Ferenge Addis Blog

Asleep at the censorship switch

In the early 2000's, Ethiopian cell phones had SMS (text messaging) just like every other country on the planet. During the 2005 elections, 0pposition groups used SMS to call rallies and spread the word about their candidates and the ruling party. Suddenly SMS disappeared "due to technical difficulties" which have yet to be solved two years later. When some bloggers posted writing unflattering to the government, the entire Blogspot domain disappeared "due to technical difficulties." When someone discovered that Skype was being used to circumvent the government monopoly on telephone revenue, Skype suddenly became unavailable "due to technical difficulties."

Yesterday someone was asleep at the censor-ship switch: for a few brief hours, Skype worked and Blogspot was unblocked. All the afore-mentioned "technical difficulties" have returned this morning, but for a few brief hours you could just get a peek at what unfettered communication looked like. Did anyone try to SMS?

Drive-in coffee shops

Today I was strolling around the business district at the end of Bole Rd (by the Bole-Mini burger joint), trying to decide what I wanted for lunch, if anything. While dodging the lake-sized mud puddles I saw an empty table at Red Bean coffee shop and sat down and ordered a latte. While I was there I noticed someone with chocolate cake that looked good, so I had some. Then I saw someone at another table who had some nice crispy fries, so I had some of those, too. Isn't it nice being an adult? Nobody can tell you that you can't have junk food for lunch.

While I was there I noticed an example of a funny practice that I see everywhere around the city: people sitting in their cars, and the wait staff bringing them coffee on a tray. In front of every cafe, especially Kaldi's, Antica, Paradise, and the like, there will be empty tables yet people in the parking lot, four or more to a car, getting car-side service. This immediately took me back to going to A&W as a kid and getting car-side service. I had a high school girlfriend who worked there. Their official job title was "curb hostess."

What I can't figure is why people would prefer to sit in their cars than at a nice table on a sunny verandah. They're in plain site, so it's not like they're making out in there (the drive-in movie motivation). People must really like their cars.

Bird on a wire (more about electricity)

On Monday the electricity was out for several hours. When I got home from the gym to my dark house, I just busied myself gathering up all the candles, lighting them all, and distributing them in strategic places around the house. Luckily I had a full laptop battery, plenty of gas in the stove tank, and a working phone line for the modem.

Power goes out a lot, but usually only for a few minutes or an hour or so. For it to be out for so long was unusual, so Getnet called around to see what was what. He was informed by the electric company (GOE) that a bird had landed on a wire, broke it, and so our entire neighborhood was without power. No kidding.

Useful factoid: a laptop screen, displaying an all-white page, set at maxium brightness, sheds a lot of light.

Q: how many candles do you need to read a book printed in average type size? (Answer tomorrow)

Animals in our lives

As I've posted before, there aren't many pets in Ethiopian homes. Dogs are allowed inside the compound walls, and cats are tolerated only because they kill vermin. Most Ethiopians understand that pets-as-family-members is another part of Ferenge quirkiness, and accept it, while shaking their heads.

A recent manifestation of the pets as family members ethic is dogs at weddings. The October before I left the US I attended a wedding where the couple's dog was in attendance. A friend and colleague recently got married, and her dog, Gracie, was part of the day, if not part of the ceremony.

Lost in translation: home office/local office collaboration

Spending time in a busy US office after being in Ethiopia for a year was a major adjustment. In the US there's just too much stuff, and it's all moving really really fast. Things happen at broadband, wired, cross-networked, 1.5 gb speed. Meetings are scheduled via networked calendars back-to-back-to-back. Conversations happen in shorthand rapid-speak while passing in the hallway. People don't know each other personally. People seem to stagger out of work punch-drunk with the non-stop meetings and deadlines.

In Ethiopia, people work just as hard, but it's different. As I've written in earlier posts, things happen that are way out of people's control: the electricity goes out, the internet goes down, phone service goes out, Bole Rd. is closed for an hour because the Prime Minister is going for a plane ride, the government clients show up two hours late for a necessary meeting. So all meetings, and sometimes deadlines, are tentative. There is just so much out of everyone's control that there is no place for the expectations of immediacy and super-efficiency.

When these two worlds collide it's often unpleasant. From the viewpoint of someone who works at the home office in the US, field office staff can seem slow, unresponsive, or even inattentive, and lacking any sense of urgency. For Ethiopians, US-based colleagues can seem demanding, brusque, and unreasonable in their expectations. It's good when US-based folks can come to visit our offices. It's good when Ethiopians can visit the home office for a while. At least it takes away the "jerk factor." Having walked at least 1/2 mile in the other person's shoes makes one less likely to ask "what's wrong with those jerks?"

Living in Ethiopia: entitlement slips away

It's been about a year now that I've lived in Ethiopia full-time. It's been interesting to compare my attitude about how things should be with that of visiting US colleagues. Without realizing it I've really adapted to the difference in the availability of services and the way of doing things in Ethiopia. I think this is natural for anyone who lives here for a while.

