the long term.

We Move In.

I mentioned a while ago that we spent our first few weeks in Ethiopia living at the SIM Guest House while we waited for our permanent home to become available. In early May, we made the move.

Our new home was a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a four story, 16-unit building that was occupied mostly by Ethiopian families. It would be an understatement to say that the building was architecturally undistinguished; made of concrete block, and painted an institutional dingy dark green, it would have fit into any Communist-bloc urban landscape.

License to Drive.

As volunteers, we could never have afforded to purchase and/or operate a vehicle from our own resources so it was a real bonus that FH/E had a vehicle that we were able to use. Our car was a 1980s-era Renault 9 sedan. Here it is, in all its glory:

 

This car had seen better days: it had mismatched headlights and dented fenders and faded upholstery. So it was the perfect vehicle for newbies navigating the chaotic streets of Addis Abeba, and we were grateful to have it. We eagerly embraced the responsibility of transporting ourselves around town.

Of course, before one can legally operate a motor vehicle, one must obtain a driver’s license in one’s country of residence. We had gone to the trouble of acquiring our international driver’s licenses from the AAA office in Eugene but those turned out to be useless in Ethiopia. So we needed to make a pilgrimage to the Ministry of Transportation.

In the western world we complain a lot about government agencies, and the DMV is one of our favorite targets. Our visit to the Ministry of Transportation was our first personal encounter with the soul-crushing bureaucracy that is (or was?) the Ethiopian government. Thankfully we had a navigator in the form of Messay, the ever-cheerful Logistics Officer for FH/E, who guided us patiently through the grinding gears and became one of our favorite people in the process.

You know how, at the DMV, there’s a little machine where you take a number, and then you sit down and wait for your number to be called? And you can read, or daydream, or fret about the time you think you’re wasting? In Ethiopia, once you got past the guard at the gate, it was a free-for-all. First you had to figure out which window you needed (thanks, Messay!) and then you joined the scrum in front of the window, elbowing and jockeying your way forward. Being a foreigner got you lots of stares but no preferential treatment. The clerk could decide at any moment that it was time for a tea break or lunch. Since it was rainy season, it might start to pour – did I mention, this was all outside? Finally you reached the window and presented your documents for scrutiny, and were directed to the next window. And the next.

You know how, at the DMV, there’s a little camera, and when you get your license they take a picture of you and stick it on your card? In Ethiopia, you had to provide your own picture, black-and-white, of particular dimensions, just like a passport photo. Which meant that before you could go to the Ministry of Transportation you had to find a photographer and have your picture taken (and bonus points if there was no hot water for a shower that morning). So: photograph, passport, Oregon driver’s license, international driver’s license, and Ethiopian ID card. And cash, of course. Hand them over and hope to see them again soon. (Not the cash).

It could have been worse: at least we didn’t have to take a road test to demonstrate our skills. By that time we hadn’t been behind the wheel in weeks and the mere thought of driving was intimidating enough. As it was, obtaining our licenses was an all-day process that wore us out with hurry-up-and-wait. But by the end of the day, we were street legal.

I have to confess that I have dragged my feet about writing this because I keep hoping to find our Ethiopian driver’s licenses and include a picture of them. A search of internet images indicates that the format has changed completely in the past twenty years. These days, an Ethiopian driver’s license is a computer-generated laminated card much like the one you get in the USA, but in those days it was a paper booklet printed entirely in Amharic with your photo stuck in there. It seemed so foreign and so official, and also, it in no way prepared us for the actual challenges of driving.

Wisely, Messay did not offer to let one of us drive back to the office that day.

We Get Around.

It’s hard for us to believe, but in 2015, Addis Abeba has a newly constructed light rail system that is due to open to the public at any moment now. Twenty years ago, public transportation in Ethiopia was much more random and haphazard.

The cheapest way to travel around town was via the government-operated Anbessa (Lion) Bus Service. The large red and yellow buses ran on routes throughout the city, with rides costing EB 0.10 (ten cents, equivalent to maybe two US pennies). The buses were crowded and unreliable and, rumor had it, a great place to have your pocket picked; we never once rode on the Anbessa bus. In retrospect I wish we had risked it, just for the experience.

The next level up was a shared taxi. These blue and white vehicles also ran on set routes but with a smaller number of passengers, and the price of the ride depended on how far you were going, maybe up to EB 1.00 (about 17 US cents). One could hail a shared taxi by standing on the side of the road and flagging one down, but there were also set transit stops where one could wait for a taxi going in the right direction; there was no timetable so it was imperative to plan ahead during busy commute times, as a full taxi would pass by without stopping.

What He Was Doing.

J was the reason we ended up in Ethiopia, specifically.

