A Traditional Bobby Orr's Birthday Celebration in Addis

Last Friday we received a large shipment of Christmas presents for the members of the team here in Addis and Sudan. Unfortunately the gifts were for Christmas 2005. You see every year a charitable organization coordinates the delivery of Christmas gifts to the members of our team deployed here. Usually they arrive in time for the festive season. Last year a snafu occurred and the packages were sent to Senegal by mistake. Also, at the time when the packages were sent there were many more people doing this job than there are now. As a result our 12-person team received enough Christmas cheer for 70 people.

We had a problem on our hands in that we had no holiday to celebrate. So checking my historical calendar of Canadian celebrities I discovered that October 27th is Bobby Orr’s birthday. What could be more Canadian, we asked ourselves, than to celebrate the great defenceman’s birth here in Addis. So we distributed our packages (we each got two) and opened the boxes eagerly. Inside were all sorts of goodies. The Pringles chips were 8 days short of their expiry date, but since they are mostly made from petroleum by products, no one was concerned. The cookies were a tad stale, but the Gummy Worms were in mint condition. I am sure in a million years they will still be digging up containers of Gummy Worms in mint condition. A big hit was the fleece jacket included with the gifts. You had to hunt around to find one your size, one of our smaller members got an 80-58 (i.e. for someone 80 inches tall with a 58 chest) that could have covered one of our SUVs nicely.

Of course after the present opening we carried on to the other traditional Bobby Orr Day activities: we blacked out our front teeth and hit each other on the knees with sticks. We also distributed packages to our staff and will give the remainder to the church down the road. They have been building the church by hand for about ten years, and could no doubt use the gifts to raise funds or for the parish’s homeless.

So Happy Bobby Orr Day to all, and to all best wishes to keep your stick on the ice!

Party like it's 1999, because it is!

This entry is a little late but I thought I’d share it with you anyway. You see Ethiopia, besides being the only African country not colonized by the Europeans in the 19th century, also has its own church, the Ethiopian Orthodox faith, and its own calendar. There are thirteen months in a year (the thirteenth has 5 days; 6 in a leap year) and New Years Day is 11 September. Having their own calendar they also never switched to the Gregorian one we use and so are 7 years behind us. Thus it was that we were able to celebrate 1999 all over again.

The Sheraton Hotel in hosts a very big party rumoured to cost its owner $10 million every year - a bit obscene in a country as poor as Ethiopia, but the owner, the Sheik, also gives many millions to charities here every year. We all bought tickets and headed to the hotel to see what was in store. There were seven or eight bands on the bill; all but two were Ethiopian acts. The first non-Ethiopian was Pap Smurf and his Blues band. He is an American from Washington DC who moved to Addis about 20 years ago and has become a fixture on the jazz scene here. The other act, and the main draw for those so inclined, was Ja Rule, the rapper. Now I don’t know if you ever saw the episode of Happy Days where Fonzie jumps the shark (it was in one of the last seasons). Well since then the term “jumping the shark” has come to mean hitting the bottom of the barrel. Well I think old Ja was in mid-flight over a Great White, when he came down in Addis.

The room was packed and the sounds of Ethiopian music filled the air. If you have never heard Ethiopian music it is very danceable but as none of us understood the lyrics the songs all begin to sound the same. Apparently two of the acts that night were the Celine Dion and Gordon Lightfoot of Ethiopian music. They had been lured back to Addis from the States where they both now live, with pots of cash.

There was an all-you-could-eat Ethiopian buffet with all the favourite dishes including sides of raw beef – kitfo is the name of that particular delicacy. There were also all manner of liquid beverages to entertain the palate and cloud the mind. When the press of the crowd became a little too much most of our group migrate to the back of the room, which held the 6000 or so guests. At midnight a 40-minute fireworks display burst over the hotel that was quite spectacular. We made our way home about one-ish and rose the next day to attend a New Year’s luncheon hosted by the mother of one of our drivers. That made it three days in a row of Ethiopian food; I now am an expert. Tamrat, our driver’s, mother had worked for the Canadian Embassy in Addis for 35 years and is fluently tri-lingual (Amharic, English and French). Two of her daughters live in Canada, in Toronto and St Catherines, though Tamrat was educated in East Germany and the Soviet Union and so speaks no French, but German and Russian.

