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!

Mekdes and Menbere were the receptionist and secretary who worked in the front office. Mekdes was very young and vibrant, and she always seemed have a smile on her face. She had a very distinctive way of saying “yes” in Amharic with a nod and a sharp intake of breath that I tried to imitate as I learned to speak the language. Menbere was older and quieter, gracious and patient with the foreigners who were invading her space. At the time, there was only one computer in the building that had access to e-mail, so I spent a lot of time in their office each week composing and reading messages.

In the middle of the morning, one of the kitchen staff would come around to each worker with a cup of hot black tea – “chai” – borne on a metal tray. The tea was always served in small glasses with about a quarter of an inch of sugar resting at the bottom. Since we didn’t like our tea so sweet we learned not to disturb the sugar by stirring, and we never drank the last syrupy sip. After a few days our tea came without sugar, but with the sugar bowl so we could sweeten it to our taste.

The very best part of the day – and I know J will agree – was lunchtime. Most of the staff members made a monthly contribution to pay for groceries and kitchen workers who would prepare lunch (and tea) at the office every day. Lunch was served in the ickabayt, the service rooms behind the main office building, and there was a set menu: shiro wat on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; siga wat on Tuesday; and “espaghetti” on Thursday. Siga wat, a type of stew with red pepper and beef, was almost unbearably spicy for us and was my least favorite food, but the Ethiopian staff loved it because meat was always a treat for them. Shiro wat, made with red pepper and chickpeas, was and still is my very favorite type of Ethiopian food, in spite of the fact that it is the most mundane meal for Ethiopians. The menu was supplemented with vegetarian side dishes – potatoes and carrots, green beans, boiled greens – and on very festive occasions we might have a feast of doro wat, a spicy chicken stew that is Ethiopia’s national dish. In my memory, the food we ate for lunch at FH/E was the best Ethiopian food we ever ate, anywhere.

After the meal, a group of us would gather around the cleared table to spend the rest of the hour playing Uno. We played with a double deck and it was absolutely cutthroat, with no quarter given to visitors or illiterate foreigners – so it was a great way for us to learn our numbers and basic colors in Amharic. Lunch and Uno were precious minutes to interact with staff from the accounting and logistics departments, with whom we otherwise had little contact.

The rest of my workday, in those early days, was occupied with reading reports and otherwise familiarizing myself with the world of development – metric tonnes and sustainability and food-for-work and gabions. International aid had become a big business in the 1980s, and Ethiopia in 1995 was still one of the largest recipients of money and food assistance from western donors, including governments and private organizations. However, these donors were starting to demand a new accountability from NGOs; they wanted to know that their gifts were going to programs that could produce results. It was my job (and Joy’s) to develop a reporting system that could not only track how resources were distributed among the various FH/E projects, but would also demonstrate that those resources were having a positive effect on the beneficiaries. It was all very different from studying art history, so there was a bit of a learning curve for me.

And what was J doing? That will be a topic for next time.