AN ADVENTURE IN ADDIS

At 6.15 this morning I was being sick in an open sewer on the outskirts of Addis. While concerned Ethiopians wondered what on earth a white girl was doing collapsed on the side of a road throwing up in the gutter.

One bravely approached me to ask me if I needed any help and to tell me I couldn’t sit where I was because it was dangerous – I said it was ok and pointed to my ‘friend’ the night guard running up and down the hill, who had somehow persuaded me that it was a good idea to go running at 5.30am.

I was moved away from the sewer.

Poor Ashoe (the guard) was reprimanded by the crowd that had gathered to watch the vomiting ferenge.

He said that I was lucky that I wasn’t in the countryside, because the locals would have called the police (would they put me in prison for being sick? or not being able to run very far?).

Anyway I’m not so sure, from my experiences outside of Addis they would have poked me with a stick, shouted you, you , you at me and asked me for one birr, before calling the police.

Everyone substitutes yes  with a sharp in take of breath.

Women whisper, sometimes I wonder how the taxis know when to stop for them.

Even at Addis university, female students studying to become teachers will refuse to speak in front of their peers or will answer questions in such low tones that no one else can hear them.

This is considered acceptable because they, their tutors and fellow students believe in their right to silence.

Jimma is on the way to Gambella and the border with Sudan. It is a centre for coffee, mud, rain, mosquitoes and serial murders (or at least one murderer).

Despite the apparent draw backs, it has something you miss in Addis, all big cities, a sense of knowing what is happening with/to the people around you.

Even if it’s not the kind of thing you really want to hear:

A night guard, who women have to sleep with to get a job on the local building site, who doesn’t declare his HIV status (not declaring your HIV/AIDS status – I presume before sex and not just by wearing a badge – is now a capital offence).

A maid who was raped but who has decided to keep the child and not to press charges.

A body (a dead human one) found buried in the garden of a hotel of ill repute, where there are thought to be more.

It does sound like a horrible place.

But it’s not, it is lovely and peaceful and green and made entertaining by the earnest teenage boys the woman we were staying with has collected around her.

They all go to school and have jobs. They tend the vegetable garden, groom each other’s hair, plonker is the current favourite English word and all were eager to reveal each other’s secrets (about girls and drinking) to us.

In one day they broke their fast three times, with mayonnaise, lolly pops (they had cow’s milk in them) and tej - already having had to seek absolution the day before for accidentally eating meat. Each time they looked absolutely devastated, for all of five seconds. Chigar yellem.

• That it is impossible to storm angrily down a street in Addis. Not because it has some kind of karmic power of resolution but because there are just too many people in the way and too many pot holes.
• That Lucy is absolutely tiny and is really in America.
• That you need a swimming hat to go swimming and no one swims in a straight line anyway.
• That there are apparently more Ethiopian Doctors in Chicago than there are in the whole of Ethiopia.

The Orange shop was broken into the other week and all the mobile top up cards and tins of powdered milk were stolen.

I also came home to a dwarf soldering barbed wire (or danger wire as the Ethiopians call it) to the higher by two bricks compound wall.

The Landlord mumbled something about things becoming more dangerous. I chose not to ask any further questions and assumed that it was because the road alongside the compound is now asphalted.

In admiration a colleague once told me that all the roads in Britain were asphalted, while I contrarily pointed out that some roads are still un-surfaced (which wasn’t really fair, please don’t tell him that they’re all private roads that usually lead to farms in the middle of nowhere).

I really should have contradicted his claim that all men in Scotland wear skirts all the time.

Orthodox Ethiopians began fasting for Easter over two weeks ago;  not eating meat, fish, milk, eggs or cake. The siga bets (meat shops) are closed or selling furniture.

They spend 250 days of their year fasting, each Wednesday and Friday plus the special fasting periods before Christmas and Easter, and any additional reason that they can think of  –  four days for when Jonah was inside the whale (I think he probably did eat, if a whale can swallow a human whole, surely it can swallow a sheep or at least a few fish too).

It is a true demonstration of their faith, because Ethiopians really like their meat.

A party is not a party without a butcher and an animal corpse hanging outside. One morning there will be a forlorn looking goat tied up in our yard and the next the dog is gnawing on its remains.

And despite all this fasting, I think it’s safe to say that I have eaten more meat here than I have anywhere else.

As usual everything conspires to breakdown, run out or disappear at the same time.

Our night guard (who I’m not convinced we really need, but is quite handy for going to pick up bread and milk when it’s dark outside) didn’t turn up on Sunday night.

Informal electricity rationing appears to have started. Every other night is “mebrat yellem”, so I’ve taken to cross stitching a red Double Decker bus by candle light.

The hot water boiler exploded and flooded the bathroom.

The gas canister ran out.

The guard turned up on Monday evening with his foot in a bandage and a long-winded story. I hope for his sake that the injury is real.

The boiler is still broken.

There is apparently no gas of the right kind for our canister available in Addis.

Oh and it’s still raining.

It’s been raining since Sunday evening.

Everything is coated in a matt gloss of mud, including my trousers and shoes.

But somehow everyone else has appeared at work with shiny shoes and none mud splattered clothes.

At times when the mist came down, it looked like the North Yorkshire Moors, but then we’d pass a shepherd wearing pink silk bloomers with wellies, holding a Burberry patterned umbrella in one hand and a spear come crook in the other, and as odd as Yorkshire is in some places, it’s not that odd.