Mud Splattered Beginnings

26^th Sept.

Writing this first, rather general update from Addis has taken longer than expected, but not for want of trying. On two occasions I sat writing in an internet café, only to have the power cut in the middle of my writing. On another I futilely tried to type it on my phone in the only free wifi spot I have yet located. Intermittent power has been a regular feature of my first ten days in Addis; I had assumed this was because of the enduring rains, but an Ethiopian friend of mine suggested that it had more to do with the massive infrastructure building that is going on throughout the city, and that I should expect outages more regularly.  So I stocked up on candles and a cheap, but very effective rechargeable torch.

My neighborhood, Hayahulet, is particularly burdened with this at the moment since the construction of a partially underground train system is in full swing. Five minutes from my house, a gaping hole where the road used to be stretches at least three blocks; the incessant clanging, hammering, scraping of busy workmen and machinery goes from dawn till well after dark. This work makes travelling from my neighborhood more challenging than normal, especially on wet days since it involves a small trek over rather precarious, very muddy ground to get to the other side of the hole. The assumption is that this project, like so many of the building projects in Addis, is a major Chinese initiative. When walking through Hayahulet last weekend a couple of people yelled “China! China!” at me. I’m used to being called a ‘ferengi’ (slang for white person, deriving from ‘Frank’), but being called ‘China’ was striking; in some quarters ‘China’ is apparently displacing ‘ferengi’ as the generic moniker for ‘foreigner.’

Despite the construction work, our neighborhood and our house are great. The latter is an upper floor apartment, which great views out to the hills surrounding Addis. I am already enamored of evenings spent sitting on the little balcony of my bedroom with a book and a glass of wine. We have a nice little restaurant, Zebra Grill, around the corner and wide selection of bars, cafes and (best of all) fresh juice shops (those of you who read my writing last year will remember my joy at discovering the “juice sprisse,” a layered mango, papaya, avocado glassful of heaven). There’s the Axum Hotel with its inexpensive gym and its free wifi (if you buy an expensive coffee), and Meskel Square, the central hub of the city, is a mere 5-10 minute drive. The commute up to Addis Ababa University is a little more taxing, but I’m getting used to riding the two minibuses a day that take me to Sidist Kilo, where it is located. My call of “waradj alle” when I reach my stop seems to be a source of endless amusement to my fellow commuters.

And, the rains appear to be subsiding! Although I shouldn’t speak too soon… When I arrived a daily downpour (or three) was to be expected, but they have been more sporadic of late. When it rains in Addis it begins with three or four large splodges on the pavement, and then the heavens open. I was confused at first when I saw Ethiopians start to sprint for cover as soon as the first drops fell, thinking that surely with an umbrella I could survive. How wrong I was! The rain falls like fast, wet bullets from the sky; it can be hard to control an umbrella while getting pummeled by it. Persevering, soaked to the core, up the road from Arat Kilo I felt like an extra in a Marx Brothers film, and my Ethiopian audience was suitably tickled. Whilst Ethiopian women are very practiced at navigating the ensuing situation under foot, even in delicate ballet pumps, its safe to say that I have spent much of my first ten days with mud-splatters up to my knees and boots that look as if I’ve come straight from the construction site.  Elegance, of course, has never been my strong suit.

So besides all of this, I have begun some work! Last week, the great triumph was to get affiliation as a Visiting Scholar to Addis Ababa University.  The latter is something I knew nothing about before arriving, since it is almost impossible to get such information online. I arrived with a letter of introduction from my department at Stanford and no clue about how I was going to get access to the library and archives. Fortunately, a fellow Brit, Sarah, was subletting a room in my house and, as a graduate student from London, knew far more about the situation after having been in touch with other researchers who had come to Ethiopia. Word of mouth appears to be the only way to get information on a range of practical matters, from affiliation to the university, to which Amharic classes you should / can take. (Next week, I’m going to write a short blog entry on these practical processes, in the hope of more broadly sharing information that I found very difficult to get on my own.)

There are many things that I hope to achieve in the next week, from meeting various key people to getting my residency card. I also plan to brave the Amharic section of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies library, armed with a list of texts that I’m in hot pursuit of (including an Ethiopian article on Lunarcharsky, about which I’m fascinated!)

27^th Sept.

