the ishi bekka chronicle

November 2012

issue 1, volume 3 of the ishi bekka chronicle

you know, since i heard that there was a PCV run newsletter circulating around this country, i wanted to run the show.

oddly enough, i never contributed to the newsletter before i took the helm. i guess i like to be my own boss. if i’m going to write something it’s going to end up here where i have total creative and administrative control. if i’m going to contribute to the newsletter, i’m going to be the big cheese. so when waidmann (the previous editor) looked toward his COS plans and prepared to hand the ishi bekka chronicle to the next generation, i got in his ear as soon and as often as i could.

then i started preparing to make the ishi mine. i couldn’t tell you what the best part of this job is, because there are so many. it’s writing, it’s graphic design, it’s creative collaboration, it’s a free pass to explore and expound upon everything under the PC ethiopia sun, it forces me to keep up with current events, and turns socializing and bullshitting into “business meetings” and “brainstorming”.

i can tell you the worst part of this job: bureaucracy. i hate that, to paraphrase chuck, an outlet for PCVs to rant, rave, vent, and act out – occasionally about and against the office, the country, or work in general – has to be scrutinized by the higher ups. i mean, look, i don’t run every blog post here at whitey by the staff, hell, i don’t run any of these posts by staff, and all the ishi is is essentially a readers’ digest of PCV writings and creative output. the staff really shouldn’t have any control over it whatsoever. but they do. so what does it all mean? does it mean that since the ishi has to be sifted through staff approval before i can even release it to my fellow PCVs, that there is a gelati’s chance in danikil of all you whitey fans getting your eyes on it?

what it means is i spend a large portion of my free time – often all of my free time – working on something that comes in large part from my brain and my efforts, and in collaboration with the impressive skills and efforts of my friends and colleagues who trust me to present their work to the world. the ishi belongs to me and my collaborators, writers, creative staff, etc and it’s something we are proud of and want to share with the world. so…

*    *    *    *

stay tuned for our next episode:

you must be kessler.

it’s all uphill from here. or downhill… wait, what’s the bad one?

****

it would be so easy for me to say i went down to hawassa, sat lakeside with a smattering of PCVs from all the Gs, and had some freshly caught fried fish with chili and lime, a few cold hakim stouts, a few laughs, woke up the next morning, and ran a half marathon like i do it every day.

yes. it would be very easy for me to say that, which concerns me.

because that would be a lie.

that last little bit would be, anyway.

i don’t know what happened out there, man.

back in the states i used to run 12 miles a few times a week for fun.

back in masha i could do 8 miles of hills no problem.

i could sit here and make excuses, but at the end of the race… well… at the end of the race i couldn’t tell you what happened because i wasn’t there. i couldn’t even finish a damn half marathon.

thus began my woes.

i had failed to finish the hawassa race.

next up: visit the host family back in boru. tachawat. invite them for tibs and beer.

fail.

deanna and i made our first efforts to revisit our boru PST host families, and we figured we would spend some time chatting and catching up with each of the families, invite them out to dinner, and head back to assela no problems. what really happened was that we went to each of the houses, at which point the families each served us an enormous meal complete with coffee and soda, left the room, and basically went on about their lives until we moved on to the next house. when dinner time rolled around, despite our better judgment and awful stomach aches, we invited the families out to dinner.

we were rejected.

this was a bittersweet moment. yes… bittersweet like ethiopian coffee.

yeah, i had so much soda and sugared coffee that day that my teeth felt like biting into anything harder than soup would make them crunch and crumble like stale M&Ms. yeah, i had thrice forcefed myself ethiopian sized meals for two (i had to take the bullet for deanna. poor thing had her fill of boru digestive problems during training). yeah, the last thing i wanted was another meal, but we thought it would be a nice gesture to take the fams out for grilled meat and luke warm george’s (OK, so it’s not fresh fish and cold stout, but hawassa was last week, man. we’re in boru, now).

back to assela with our tails between our legs and our heads between our knees (so we didn’t puke…).

then it was back to addis where i managed to get stuck for 3 more days than i intended, which i spent basically ferenjiless, incommunicado, and unwillingly hanging out with street hustlers a good majority of my days.

as much fun as addis can be, it’s not “surprise you’re stuck in addis! yeah!” fun. addis needs to be premeditated. even then…

you don’t wing it in addis, because addis has decades of experience at being inconvenient. addis will beat you. you don’t plan to get a bunch of important errands done all over the city and be ready to head out by breakfast time, because you will step outside to find that there are no taxis or busses running today. the streets have to be clear for the world economic forum that is inexplicably being held in a country that is so economically sound that they receive more international handouts than any other country in the world.

