Bonfires & Rockets

Rockets were ignited; the sound deafening and chaos erupted in the streets of Dangila. There was a sigh of relief when I finally made it safely inside the gates of my compound as darkness fell around me.  I stared for a moment at my red-stained hands and reflected on the pandemonium the day held.

I went to bed last night after double-locking my door and comforting my dog who was scared as small explosions popped loudly near my front door.  Around 3am I awoke to silence and was thankful for the peace it brought me, but at 5am the noise was once again inescapable.  I peered out my window and saw that fires were raging in the street and smoke filled the air. Time to join the celebration, I finally conceded!

Today was my first Meskel holiday spent in Dangila and it quickly had turned into my favorite.  Ethiopia has a lot of obscure holidays, but most are celebrated in the same fashion: coffee ceremony, killing a sheep, eating injera.  But Meskel proved to be a unique and wonderful reprieve from the monotony of holidays here.

Although the holiday is officially today, Monday, September 27, 2010 (Gregorian calendar, because let’s not forget we just rang in the year 2003 in Ethiopia), Meskel celebrations began yesterday.  All over town cone-shaped bonfires were built and children anxiously ran amuck in the streets wanting to set fire to them.  But their parents' warnings halted their pyro-instincts.

I visited neighbors’ houses all day yesterday, which officially started the holiday and the process of being over-fed.  At one house, “the house of 5 girls” as I’ve labeled them, I came in just as the henna mixture was ready for application.  I accepted the fact that my hand was going to get the same treatment as theirs without a word and enjoyed my girl-time with this wonderful family.  As I sat there letting the henna dye my skin I thought about how majestic the henna dye looks on habesha hands, blending the natural golden brown skin on the back of the hand into a deep red palm.  Then I looked at my pale hand and realized I’d inevitably look like a kid who stuck their hand in Georgia clay or Kool-Aid, but what could I do about it now?

Hands stuffed in my jacket pockets, I continued to visit neighbors and enjoy the atmosphere.  I stopped to hangout with some children on my street for a while and they showed me their clever invention made from an old metal pipe and a nail all strung together with wire.  If you scrape off the head of a match and put it in the pocket formed by pipe and nail, and slam it against a rock, it creates a loud POP sound.  Some kids buy fifty sentim “rockets” which create a much louder effect, but using matches proved cheaper, so most kids opted for this method of being annoying.

The kids and I watched as parents built the bonfire tower out of wood and wrapped it in fresh evergreen branches which by the end resembled a Christmas tree by both sight and smell.  They told me the bonfire would be lit at nine o’clock, which would normally translate immediately in my head (there is a six-hour difference), except for some reason 3am seemed an unfathomable meeting time and instead 9pm stuck.  It wasn’t until 8pm, after I returned home from watching the Addis Ababa bonfire igniting on ETV and reminisced in my head about my Meskel spend there last year, that it clicked with me that the kids meant 3am!  I immediately wanted to double-check because I wasn’t going to be the fool who wakes up in the middle of the night for nothing, but at this point I was home, in my pajamas, and safe from the raucous in the street.  My final walk home just 30 minutes before was filled with dodging little boys running up with their fire-cracker invention and popping it at my feet; no way I was going back out.

I went to sleep cursing the children who kept throwing the rockets over my compound fence which would then explode in noise on my porch.  At 3am I awoke without an alarm from a loud but comforting noise, rain pounding on my roof.  The street itself was quiet though and I easily put my head back down to keep sleeping.

Around 5am was the next time I woke as children screamed with joy and rockets once again began their popping.  I threw on a jacket and hurried outside, unsure what to expect.  My neighbors happily greeted me and handed me a small bundle of sticks.  The streets where pitch black except for bonfires ablaze on each block.  My neighborhood’s bonfire was just about to be ignited and I joined in carrying the flame from an already burning fire to ours.  We chanted yohey, yohey, yoho, yoho lead by an elder and danced in a circle around the Christmas tree-like structure, then we lit it with our bundles of sticks.  The bonfire went up in a blaze and smoke from the green branches filled the air.

Bonfires eventually turned into ashes and darkness turned into a beautiful sunrise.  Corn was roasted on the remains of the fire and neighbors began their holiday celebration together in the street.  The rest of today has been spent bouncing back and forth between neighbors to accommodate all the bunna invitations; there have been quite a few coffee ceremonies.  Despite the number of cups of coffee I’ve had to drink today, the caffeine couldn’t overpower my four hours of sleep last night.  What a wonderful holiday; it will end the only way a good Ethiopian celebration can end: with a deep sleep!

My Internet Café Project

I realized recently that while I’ve mentioned my internet café project a bunch, I’ve never told the story in its entirety.  The ten orphan boys I grew to love last fall needed something sustainable to get them off the street, or at least put food in their mouths.  This past spring, while talking with my counterpart at HAPCO about helping these boys, we thought of the idea of opening an internet café whose profits will help support these orphans, and others too.  The internet café project we decided would employ one manager, one guard, and several part-time teenage orphans when they weren’t in school.  Every month a percentage of the profits would be divided amongst the orphans we wanted to help.