Today is the national holiday of Meskel, or the Finding of the True Cross, which is an Orthodox Christian holiday. This holiday Last night I went down to Meskel Square (the hub that used to be known as Revolution or Abyot Square). With a few of my new friends, I stood in a crowd of (apparently) several hundred thousand people to watch the burning of the Meskel bonfire (demera), understood as reminiscent of the fire burned by Queen Helena, the smoke of which showed the direction of the True Cross. The bonfire is also sometimes understood as an act of cleansing sins. It was a quite spectacular affair, and one in which there is considerable religious song and dance from groups of young men and women of the Orthodox Church. Despite the recent, deeply tragic events in Kenya, people were not discouraged from attending a large-scale public event, and the atmosphere was very festive. Once the bonfire had burned to nothing, and toppled to one side, the fire brigade arrived to extinguish the lingering flames. Soldiers, who has been keeping the crowd at a distant moved out of the way and allowed people to run into the smoldering remains to grab some charcoal. This is then used to mark a cross on the foreheads of the faithful. My friend Ramallah insisted on marking both mine and my friend Victoria’s heads, much to the fascination and amusement of the Ethiopians around us…particularly in the fancy bar, The Black Rose, where we went to eat steak sandwiches after the festivities.

In other news, its my little sister Anna's birthday today! I remember well being taken from school at 6 years old to meet her. Anna, I hope you have a wonderful day!

I promise to try to update this more regularly, particularly from next week when I hope (fingers crossed) to have access to the internet at home.

2006: The Year that Keeps on Giving

On Sunday morning I will arrive in Addis Ababa, and the year will be 2006. Ethiopia, as you may already know, follows a calendar very different to our own Gregorian calendar. Based on the Coptic Calendar, and similar to the Julian one, the Ethiopian calendar is approximately 8 years behind the Gregorian. Each of its years (amet in Amharic) consists of twelve months (wer) of exactly 30 days (qen), and a thirteenth month, known as Pwagame, which consists of five or six days, depending on the year. This week Ethiopia celebrated its New Year or Enqutatash, which occurs on Mesekerem 1 (or September 11th) every year. Typically it marks the end of the rainy season (Kremt) and the start of the flowering season. This year, the rains seems to persist amidst New Year blossoms, but I will shortly be arriving in the earliest days of Ethiopian 2006, itching to get down to work.

The thought of going back (or forward) to 2006 got me thinking last night as I squeezed tea bags into my suitcase. In the Gregorian calendar that was a bit of a ropey year for me. It was the year in which the sheen of graduating from Edinburgh University was fading as all the opportunities I assumed would be laid at my feet did not materialize. I moved down to London and in with my extremely accommodating cousin, having failed to get a job as a part-time receptionist at The List magazine in Edinburgh (which I, obviously, believed was the only path to greatness). I started working for less money than I needed to live on at a Mayfair gallery that I was far too common to be staffing and churned out the odd awkwardly written exhibition review. My family was going through a difficult time and I shamelessly lived for the smorgasbord of free canapes and cheap wine at any art opening my dear friend Katie could get us invitations to. I quickly came to realize that I was neither glamorous nor savvy nor [add your own adjective] enough for the Art World. And to top it off, I was unceremoniously dumped by my first love, calling on his lunch break from his far more exciting job in America. This, naturally, led to several months of insisting that I could never, ever, ever be happy, ever again. I was your classic self-centered, melodramatic Generation Y-er. I probably still am (this particular blog post may corroborate such suspicions), but Gregorian 2006 has gone down, in particular, as my annus horribilis.

 

The late, great Tigger in Gregorian 2006, summing up my thoughts entirely.

This 2006 is going to be quite different. I've been having those disturbed, teeth-grinding nights of sleep that inevitably come before an exciting, yet intimidating move. I've packed and repacked and packed again, anxious about what to take both to survive the end of a very rainy rainy season and to ensure that I make the most of this opportunity to study and learn. I've tried to revise some of my Amharic, although I think anxiety is wreaking havoc with my language recall; I'm relying on the whole "immersion" experience to trigger my memory. I'm squeezing in books I feel I ought to take, and packing the odd photograph to brighten my room.

Its quite strange to be thinking of returning to 2006, since I distinctly remember toasting "good riddance" to it on Gregorian New Year's Eve that year. Funnily enough, it was in the first few weeks of 2007 that everything changed. I got a fellowship to Harvard University, where I enrolled later that year and audited a class on African Craft and Design with Prof. Suzanne Blier. It was this class (and the wonderful professor who taught it) that would radically shift my life path. And it is that same (sometimes meandering) path that has led me to this point: packing up my belongings to travel to sub-Saharan Africa for doctoral dissertation research.

So here's to a new Ethiopian year ...and to my being much older and a little wiser in 2006 this time than I was as a hapless 24 year old.