I've told a few people that living in a developing country is a good way to let go of attachment to how things should be. For example, of the five services: electricity, water, internet, land-line phone, and mobile phone, it's very rare that all five are working at the same time. In the office the electricity goes out several times a day, as it does at home. At work this means the internet servers need to be re-booted, which few people know how to do. So we have internet (slow, clunky, internet) intermittently. Especially 20-something visitors who have grown up on ubiquitous wireless broadband become distressed when services disappear. The rest of us just work off-line until things come back, which they always do eventually.

And your internal attitude adjusts completely. I remember one of my first weekends here when the power was out and it was inconvenient and I had an embarrassing public melt down. This morning I woke up late and was really grateful that there was still electricity so I could make coffee. (Sunup on Sunday mornings is often when they take the electricity grid off-line for maintenance.) When the electricity went off at 7:45 I was happy that I had lots of battery left in my laptop.

HIV/AIDS, gender, and money

I attended a two-day meeting last week where, among other things, people presented some HIV/AIDS statistics. These were interesting to me:

• HIV/AIDS prevalence is slightly higher in women: they account for almost 60% of infections.
• When antiretroviral treatment was not free (was fee-based), men made up 80% of those getting treatment.
• Now that ART treatments is free, women account for about 60% of those getting treatment (about the same as the prevalence numbers).

What conclusions do we draw from these simple statistics?

Addis expat socializing, Part II: the Ferenge Network, the Mommy Mafia, and the many acquaintances

Ethiopia draws a lot of interest from the development industry. Both USAID and GTZ (German development association) have their largest missions in Addis. So there is a fairly large Ferenge population. They/We tend to gather at the same coffee shops and restaurants: Lime Tree on Bole Rd., Castelli's in Piazza, Serenade up by amest kilo, the riding stables on Sunday mornings. Because we're all in the same boat people tend to be fairly open to making and receiving invitations for social activity. It's easy to get included on the bike-ride e-mail list. You can always find someone to go for coffee on Sunday afternoon. Social groups tend to group by language, e.g., the first party I went to here was attended by Americans, Brits, and Canadians. This is not always the case. We spoiled Americans enjoy the fact that most expats speak English pretty well, no matter where they're from.

One quick connection maker is the Mom network. As soon as someone with young children moves in, or even before they move, they get plugged in, via e-mail, to the play-group network. Mothers and others (the occasional stay-at-home dad) gather to let the kids play, and to drink wine and talk. Sometimes moms bring the Nannies so they can converse more easily. Sometimes the Nannies come without the moms. Anyway, these play group connections also become non-kid social connections, for dinner or whatever.

The itinerant nature of people's postings here (most are two years) keeps relationships somewhat less deep than they might be otherwise. For people who like to have lots of acquaintances this is an ideal situation. For those who prefer a couple of deep friendships, it's not.

Socializing in Addis, Part I

Before I moved to Addis I asked another expat who lived here who she socialized with from her office. Her reply was shocking: "Nobody. I hang out with other expats. I tried, but nobody would accept or return my invitations." I didn't say much, and chalked it up to her US-centric nature. Besides, she knew she was only there for a while so probably didn't try, right?

Then it happened to me. When I asked Ethiopians to lunch they looked at me quizzically, as if to ask why. I got excuses like "Um. No. I, um, have something else to do." The two people who I cornered into lunch never reciprocated an invitation and had an excuse ready the next time I asked. I've invited Ethiopians to my house several times and had one person accept, one time, and it's never been reciprocated. I do have two Ethiopian friends I socialize with, but only two. It would be easy to chalk this scarcity of socialibility up to my personality, to say "Geeze, Marc, you're just a dork; get a clue and move on."

So I asked around expats I talked to. I got the same story from every single person. Every single one. While making me feel personally better, it made me wonder about the reasons. Language? Most Ferenges don't speak Amharic very well if at all. (The two Ethiopians with whom I socialize speak English exceptionally well, which lends credence to this theory.) Maybe it's the short-term nature of expat assignments? Why make friends with someone who's just going to leave in a year or two. Culture? Maybe Europeans and Americans miss subtleties that cause us to give unknown and unintended offense. Prejudice? Of course there's a small contingent of "Ferenge go home" types here (see some of the comments on this blog) but most Ethiopians are accepting and kind, just not sociable.

Any ideas?

Next post: Socializing Part II: the expat network, the mommy mafia, and the language-centricity.

The adoption question: our informal poll

Given the question at the end of the last posting, a couple of friends and I started taking an informal poll: people we work with, people we're having lunch with, people that work for us. All will say, immediately, that it's much better that the children don't have to live their lives in an orphanage. The people we talked to seem to recognize that the kids will be loved and have a materially-secure future in Spain or Germany or wherever. But you can see in people's faces that there's something else. With some probing, you get uncomfortable musings: with what culture will the children identify? Will they be Ethiopian or Canadian? Will they be accepted by either culture? So our super-non-scientific and informal poll seems to answer the "is this a good thing?" question with a resounding, Yes! but...

BTW, we also found out that Spain adopts more Ethiopian children than any other country by far. Why Spain?