It was a flawless plan, we figured.  Since Ethiopians are just discovering the glory of the world wide web and Dangila isn’t yet connected (except for my house!), we thought this was a perfect business plan, bound to be a success.

I applied for Peace Corps funding through a grant accessible to Peace Corps volunteers working with HIV, funded by PEPFAR.  My counterpart and I came up with a project proposal, submitted it and were soon approved for the $5,000.  A month or two later, in July, we received the money and began figuring out the logistics of getting the café up and running.  I purchased two computers, a photocopy machine, and a printer in Addis and hauled them up to Dangila.  The next step was securing a location – if you haven’t read my blog entry “Not Knowing Everything” (and why would you have not?) you should now, to understand the rest of this story.  And yet here I am, two and a half months later, without a container for the café.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, or container apparently.  There is a catch with this supposed “empty container for orphans.”  An Iddir (community group) was put in charge of organizing the container to benefit orphans from kebele 05 (which is like a small county or neighborhood- - there are five in Dangila).  The container was actually purchased with HAPCO funding over a year ago and since then, not a single birr has been given to the orphans it was suppose to support.  Yet the Iddir won’t relinquish control of the container.

The Iddir chairman’s reasons for not giving the container to this internet café project are flawed and ridiculous.  He says the container is suppose to help only kebele 05 kids, while our project has six orphans from kebeles 01-04.  Twelve of eighteen are from kebele 05 though and we increased the number of orphans early in the project to include all children which were supposed to be supported by the failed container projects.

It came to me one day that I should write him a sincere letter asking if we could please work together to achieve the mutual goal of helping orphans.  It was translated with the help of my friend and presented it to him in his office.  He hardly looked at the letter and definitely wouldn’t look me in the eye.  All he said was, “Aychelem” – it’s not possible.

Next step? Well, HAPCO has a signed contract with the Iddir since the funding originally came from them.  The Iddir promised to help set up a business to help the orphans, and a year later since they have not yet supported the orphans, HAPCO has the ability to take the container back, to give it to my project.  The mayor, who is in full support of my internet café project, wants to first give the Iddir time to “do the right thing” and simply hand over the container. Not likely. Hence the two and a half months of waiting.  And I fear if HAPCO actually tries to enforce the contract and take the container back things could get really ugly.

In the meantime we conducted a basic computer and basic business training for the eighteen orphans we want to help.  The internet café is not simply giving these orphans a portion of its profits, but the project also aims to keep the children involved in the café, and make them active internet users (which they will be able to access free-of-charge for a certain number of hours per month).

With the training completed and the waiting game with the Iddir still counting days, I am starting to worry.  There are only three and a half months left until I leave Dangila and finish Peace Corps, so I am starting to fear this project won’t finish.  I have literally put blood, sweat, and tears into this project (albeit blood by paper cut).  Six months have passed since brainstorming this idea and at the moment I’m feeling disheartened.  I don’t know where to go from here and simply waiting is becoming an impossibility.

Tears and frustration. Sometimes you can give all you have and it still might not be enough.  But I’m not giving up. No ma’am.

Sharing Dangila

For over a year and a half I’ve survived, even thrived, on being the only foreigner in Dangila.  Being the only ferengi in a town here certainly has its ups and downs. It almost seems like the easy way, having another person to always talk English to and share hardships with, but since most of us came to Ethiopia not knowing a soul, we want our own experiences.  Many volunteers prefer to have their towns to themselves, not having that constant comparison, not having children call them by the wrong name, and not feeling as if you each have your territory in town.

So two months ago, when a jica (Japanese international corporation association, aka Japanese Peace Corps) car rolled up outside my compound, I met the site development team with eagerness and skepticism.  Dangila is my town, just listen to the kids yelling my name, or ask the mayor, he’ll tell you.  But I’ve known jica for a while, enjoying getting to know the volunteers in neighboring towns, and I have always wondered why Dangila didn’t ever receive a volunteer.  In August, the staff members told me, we’d be receiving two!

Decision made for me, not that I ever thought the decision would be mine.  I had a month to ponder my new ferengi neighbors and decided that I would give them a chance, after all, I had had Dangila to myself for a long time.  Their week-long site visit finally came at the end of July, and after running into one of them on the street I invited the two volunteers and their counterparts to dinner at my house.  Funny story: I didn’t intend to invite four strangers to my house but somehow through broken communication it happened, so I did what any gracious hostess would do, bought a kilo of pasta and started planning my first dinner party.