When we signed up to go overseas, J was a newly minted Master of Science in Computer and Information Science. His skills would have been in demand anywhere, and they were particularly desirable to Food for the Hungry as the organization worked to update technology in all of their international offices. He was initially offered a position in Mozambique, in southeastern Africa, but there was a fairly unstable political situation at the time and I would not have been allowed to accompany him, so it was easy to turn that down. Ethiopia had also recently wrapped up a civil war but was quiet enough that we could be there together; and FH/E was eager enough to have J there that they agreed to cover the cost of our housing, which meant we could get there sooner.

(It was actually pretty common for expatriate employees to have 100% of their living costs covered by the organization, which was a pretty sweet deal -- but since we were technically volunteers we were resonsible for raising the bulk of our own financial support.)

So when we arrived, J's first order of business was to assess the technology situation. Not surprisingly, most work was still done with typewriters and ledger books, with paper copies saved in row after row of standard black binders. There were a few desktop computers in the building, used primarily for spreadsheets and word processing. Those were the days before Windows 95 so we were using DOS-based programs like Lotus and Word Perfect. It goes without saying that PCs were the norm at FH/E and everywhere else in Ethiopia, which was a real adjustment for those of us who were (and are) Mac users. Electrical service was no completely reliable, so unsaved documents might be lost without warning when the power went out. There was no network in place and only one or two printers -- so whenever one needed a hard copy, one had to save the file to a floppy disc (!!!), upload it onto the secretary's computer, and manually print the document.

J has spent the past fifteen years co-owning a business that specializes in data networking but back then it was all new to him. He turned to his buddy Paul to help him figure out how to set up a local area network and to work up the order for specialized tools, cables, and network cards -- and a few battery-powered backup systems, also a new-to-us concept. He took some time to map out the attic, a maze of eucalyptus rafters, corrugated metal, spiders, and rodent corpses. And then -- the wait. For the order to be processed and shipped. For the shipment to travel thousands of miles to Ethiopia. For the packages to be cleared through customs and delivered to his care. A process that took weeks, if not months, from start to finish.

So it's good that there were plenty of things to keep us busy in the meantime.

At the Office.

I had worked various part-time jobs during college and grad school, but FH/E was my first “real” office job, so it was all new for me in a lot of ways.

By far my favorite part of work was interacting with our co-workers. My office mate, Joy, had arrived at FH/E just a few weeks before us, but she was way ahead of us in cultural adjustment. Joy's parents lived in Addis Abeba and she was a graduate of the International Community School of Ethiopia, where her mother taught chemistry. Joy had recently finished college in the United States and was interested in a career in international development, so she had returned to Ethiopia to get some real world experience before starting a graduate program. She was (and I am sure still is) a very smart and very sweet person, the perfect co-worker. She was living with her parents in their newly constructed house, and I remember her struggling with the lack of a shower curtain in the small bathroom – everything got wet, including the toilet paper!

An Excursion.

We culture-shocked our way through that first week in Ethiopia, spending our days at the office and our evenings hanging out at the SIM Guest House. Without a valid driver’s license or access to a vehicle, we were extremely limited in our ability to get around town on our own. We were far too timid to venture far on foot or – heaven forbid – to wrestle with the intricacies of the public transit system. So we were excited when our co-workers, P. and E., proposed an excursion for us and our new friend Joy, on our first Saturday in Addis.

(We were quick to notice that all of the seasoned “expats” we met referred to the city as “Addis”; only newbies like ourselves ever used the full name).

The plan was to visit Mount Entoto, which rises almost 1,000 meters above the city. Back in 1881, Entoto had become the military base for Menelik II, the ruler of the Showa province who was at that time still fighting for political power among a number of regional kings. In 1889, Menelik became the Emperor of Ethiopia, the King of Kings; he is credited with the creation of the modern political state of Ethiopia. Along with a fortress, Menelik and his wife Taitu established two Ethiopian Orthodox churches on the mountain, one of which, Entoto Maryam, was our destination.

It’s a short but steep drive, straight uphill, from the center of town to Entoto – past Addis Abeba University and the American Embassy. At Shiro Meda, an outdoor marketplace where one could purchase locally made cloth, delicate hand-woven cotton shawls gleamed white in the sunlight.

As we left the city behind we drove through forests of eucalyptus trees that had been planted by Menelik and his successors in these hills and all over the countryside. Eucalyptus is known locally as “bahir zaf,” the foreign tree, and it is valued in large part because of how quickly it reaches a mature size; when it is cut to the ground (or coppiced), several new stems grow from the original stump. We passed dozens, or maybe hundreds, of women who were shuffling down the hill, bent double under weighty bundles of eucalyptus that they were planning to sell as firewood to support their families. J and I will never forget the sight of these women, our first experience of desperate poverty. Although it was illegal to cut the wood without a permit, these women had limited choices, and the penalty for getting caught was worth the risk.