We ended our New Year’s celebration and went home to rest. Next year is the year 2000 in Ethiopia so they are already talking about how the Julian Millennium will be welcomed. I wonder if anyone will resurrect the Y2K scare?

At the Post Office

I had a little adventure a couple of weeks ago that I’d like to relate to you. I did not know it at the time but I was the first in our group, which has been here, in one form or another, for about two years, to try and mail a package back to Canada. Now as a practised sender of Strong Bad paraphernalia, books, maps and telephones through the Canadian mail system, I approached the Ethiopian equivalent in a nonchalant and confident manner. Boxing up my gifts I double wrapped them in brown paper, taped the box up to survive the depredations of the most ham-handed postie, and labelled it ferociously. Secure in the knowledge that all I had to do was get the box weighed, affix the proper postage and it would soon be winging its way west, I headed to the baroque palace that is the Addis Ababa Main Post Office.

My first clue that I was entering the postal equivalent of the twilight zone was the queue of people holding various flotsam and jetsam in their arms waiting to be yelled at by a small woman behind a counter. Having neither flotsam nor jetsam, and not really wanting to be yelled at by the Ethiopian equivalent of Dr Ruth, I searched for the line up of smug self-satisfied package mailers. Alas, to no avail. With growing dread I realized that I was meant to line up with the other poor souls, and as I approached the counter a further fact struck me – they want to look inside the box! Now my efforts to hermetically seal the box came back to haunt me as I tried to preserve the wrapping (not a chance) and labels (partially) while getting the box ready for inspection. I had just got it open when I got to the counter and confronted the dragon lady. A shrewd opponent she noted that I was not Ethiopian, well spotted, and used what I was later to discover was one-third of her English vocabulary on me; “What!” she barked, which I took to be a request to see what it was I was impudently attempting to mail out of Ethiopia. I produced the meagre contents of the box: a couple of bear-shark T-shirts, souvenir figurines, a straw basket and a birthday card. She examined them and evidently found them worthy of exit. “Where?” was the next query, to which I hesitantly replied “In the box?” This confused her but a moment as she then repeated her query while pointing at a very old map of the world. Passing up the opportunity to send my box to such exotic locales as the Bechuanaland Protectorate or The Low Countries, I pointed in the general direction of Rupert’s Land and said “Canada?” This seemed to satisfy her curiosity as she then began to consult the “Great Big Book of Postal Rates” which teetered on her counter. I was now left with the task of reassembling my package. Not being prepared for this eventuality I had not brought my tape nor my scissors. One of my fellow benighted ones helpfully pointed out the Post Office Shop nearby, to which I trotted, abandoning my spot in line. It was at this point that the great conspiracy that is the Ethiopian Post Office came to light. You see once they have got you to rip open your box, you have little choice, if you are a dopey ferengi that is, but to purchase vastly overpriced shipping materials in Costco-like quantities. So armed with 8 rolls of tape and 4 pairs of scissors I reassembled my package and rejoined the line.

When I got back to the counter with my box, I proceeded to the next step – weighing the package. I now regretted adding 2 kilos of tape to secure the box as the cost to ship it was 280 Birr, which is about $40. Lastly the counter lady applied three different rubber stamps liberally to every surface of the box. I think she was actually just trying to paint the box blue, and she almost succeeded. So, safe in the knowledge that it couldn’t get any more complicated or bureaucratic, I left the post office in time to see my box being strapped to a donkey for the trip to Canada, and a clumsy donkey at that. But if you have been reading this blog you know that….donkeys don’t stop, so my package arrived safely at its destination a mere 17 days later.

Ribs the Dog

This is a bit of sad tale, so those of you with low tear thresholds proceed at your own risk. About three weeks ago a scruffy black and white dog began hanging around the front gate at Canada House. She would scrounge for food scraps and after we paid her some attention our cook's assistant would give her leftovers. She was rail thin, so we called her "Ribs" as you could see all of hers through her fur. Well about a week later Ribs proceeded to give birth to ten puppies on our doorstep. One of the neighbor's rigged up a bit of den in the hedge next to the house and the puppies were set up. Well, if you thought we were feeding her before she became a Mom, you should have seen the food she got afterwards. Ribs took to camping out right in front of the gate and the guards helped her by chasing away the hyenas, yes I did say hyenas, from the den. As an aside, these aren't the goofy Whoopi-Goldberg-voiced hyenas of Lion King fame, no gentle reader hyenas are very aggressive hunters. The females are much bigger than the males and can get as big as a small donkey.