When the dinner came, only the volunteer I met on the street, Taish, and his counterpart, were able to attend, so it was a good thing that I didn’t start preparing the food until they arrived! This is very Ethiopian I realize, to invite people over and then expect them to wait, and very Peace Corps to expect them to help with preparation, but I really like the idea now.  I made pasta and tomato sauce, as basic as it gets, but to my Japanese and Ethiopian guests it was foreign, and they agreed, delicious!  One interesting development that came from this dinner was that Taish was looking for a house, and it came up that there was a vacancy in my compound (my former house), so I suggested he ask the landlord for details.

Then there was a month of waiting for the jica members to return after training and officially move in.  It was set that Taish would move into my former house, which I was slightly uneasy about, but realized I should accept the new situation and stop being selfish.  And my reasons were just that, selfish; Taish is a perfectly nice person, and I really looked forward to having a new friend in town, but him living in my neighborhood, and in my compound, means that inevitably I will be replaced.  I am the ferengi in my part of town, and more than that, “Jennifer” even means ferengi to many people.  Will I be giving that up when Taish moves in? I thought.  Most volunteers have a difficult time thinking about the next volunteer coming to their town after they leave, and an almost painful feeling about that person just replacing his/her life and slipping into their role with his/her friends and neighbors.

Taish moved in, I finally met Moto, the second volunteer who is still searching for a house, and life hasn’t changed all that much.  I have really embraced the idea of having them in town, and I like getting to know Taish around the compound.  Just last night I had Taish over for dinner (which will likely happen a lot more considering he has no stove and eats mainly bread) and it’s great to talk to him about all the frustrations of life here. We talk in broken English, but through simple words and pantomimes we vented about children, food and funny cultural differences.  We each come from such different cultures ourselves, but we still find the same things odd here in Ethiopia, which is comforting to know!

Nostalgia is kicking in already as I savor each round of coffee and plate of injera.  I already know the next four months will fly by, and thinking about leaving and having a replacement already is sad.  It is nice to know Taish though and have someone here that will be easy to communicate with for the next couple years.  For now he is having to put up with all the comparisons about our Amharic and integration levels, but I have reassured him that in a couple years they’ll have forgotten me and be complimenting his excellence.  It’s a perpetual cycle, but something you deal with as a volunteer here, something I’ve come to terms with, but for the next four months it’s still my turf and I’m going to live it up.

Comparing Kenya

Arriving in Nairobi I had very few expectations for Kenya, but soon found myself caught up in a comparative state-of-mind which is ever so popular in Ethiopia.  I would see a street of vegetable stands and think to myself, that’s just like Ethiopia. And then I would see the smooth unbroken sidewalk and think, wow that’s something Ethiopia doesn’t have! But at the end of the day I realized how the two countries cannot be compared, mainly because ones reasons for visiting either Ethiopia or Kenya are vastly different.  In Ethiopia you would find castles, monasteries and rock-hewn churches, while in Kenya you’d find lions and beaches.  Each country offers unique opportunities that you’d be blessed to experience.

Day two in Kenya and we headed out on a safari ready to have one of those experiences Ethiopia doesn’t offer.  Since I had already been on a safari with my family last December in Tanzania I also had a bit of expectations in my mind for the safari, but tried my best to not compare the adventures.  One main reason comparing would be unfair here is because while my family treated me to a luxury safari, Chris and I were doing it as budget as they come.  So budget that we found ourselves in a car with five other tourists, one of which had lost a bet; That’s right, our safari was someone else’s torture.

After dropping our bags off at the campsite we got back in the car for our first game drive.  I cannot deny that I was a little under impressed when the first picture stop was made for wildebeests and zebras while everyone else snapped away, giddy as first-timers should be.  I found myself having thoughts of a safari snob, wondering how soon we’d get to see some real safari animals.  As we bounced our way along the dirt roads of the Masai Mara NR  I began to remember my first day on safari last December, which was probably less than a hundred miles south across the Tanzania border.  That first day, especially when you have a lucky game drive, is irreplaceable.  Seeing that sparkle in everyone’s eyes as National Geographic scenes unfolded in real life made me smile; I remembered that feeling too.

I opened my eyes anew as we pulled up to see eight lion cubs playing around in Mother Nature’s version of a playground.  I’d never seen anything like that before, it was like watching a bunch of toddlers, or puppies all piling on top of each other and teasing one another.  At that moment I was reassured that whether you pay for luxury or have to zip up your own tent at night, the animals are the same, and they are amazing (ask our bet-losing new friend and she will agree).  The first two hours, as we rushed to see all we could before sunset, were about as great as any two hours could be.  Four grown lions, eight cubs, eight elephants, two giraffes, buffaloes, zebras, wildebeests galore; a lucky day indeed!

 

The safari continued for a couple more days, as did our minibus’s fun, but by the end of it we were satisfied with the animal sightings and very ready for smooth pavement.  When the tires hit that first patch of asphalt our bodies didn’t even know how to react it was so serene.  Second safari down, and I have a feeling there will be more in my future. The majestic atmosphere of watching nature’s beasts in the wild is too addicting to call that my last safari.