hey everybody! we can show you how to stay out of debt… ethiopian style! see we just get a bunch of free money from all of you guys (no, friend, we don’t borrow it. we just get to keep it). so if you all just borrow money from yourselves, you’ll be sitting pretty in no time! p.s. : i hope you don’t like infrastructure, ‘cause that’s not part of the plan… ethiopian style!

finally i get a bus out of town, and we managed to get sideswiped just 20 minutes outside of the city. that held us up for a good two and a half hours. the other two stops, which each held us up for over an hour, were for no reason at all that i could deduce. i got to jimma in the middle of the night, and had to get up first thing in the morning if i wanted to get back to masha that day.

i would not get back to masha that day.

i couldn’t bring myself to get up at 5AM to get a bus. so instead i hoped to break down the trip piecemeal and get an easier bus to bedele (the halfway point between jimma and metu, where i’d have to transfer again on to gore, then to masha), and hope for the best when i got there. instead i was immediately offered a cobra (not a poisonous snake, but the slang term for a private car that is going your way and will take you along, usually for an inflated “speed and comfort” fee). i sat on the bumper of this guy’s truck for an hour and a half while he continued to assure me that we would go as soon as he was done with tea… then breakfast… then tea again… then it was almost lunchtime and we couldn’t leave without a proper lunch so…

i walked back to the bus station, got on a bus, and got stuck in bedele until 5:30 at night. at long last, a metu bus finally departed, getting me there approximately four hours after the latest possible transfer to gore.

psst! over here! –> a side note, if you’ll permit me: i don’t mean in anyway to insinuate that ethiopia has bus schedules. it does not. but once you’ve been around a while, you start to recognize the patterns and routes well enough to estimate these things. one of the volunteers recently had a friend visit who said that when he arrived in addis, he could just check out the bus schedule and find his way down to bonga. to which we all replied an enthusiastic “awww. that’s cute!” alright, meet you back on the other side <–

i would eventually return to masha to find that my ambiguously gay neighbor tiwolde decided that his cat-sitting duties included borrowing a bunch of my stuff while i was out, but in no way included cleaning up the dried out pile of cracked eggs he left in the corner of my room, and stopped just shy of feeding my cat. i’m assuming by the dusting of sharp, pointy bread bits all over my room that when he used up the eggs i left for him, he decided that the hundred birr i gave him to buy more would be better spent on one or two pieces of bread, valued at 1birr each (i’m not expecting change). when that first round of bread was instead ripped up and scattered across my bedroom, he simply gave up altogether.

though i’m posting this now in mid-july, keep in mind that my blog has fallen far behind and this worst week yet happened in mid-may, beginning a series of giant ethiopian assaches that dear sweet fancy meles, i can only hope are finally now, two months later, winding down.

lucky me, in the midst of this worst spring/summer yet, i would soon receive the best kind of relief i could hope for.

* * * *

it’s ironic that i’m smiling here because this would be the start of two and a half months of thinking i was dying or just plain wishing i were dead.

****

word of the day: ethiopian : (adj) used to describe a situation so bad for so many different tiny nagging reasons that the only thing i can compare it to is having a large toddler wearing dutch clogs padlocked to your bare chest in a sandpaper baby bjorn, then being forced to carry a tray of beers across the dance floor at a justin beiber concert while the child repeatedly kicks you in the nuts and pisses down the front of your shirt, eventually you stumble out of the melee only to trip and fall head first up a cow’s ass, the cow’s explosive diarrhea rockets you free but you land in a cactus patch for some reason, the cactus thorns manage to snag and remove your pants, oh no! this tragic series of events has caused you significant shrinkage, and you look up to see that a group of hysterically laughing supermodels has witnessed the whole thing. that, my friends, is a positively ethiopian day.

* * * *

stay tuned for our next episode:

i don’t recall saying djibouti.

****

easy listening: the airborne toxic event : papillon

meet the peace corps: bailey’s full of surprises.

if i’m going to start making extra efforts to appreciate people again, i guess i’d better bring back meet the peace corps, hadn’t i?

today, let’s meet bailey.

how much do i know about bailey?

not much.

i think, maybe, she might be religious… possibly.

not in that weird, grating way, but in that sweet, endearing way.

she’s from kansas, i know that, and she’s got the jayhawk pride and lilting twang to prove it.

bailey is the poster girl for what we used to tell the world american women were like, you know, before we started telling the world that american women were coked-out, whored-up, 14 year old disney pop singers. oops. did i say that out loud? i haven’t complained about disney in a while. i must be backed up.

