Ferenge Addis Blog

Random culture shock tidbits

During my second week of being a foreigner in my former home-country, here are some random culture-shock-inducing snippets of my visit:

• doing my own laundry
• doing my own food shopping
• using a drive-up ATM
• forgetting my cash so buying a bicycle inner tube with a credit card ($6)
• buying everything with a credit card
• bicycling on empty, smog-free country roads
• opening my laptop and finding seven wifi netorks in range
• driving an entire day and not hearing a horn honking
• Youtube

"I feel sorry for you people..."

Since coming back to the US for a visit I've been experiencing various kinds of culture shock. I talked about it with a Kenyan colleague who works in North Carolina: he feels the same way when he goes back to Nairobi.

One of the culture shock items is lack of help to do things. For example, at the office, nobody brings tea. I left the tea cup on my desk, and the next morning it was still there! (And nobody had wiped off my desk either.) The first day I got back to the US I was in my mother's house alone. So I had to make myself dinner. This wasn't as bad as the next morning: the dinner dishes were still sitting on the counter. Bother! Tonight after dinner I couldn't get out of my friend's house, because she had it locked. (She didn't have any guards, so locking the house when inside was necessary.)

This all reminds me of the first time my Indian colleague Menakshi came to the US. When she was leaving I asked her some impressions. The first words out of her mouth were "I feel sorry for you people. You have to do everything yourselves. You don't have any help at all."

Sure, domestic help is expensive in the US and relatively cheap in Ethiopia. But why is it people will spend $1/2 million on a huge house for two people; or $50,000 on the latest SUV as big as a house trailer, but won't spend a few hundred bucks on someone to help with the housework? "You people" in the US are really hard to figure out in some ways.

We're number one!

I was this article in the New Your Times about how disconnected (from the internet and mobile phone networks) Africa is. Be sure to click the graphic on the left to see how, once again, Ethiopia is #1.

Retail is different

People have said they come here to read about how life in ADD is different than life in the place they're living. This is especially true for people who are thinking about visiting or even moving to ADD. Since spending some time back in the US, I've noticed how different the approach to retail is.

In the US there are HUGE stores, called "big-box" retail. They have names like Best Buy (consumer electronics), Target (everything), Home Depot (home improvement), and Safeway (groceries). These stores are each as big as a football field, with ceilings 10 meters high. Let's use Home Depot as our example of the differences in approach. Let's say we're trying to buy a bathroom sink (something I have actually done in Ethiopia). At Home Depot they have a giant plumbing/bathroom section. There will be roughly 30-50 sinks of every size, color, price, and quality. The selection is endless. There will be nobody there to help you pick one out, though, so good luck on your own.

Let's contrast this with sink-shopping in Addis. For that kind of thing you go to the Kasangis (spelling anyone?) neighborhood where there are lots and lots of very small plumbing shops. Each shop is about the size of a one-stall garage in the US. Each shop has roughly the same three bathroom sinks as the one next to it. There will be at least one person at each shop, ready to help you pick something out, or to answer all your questions. I don't understand how each little shop makes money. I don't understand how you pick on shop over another, other than by price.

On being anonymous

When a friend asked, over coffee at Kaldis, what I was looking forward to most about being in the US, I answered "being anonymous." I was looking forward with great longing to not hearing "ferenge!" or "moneymoneymoney!" or "you you you!"

I got my wish. Especially during this week in Traverse City, Michigan, I fit in like mad. It's a pretty white-bread town in the northern part of the state, and most people look pretty much like me. I walk around the crowded downtown streets and nobody even notices me. I sit and drink an espresso and I'm just one of thousands of tourists. I could do anything: stop, look at a map, fumble, fall down, and not only would 100 kids not point, laugh and start yelling, but nobody would even notice. Ahhhhh.

Internet costs: let's compare shall we?

Okay, you regular readers knew this was coming. I can't help myself. Internet costs compared:

US Cable Internet:
- Speed: 1.5 mbs
- Installation costs: $0.00
- Monthly Cost: $44.95
- Annual cost as a % of average annual wage in the country: 0.018%
- Reliabilty: In my experience, went out twice in one year, for about four hours each time.
- Application process: fill out one screen of information on the website
- Application duration: activated the next day

ETC Leased Line internet:
- Speed: 1 mbs (others available, starting at 64 kbs)
- Installation costs: $5,788 (not a typo)
- Monthly Cost: $2,639 (not a typo)
- Annual cost as a % of average annual wage in the country: 7930% (not a typo)
- Reliability: goes out at least once per day, sometimes for days at a time, sometimes slows to 1/100th of advertised speed.
- Application process/duration: fill out three forms, have your employer fill out two forms, go in person to the ETC office to drop off forms. Wait for several weeks at least. Remind ETC every week or so about your application. Keep waiting...

Continuing culture adjustments: Big

Still getting used to being in the US after a year. The initial impression is that everything is big here: big cars, big houses, big stores (think Best Buy, mega-supermarkets, Target, and CVS), big people (I'm in the Midwest where being overweight is the norm), big spaces, big parking lots, big restaurants, big lakes (I'm in MI). I never noticed it when living here was the norm, but everything is just plain big.

ADD-AMS-DTW-FNT

First impressions on being back in the USA after a year in ET: oh my god the cars are freaking HUGE here! You know those Land Cruisers that look so big in Addis? Pah! Nothing compared to the enormous, egregious behemoths that clog the streets here: Suburbans, Excursions, Escalades. OMG they're everywhere, each as big as a shipping container, each with its V-8 petrol engine, each one carrying one person.

First restaurant in the DTW airport: Starbucks for a tripple grande soy latte (135 degrees please) with two packets of the yellow stuff. First home-made meal? Veggie burgers on super-heavy whole wheat bread, Heinz ketchup, washed down with Silk brand vanilla soy milk. Oh, and water right out of the tap.

Where is Home?

As an expat this is not an idle question. Most expat contracts include a plane ticket "home" about once a year. Where people choose to go is ineresting. I recently had lunch with an American colleague whose parents moved away from the US many years ago and are living in Dubai. Her significant other (boyfriend) is in England. She doesn't really know where she'll go for home leave.

I was always surprised when adults of my age group would ask whether I was going "home" for the holidays. I answered "no, I am home; I'm going to visit my parents in Michigan."

When I relocated to Ethiopia I sold my house in North Carolina, so I don't really have a "home" there. But all my friends (who serve as my extended family) are still there, so it feels like home. Pretty much. My parents both live in Michigan, where I grew up, but I left on purpose in the 90's and Michigan doesn't feel like home. Of course my parents being there make it home-like when I visit.

So, at the age of 48, I'm going "home" to Dad's, then NC, then Mom's.

It's not just me (part 2)

I remember reading a self-assessment tool for finding out whether you might be obsessed with a topic. One of the main criteria is whether every situation keeps pointing back to one thing. I worry about this because so much of what is bad in Ethiopia, in my mind, keeps coming back to ETC. Greed=monopoly=bad service=lack of foreign direct investment=worse poverty... You get the idea. So it's nice to see so many other people talking about it.

Andrew Haven is a journalist who recently moved from Addis to Khartoum. He writes the very popular and balanced "Meskel Square" blog, although I don't know how long that name will stick now that he's moved. Meskel Square is the main referrer to this blog. Read this recent post from Sudan. Isn't it sad when we're ages behind Sudan in terms of development?