Taking a Walk
Back home, my mornings followed a prettty standard format: get up, hot shower, throw some food together, get in car, if inclined stop for takeaway coffee on the way, arrive at office.Here, my morning schedule always has an element of surprise, from animals on the street to the people I encounter. I set my alarm for 5:45, at which point I stagger into my bathroom in the dark, fumble for the plug to the water tank, and plug it in before collapsing back in bed for an hour. At 6:45 I get up and shower, which takes a varying amount of time since the water pressure can be practically nonexistent (at home my showers are 7 minutes flat almost every time.) Those of you who like to problemsolve will suggest that I just shower at night, which I would LOVE to do if the water didn't shut off every evening around 7:30 PM during the dry season.
I get everything together while addressing household issues--trash, windows, plants, my morning mass antkilling--pack up my 12-pound laptop (it's huge for design purposes) and head out the gate. I generally walk through back streets to my office, which are dusty, rocky paths winding between 6-foot-high concrete or stucco walls of compounds, hyacinth spilling over their jagged glass-studded tops. I have to watch my step carefully or I trip constantly on the uneven ground.
I always pass a few school children straggling in late (after 7:45 AM) in their navy and white uniforms, skipping along with their mother or father, the bold ones calling "Hello! How are you?" to me with pride in their spoken English. I wind my way through the cattle grazing stiff-kneed along the grassy embankment, where open sewers collect trash and often a small fire smolders, letting off acrid, plasticky smoke. I frequently pass the staring neighborhood unfortunate, a middle-aged man who is definitely very sick and probably very mentally ill and sleeps in the afternoons on the street near my house, passed out cold, in a puddle of sick. The other day he had lined up old Smirnoff bottles and had stuffed small pieces of fabric in the bottle tops, such that they eerily resembled Molotov cocktails.
The air smells like onions and eucalyptus smoke from the morning cooking and the sky is still clear, although a low-lying cloud of brown soon gathers over the small valleys that I can see from my hillside. I turn a corner onto my office road and face a large congregation of men working on the seemingly endless construction projects in the area. Instead of machines, everything is done by manual labor. Women carry stretchers full of dirt and rocks back and forth; men swarm over the structure with axes and handsaws, and hard hats are nowhere to be seen. I have to keep my head down at this point because to make eye contact is to invite a chorus of comments from the men (not unlike construction workers in the States.)
I walk by two shacks, set down in the ground for storage space, housing the Ethiopian equivalent of corner stores--the young man in the blue one always calls out, "Good morning, sister!" to me because I buy my water there. Sister is a respectful address, and is also the title used for nurses. I cross the road for the school and can hear the students outside chanting some kind of national anthem/prayer as last-minute parents drive up in taxis or cars to drop their kids off before work, and then I'm at the gates, which are manned 24/7 by two guards.
We conduct the morning greetings and I walk into my frigid, stone-floored office to start the day as colleagues stop by for the morning hello-and-how-are-you ritual. You must repeat it three times in a row for each person; they will keep asking you how you are, and you must return the favor, even though the answer is always the same. The impatient American in me is very uncomfortable with this. Amel tells me, somewhat facetiously, that it's because Ethiopians need reassurance that everything really is OK.
posted by Margot @ 1:24 AM
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