speaking of backing up…

bailey is also on PSN. that’s how we come to be in addis so often at the same time. and yet, i’ve pretty much told you everything i know about miss bailey.

everything i knew about miss bailey.

up to now i may just as well have been describing superman’s mom.

which is why i (a far cry from jonathan kent, and a hell of a long way from smallville, kansas) was a teensy bit surprised to find myself spending an entire weekend sharing bus seats and hotel rooms with that very same miss bailey. why i was surprised to hear that she was wandering the early morning alleyways behind the ras hotel in addis looking for illegal mini-busses to hawassa for the half-marathon that weekend, or that she was totally unconcerned about not having hotel plans when we got there. i was surprised that she was so cheerfully open to a last minute detour at the wendo genet hot springs with deanna and her boyfriend… during a torrential downpour.

after a long weekend spent in bailey’s company i was pleasantly surprised to discover that she is the kind of woman who says yes to adventure, even little bitty ones (or anyway, she doesn’t say no) she’s the kind of woman who gets rowdy during march madness. she’s the kind of woman who appreciates a good schnitzel, then spends the rest of the evening singing “a few of my favorite things”. she’s the kind of woman who hangs out with spanish artists in the monasteries of ethiopia’s northern deserts. she’s the kind of woman who says “i’m thinking about taking a trip to the loop”. i don’t think anybody who didn’t live in the loop has ever uttered that phrase. she’s the kind of woman who will put her fist through a plate glass window to kill a mosquito, then you catch her doodling happy little eyes over the big smile shaped scar she consequently inccured on her wrist.

bailey was the perfect person to begin reappreciating the peace corps, not for the program itself, but for the people, because bailey so perfectly embodies the mix of people in our little pc world, and the mix of traits that we each possess at once. she’s also the first person to explain that it’s not “rock, shock, jayhawk”, but rather “rock chalk…” which may be the most disappointing thing all weekend (or maybe not…).

anyhoo.

bailey, meet everyone. everyone… bailey.

now if you’ll excuse me, i’ve got to go run 13miles in a row… or in a circle.

you get the picture.

* * * *

no wait… that’s superman’s mom again. bailey’s like, at least 40 years younger than this. in my defense, i think we all wish our kids were a little more like batman.

****

stay tuned for our next episode:

i did[n’t] 21k!

****

reading asignment: of mice and men : john steinbeck

lately i’ve been peppering my other reading with the short stories of steinbeck, all of which i recommend. of mice and men, however, has been for decades and still is for the foreseeable future, my favorite book of all time. i don’t see a problem with a child reading a book about how shooting a mentally disabled man in the back of the head may actually be his best chance to find a world where he fits in and… no i’m not crying like a little girl! i have something in both of my eyes… shut up!

hello cheezy good times. goodbye to whatever this was supposed to be.

presently there are something like 30 of us PCVs in ethiopia working in the health sector.

the powers that be, those being local admin, our washington DC overlords, and the ethiopian government, insist that everything we do out here had better have something to do with curing HIV/AIDS. even the environment and education sectors have to prove that what they’re doing is solving the AIDS problem or they won’t get funding.

to the untrained eye, this might make a person think that ethiopia was on the cutting edge of health care.

i mean, even the most advanced health care providers from all over the world have thus far failed to stop HIV. so if HIV is ethiopia’s only problem, then they must be on par right?

why is it then, that when our beloved blonde brittany, brittany of the boru crew, is laid up in the hospital with gastritis, an affliction that makes it terribly painful to eat anything greasy, spicy, salty, sour, creamy, fermented, or otherwise interesting to the palette, they keep carting in meals loaded with palm oil and chili peppers?

this is not the attention to detail one would expect from a health care system that claims to be mustard in every respect other than that pesky AIDS thing (note: add mustard to the list of things brittany can’t eat).

this is the attention to detail one might expect from a health care system that answers the question “why wasn’t this case of measles reported to the CDC?” with girly giggles as nurses flee from the room. so i guess that explains it then.

our poor blonde brittany.

our poor blonde brittany from memphis, tennessee, home to arguably the best barbeque cooking in the solar system, can’t eat spicy, salty, greasy…

poor brittany writhing in pain from hospital food, of all things. reduced to a diet of digestive biscuits and water.

brittany who had just received a care package containing, of all things, cheetos. do you know that i have been in ethiopia for an entire year, and i haven’t thought of cheetos once? it must be my highly medicated state of confusion. trooper that she is, brittany tried to appreciate them. wouldn’t you? a year in ethiopia, with scant few sustenance options save for ethiopian food, and one day the mail delivers you a box with that shiny orange bag inside. that bag with the really cool cheetah on the front promising you the kind of x-treme deliciousness that can only come from styrofoam packing peanuts covered in day-glo orange safety paint?