I shouldn’t be so surprised to find that one can now read reviews of Entoto Maryam on Google and TripAdvisor, and watch video tours on YouTube. A Google image search returns hundreds of results; you will have to look there and forgive our oversight in not having taken any of our own pictures of the church on that day. It’s a distinctive building, an octagonal plan that was (and still is) brightly painted in the national colors of Ethiopia. I don’t recall going into the church itself, and even if we had we wouldn’t have been allowed to take pictures inside. We did visit the adjacent museum to view artifacts from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, including ornate imperial robes, and shields made of hides and trimmed with the manes of (now endangered) black lions.

Along with the churches, Entoto is known for its amazing panoramic views of Addis Abeba. And we did take pictures of that, shown here from east (upper photo) to west (lower photo):

We drove along the ridgeline for a few minutes, then parked the Land Cruiser on the side of the road and tramped through the underbrush to find a beautiful view of the countryside to the north.

Probably the first photo of us in Ethiopia.

On the way back into town we stopped at Blue Tops Café, the only place in the country where one could get soft serve ice cream.

J and Joy at Blue Tops.

Two years later, Blue Tops would be the site of a terrorist grenade attack that injured nine people, mostly foreigners. But on that first Saturday, we were just starting to discover the complexity of the country in which we found ourselves.

A Digression.

As I've been writing over the past few weeks, I have encountered a couple of challenges that I would like to address up front, before I continue with our stories.

First, I would like to (re)emphasize that all of the stories I write are based on my (unreliable) memories from twenty years ago. When it’s possible, I am trying to corroborate my recollections with J and/or with other friends who were in Ethiopia at the time, but I am sure there will be details we misremember, for better or for worse. So please enjoy this blog for what it is – a personal memoir, written for my pleasure and for yours.

Second, Ethiopia is home to a very diverse population made up of many different ethnic groups (there are as many as 90 languages spoken in the country, here's a list), which have, until quite recently, had little contact with each other.

Language map of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti; image from www.silethiopia.org.

So regardless of our strong Western preference for narrative structure, there’s really no such thing as a cohesive “Ethiopian” history or culture, which makes it difficult for me to generalize. Our stories about Ethiopia are by necessity connected to the specific Ethiopian people we met – people who were fairly well educated, relatively wealthy, largely urban, and fluent in English. As I write, I am trying so hard not to make sweeping statements about "Ethiopian" culture, so please forgive me if I forget.

(Everything we knew about Ethiopia, in those pre-Internet days, we knew from one of three sources: 1) individual informants, by which I mean, people who had lived in Ethiopia and were kind enough to share their information with us; 2) the encyclopedia, seriously; and 3) the US government, by way of State Department and CIA publications. The individuals were by far the most useful sources, and it’s thanks to them we brought our duvet and winter coats.)

Finally, some observant readers may note that I use the spelling “Abeba” instead of the more familiar “Ababa” in the name of Ethiopia’s capital city. I'll explain later in more detail, but the former is a more accurate transliteration of the Amharic spelling of the word; it is more commonly used within Ethiopia, and it’s the spelling we have used for the past twenty years. "Ababa" isn’t wrong, but it’s like pronouncing the “s” in Paris – you wouldn’t do it in France. Spelling is just one of the many ambiguities that will feature in this memoir.

All right, now back to the stories...

The First Day, Part Two.

After lunch, we loaded up into the Land Cruiser for the relatively short trip to the FH/Ethiopia head office.

We didn’t know it at the time, but we would soon learn that there was an informal automotive hierarchy in Ethiopia, with the Toyota Land Cruiser at the very top and the Soviet-made Lada sedan at the very bottom. The Land Cruisers were, in general, owned by organizations rather than individuals – your embassies, your NGOs* – and driven by those in the very upper echelons of management. FH/E had two shiny white Land Cruisers, no doubt courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, and one of these was designated for the personal use of the Country Director, who, together with his wife, had been our host at lunch. We drove a short distance through the winding streets of the Kazanchis neighborhood, turned down a dead end gravel road, pulled though a tall metal gate, and there we were.

The First Day, Part One.

We… don’t really have clear memories of our first morning in Ethiopia. And this might be a good time to acknowledge that neither one of us kept a written record of any sort during our time in Ethiopia. I have always found my journal writing to be short-sighted and self-indulgent and embarrassing in retrospect; I am a highly biased and extremely unreliable narrator of my own life. So I’m not sorry – but the fact remains that a lot of our experience there has been lost to the ages. At times like this, I try to check in with J about what he recalls, and see if we can jog each other’s memories.

So we agree that we must have trundled down the hall for showers that morning – though we can’t remember whether or not there was water; there wasn’t, on some days. We must have eaten breakfast downstairs in the communal dining room, almost certainly a bowl of excellent whole-grain hot cereal followed by a second course of institutional eggs or pancakes. We must have introduced ourselves to the people we encountered, though we can’t remember whom we might have met on that particular morning. For example, I don’t recall the names of the young couple who were staying in the room next door – though I do remember that she had studied midwifery, which (I learned) is pronounced “mid-whiff-ery”... we never saw them again, after those first few days as neighbors.