Anyway, Ribs and the puppies seemed to be getting along just fine when we noticed that Mom started acting lethargic and unresponsive. A couple of days later (this past Thursday night) one of our group found her in the bushes, very near death. The hyenas got her that night and we have inheirited eight two week old puppies (two were adopted by neighbor's). We fed them on Friday and Saturday and then decided to move the den into our compound to keep the predators away. We washed them and tried to remove as many flea and louse eggs as possible before setting them up in a plastic and rug based den in the back yard. They were a little traumatized by the move, but seem to have adapted. One seems to be convinced that my shoe is its mother.

Fortunately we have found a shelter in town, I did not think Addis would have such a thing given the hundreds of stray dogs we have seen, and in a week they will be old enough to be taken in by the NGO that runs it. We have also been trying to interest our colleagues in adopting the pups, whom we have also named after bones, in honour of their mother. So little Tibia, Fibula, Radius, Ulna, Scapula, Femur, Patella and Humerous are doing fine for now. One of our group is lobbying his family back in New Brunswick to allow him to bring one home. Anyone want a puppy?

Lucy, You got some 'splainin' to do!

We went to see the Natural History Museum in Addis this past weekend and saw the bones of Lucy, the oldest human. They are 2.5 Million years old and are grouped with other remains of similar age found in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia. Famous as she is, Lucy would not have been on the Australopithicus First Squad basketball team, as she was only 3 ft tall, but it was impressive nonetheless, to see her remains. They are not the real bones, of course, they are plaster casts. The real bones are stored away in climate controlled conditions, or so the sign said. We also got to see Emperor Haile Selassie's incredibly huge throne. You could easliy have seated five emperors in sort regal slumber party on that huge velvet bench. The throne for the Empress was much smaller, in comparison, but was much more heavily gold encrusted.

The museum also housed the crowns of the last five emperors. They must have done a lot of neck exercises as those things looked very heavy! Upstairs in the museum were housed many artifacts of life in ancient Ethiopia and some rather impressive art. Some of it was right out of the Joseph Stalin School for Government Artists as it was from the Derg era. Lots of heroic looking Ethiopians gaining control of the means of production while smashing the capitalist running dog type stuff. Outside they had one of the cannons used to defeat the Italian Army at Adowa in 1896, the only time and African army beat a European colonizing force, and the source of much native pride.

After our visit to the museum we went into the tukul (thatched roof hut) that housed the museum's cafe and had a coffee ceremony while watching a track and field meet on the television. Another good Sunday outing.

Dog Tales and Cat Tongues

Addis is not a city for dog lovers. There really are no, or very few, dogs kept as pets, so all the dogs you see are strays or feral. They roam around in packs and scavenge for survival. We have a neighbourhood pooch, a sort of golden mutt-triever that seems to do all right in the survival department. I think some people leave bones out for the dog as I saw it gnawing on a cow skull a few days ago (at least I hope someone left it out for the dog). The best time to see the dog social dynamic is in the early morning. I have had to go out to the airport often in the early morning to pick up arriving colleagues. It is then that you see these diverse groups of dogs wandering the streets in search of food. There are very mixed groups with huge Rottweiller-VW crosses chumming about with tiny terriers. Sort of “Lady and the Tramp” meets “The Warriors.” Of course an inevitable by-product of lots of dogs running the streets, and drivers who follow no traffic laws, is road kill. Every morning for a week, about a month ago, I saw a dead dog lying on the side of the road on the way to work. They were cleaned up pretty fast though. All in all it’s probably a rough life for a dog in Addis, not as rough as a donkey’s life, but still rough. You don’t see many cats in Addis, by the way. I saw more of them in Darfur, but they were skeletal and very people shy. They did speak the international language of food, though. There is a certain sound you can make, sort a whistle, which in my experience will attract the attention any cat within 20m, which is unfortunate as I am alergic to cats. My theory is that the noise is the sound of food, to a cat. Italian cats are immune to this sound, however, for reasons unknown.