i don’t know why they’re so damn good, but if the french can eat deep fried garden slugs, and people will pay thousands of dollars a pound for coffee beans that can only be obtained from the shit of a south american jungle cat, then why can’t we enjoy cheez flavored crispy sponge nuggets now and then?

i think the only good reason, sorry to say this brittany, is gastritis.

she wouldn’t make it much longer in a country where everything is greasy, spicy, salty, fermented…

she’s going home.

it’s a medical separation, and she can come back if things turn around in the next six weeks, but i won’t blame her if she doesn’t. mostly we’re all pretty fed up with ethiopia and it’s snail’s pace of self-destruction.

i think a lot of us have grown to love bits and pieces of this place, mostly as a survival mechanism.

how could we stay here if it was purely awful?

we desperately long for those little fun bits. trips to jimma, addis, bahir dar. places with fast internet, cold beverages, and dairy products.

and brittany, i think, had truly enjoyed her time here, but how much could she enjoy it when she would be surviving on little more than glucose brothers’ tea cookies?

sitting in brittany’s hospital room, helping her enjoy her cheetos before she went back to a country where the munchies flow like wine and she still won’t be able to eat them, got me a little nostalgic for the afternoons at the boru shai bet eating sambusa and peanut butter tea, and bitching about our day.

after the four of us left boru, i didn’t keep up with the crew too well. i think what bums me out most about brittany leaving is that, in these last months, i didn’t appreciate her as much as i should have. the boru crew was a tight little support group when we were out there, and now, a year later, i’m wondering what happened.

we got thrown to different parts of the country, different experiences, and schedules…

during PST it didn’t matter who was married, and who wasn’t; who was in a town like assela and who was in a town like boru; who was fresh out of college, and who was an old hand; who was learning what language, and who was better at it. for all intents and purposes we were all living the same lives.

a year ago i was pontificating on how life was changing everyday. new relationships, new experiences, new knowledge, new places and challenges.

the same holds true today. on the one hand, you might say life is changing for all of us, but i think a more accurate way to put it is that life is changing for each of us. and i think that’s starting to wear us down. without 68 sidekicks to bounce off of, the stability and routine is great, but the sameness and emptiness of the peace corps days is boring the pants off of us. meanwhile the novelty and challenges of the ethiopian days are just a pain in our pantsless asses most of the time.

but why should that be so?

were we not going to use all that great down time to read all those books we never got around to? to learn languages, and instruments, and hobbies? to work out until we were chiseled from stone? to study until the GREs and GMATs and MCATs were laughable? is that not still the plan?

what’s more, isn’t adventure the spice of life? yeah that spiciness is starting to give us a collective case of emotional gastritis, but let’s look at the bright side: i could sit in bedele waiting for a bus for the rest of my service, and at the end of it all, i still did peace corps ethiopia. for better or worse, i get the benefits of that. it’s time to forget how much this place can suck, and embrace it. because:

a)     it could always be worse (always).

b)    if nothing else, it makes for a good story.

surely at the rate life was changing we couldn’t expect to remain the happy-go-lucky atlanta 69ers forever, but, and maybe it’s just me, and maybe i’m really only feeling this because brittany’s leaving, but i think life in Ethiopia has broken our spirits, and our bonds just a tiny bit.

a year in, down in the G5 doldrums, i think what i’d like to do is forget about the struggle to love ethiopia, i think what i’d like to do is to appreciate the people who make it bearable, appreciate the silliness of it all, and try my best to live with that bright eyed optimism that we all arrived with, that eager invincibility that we all fueled in each other.

i think what i need to do, is make this more of an adventure.

peace corps ethiopia?

let’s parking lot that.

the great adventure that is life, peace corps ethiopia chapter?

i think i’ll take that for a spin.

but before i do, what i’d really like to do is say that you will be missed, brittany, by the boru crew, and all the rest. of course we hope you’ll return, but should you stay away, enjoy the land of cheetos and freedom fries.

we’ll see you again, soon enough.

best of luck on your new adventure.

****

brittany looks optimistically into the distance…

****

there was once a time when we were this excited about the transportation in ethiopia.

* * * *

stay tuned for our next episode:

beer. run.

****

reading assignment: tracks : robyn davidson

one woman’s solo journey across the unforgiving western australian outback with no one but her dog and a herd of camels. don’t ask why i specifically sought out this book, or why i need more in depth maps. just enjoy her hilarious and poignant trek.