But we remember lunch, specifically.

How On Earth?

For people who didn’t know us twenty years ago, we wanted to let you know how on Earth we ended up in Ethiopia.

As I mentioned earlier, the fact that J was born and raised in the Netherlands added an unanticipated dimension to our relationship. Here I was, married to a man who played Monopoly in a different language, and who relished foods that were not familiar to me; who preferred to watch soccer over basketball and who cheered for another country’s athletes during the 1992 Olympics; who shared my antipathy for the first Iraq War but for entirely different reasons. From the very beginning, J and I were engaged in a conversation that challenged my lifelong notions about nationalism and the USA’s role as a superpower. As a result, I wanted to have an international experience that would take me out of my comfortable assumptions and help me to understand his global perspective. So that motivated us to explore the idea of living overseas, as volunteers.

This whole volunteer idea was not as crazy as it may seem – after all, the Peace Corps is built on this model, and they get thousands of applicants every year! We were in good health, as were our parents and siblings, and we had few financial burdens (we deferred J’s student loan), so it seemed like the perfect opportunity for us to spend a few years on the other side of the planet.

We knew there were a few options out there and since we were still in grad school we had plenty of time to explore them. I won’t bore you with the details but we ended up at IVCF’s Urbana Missions Conference in the winter of 1993, met with representatives from several organizations, and decided to pursue a position with Food for the Hungry’s Hunger Corps. Idealistic as we were, we appreciated FH’s mission of addressing spiritual hunger as well as physical hunger – and we had a friend who had already had a positive experience as an FH volunteer. We were accepted into the program, went through training in the summer of 1994, spent a few months raising support, and were on our way to FH/Ethiopia by the following spring. We were both assigned to roles at the head office in Addis Abeba, where J would be the Management Information Systems Coordinator and I would be a Donor Liaison Research Officer – whatever that meant.

And that's how we found ourselves in Ethiopia.

These people have no idea what's in store for them!

Room and Board.

Our home for the first few nights in Ethiopia was the SIM Guest House, located right in the heart of Addis Abeba, across the street from the Black Lion Hospital. The guest house was intended to shelter missionaries as they came and went to the big city from their homes in the countryside and it still operated that way twenty years ago, with a few rooms available for people like us – development workers in transition, or short term visitors who were affiliated with the SIM mission or its sister church.

The accommodations were… adequate. We had a room on the top floor that was meant for longer stays with a little kitchen and a sitting area in addition to the bed; more than enough space for us and our abundance of luggage. The facilities were down the hall and around the corner, the shower rooms separate from the WCs. Meals were served downstairs in the dining room, with everyone seated family style around long tables. We were grateful to the staff who provided coffee and delicious hot cereal every morning, along with an unlimited supply of purified water -- less for us to worry about as we settled in to our new surroundings.

To Begin With.

Twenty years ago today, on a Tuesday evening, we landed at Bole International Airport in Addis Abeba, the capital city of Ethiopia. We had been traveling all day -- all week -- all month, really -- from our old life as graduate students in Oregon toward our new life as volunteers in the Horn of Africa. We had obtained our degrees, packed and stored our belongings, and said our tearful farewells to friends and family. As newly minted masters in our fields, we knew a lot (collectively) about computer science and art history, but we also knew that we needed a break from academia. We didn't know anything about Africa in general, or Ethiopia in particular, or development work at all. Over the next few years we learned a lot on these subjects, and also a lot about ourselves.

I was 25 years old, and this was only the second time I had traveled outside of North America, so I was completely unprepared for Addis. The airport itself, dingy and dimly lit at night with flickering fluorescent bulbs; the bumpy streets lined with ramshackle structures of corrugated metal; the guest house where we hauled our comically large suitcases up three flights of stairs -- it was all so dark, so different, so foreign. But of course it wasn't foreign, we were. I was.

J had been through a similar experience when, at eleven years of age, he emigrated from the Netherlands to the United States. I wonder if as a boy he had searched the crowd outside the airport, as we did on this occasion, for the familiar faces that would welcome him to his new life. I wonder if he had stared out the window on the drive into the city, trying to get a sense of his surroundings. I wonder if he had strained his ears when he heard people speaking the local language, hoping for a chance to use one of the few phrases he had learned in advance: "Hello! My name is J. What is your name?" It was his perspective as an outsider living in the United States that had piqued my interest in an international adventure, and suddenly there we were.

We have been back for so long and are so far removed in many ways from our time there; but we are who we are now because of those experiences and we thought it might be interesting to see if we can remember what life was like for us -- twenty years ago, in Ethiopia.