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 FH/E Office, and a Land Cruiser.

In those days, and maybe still, a lot of NGOs had converted private residences for use as offices. The FH/E main office was located in a particularly large house that had been carved up into several smaller rooms – one for the secretaries, one for the accountants, one for the Country Director (let’s call him P.E.), one for his wife, (E.E., who was also the… Program Officer?), one for the logistics department, one for the cook and cleaner, et cetera. All told, there was a staff of about 20-25 people at the main office, plus dozens more distributed among three program sites around the country.

We must have learned, that first day, how to shake hands like a proper Ethiopian: right hand out, left hand holding the right forearm, half-bowing toward your colleague and repeating the greetings. Later the handshakes would become embraces and kisses and repeated expressions of delight, but on that day everything and everyone was new and proper. We would have practiced our formal Amharic phrases, the only useful information from our language tapes. We would have met lovely people like Mekdes and Menbere, Messay, Melesse, Solomon, Demissie, and Joy.

J in his very own office.

J was to have his very own office, a tiny cubicle off the main hall with a desk and a computer; I would share a room (two desks, no computer) with Joy, a wonderful young woman who had been raised in Ethiopia, had recently graduated from Mount Holyoke College, and had just started working at FH/E as a Donor Liaison Research Officer.

Wait a minute – wasn’t I supposed to be the Donor Liaison Research Officer?! Huh. Well, I am sure this is all going to work out just fine.

*Non-governmental organizations