Into Darfur

I left for my visit to Darfur on Sunday morning. The flight was problem free and I sailed through customs and immigration. HOT! It was hotter than a gas barbecue wearing a fleece! After Addis’ rain and cool temperatures walking out of the Khartoum airport felt like walking into a blast furnace. It doesn’t get much cooler at night either, staying around 30°C until early morning when it cools a bit. The highest temperature recorded recently by the Canadians here was 54°C. Khartoum’s infrastructure is in much better shape than that of Addis, I guess all that oil money that is starting to flow is bringing some improvements. Traffic is still chaotic, but apparently it is a very safe city in which to live. I met our team in Khartoum and the people with whom they work. Changed some money, got ripped off changing money, and tried as much as possible to stay in an air-conditioned environment. I had dinner at a very good Indian restaurant with some other Canadians working in Khartoum.

My flight to El Fashir was scheduled for 8:00 AM, which meant checking-in at 6:00 AM. It was little chaotic and I had to make some last minute baggage adjustments to meet the 20-kilo limit. I was bringing some Tim Horton’s coffee to the team in El Fashir, but that had to be left behind, along with a few other heavy items. We loaded the bags into two Toyota pickups for the 5-minute drive to the aircraft. We followed in a minivan. As we drove along it became clear that one of the bags was going to fall off the pickup truck. Our driver started honking, but everyone honks. We three in the back row of the van started a quick pool to see how long it would take for the bag to fall off the truck. I started my stopwatch and the game was on! The winning guess was 3 minutes 50 seconds. Fortunately it was a hard sided Pelican-type bag and suffered no ill effects. The flight to El Fashir was in a Dash-8, so it was just like flying from Toronto to Kingston, except the flight attendant had a moustache, spoke only Arabic, and we passed over much more desert than we would have along the north shore of Lake Ontario.

It was actually not as hot in El Fashir as it was in Khartoum and I soon driving into the town to get some bread for the day. Most of the permanent buildings in the town are constructed of unfired clay brick, which means they eventually crumble in the rain if not covered by stucco. The bakery was a hole in the side of a wall with an oven and some racks for bread. It was very fresh and smelled wonderful; we bought some Kaiser rolls, though I imagine they have a different name here. I met most of the African and European staff working in El Fashir before lunch, which was meat stew over rice, and then had some more meetings to discuss some projects ideas I had brought from Addis. There is a curfew in El Fashir that starts at 6:00 PM so everyone must clear out or be stuck at work all night. That evening I moved into my tent, air conditioned, and had a dinner of tortellini with tuna cooked on a hotplate. At about 7:00 PM a dust storm swept over the area. It looked like a large red wall moving across the desert to engulf the town. Very fine particles of dust filled the air; you could feel them on your teeth. The storm lasted about 2-hours and a left thin coating of red dust on every surface. Our satellite dish was being stroppy so I retired to my tent and read. I had picked up a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird from a pile of paperbacks in the corner of the TV room, and as I have never read this classic, nor seen the famous movie, I thought I’d broaden my cultural base a little. Yes, dear blogee, I am actually reading a novel!

During the night I was awoken by the sound of rain on my tent. I had come 1500 km from rainy Addis and the rain had caught up with me! It rained on and off through the night and was still drizzling in the morning. Apparently this was the first rain in months, and indicated that the rainy season in Darfur was moving north. On our drive to work we saw seven or eight horse-drawn water carts engaged in what appeared to be the El Fashir Derby. The horses were galloping for all they were worth dragging a cart carrying two 200-litre drums welded together. We discovered they were heading for their morning fill up at the water site and then would head off to sell the water in the town. I guess the race was to get to the pumps before the competition, or perhaps just a bit of high spirits. All along the way we passed many children on their way to school, all in uniforms of one sort or another. One girls’ school seems to have chosen, for its uniforms, dresses in the blue camouflage pattern favoured by the Government of Sudan police. Perhaps the truant officers are more reluctant to tangle with them when they are dressed that way?

After more meetings that day the Canadian representative on the team, the guy I was visiting, took me down to the market in El Fashir. The town has grown and is continuing to grow as a result of the presence of the headquarters of the African Union Mission in Sudan on the edge of town. There are a few hundred people there and there has been a spike of growth. An entire new section of the town has grown up, called by some “El Fashir Heights” where houses have been built to accommodate newcomers. The market was very busy but less chaotic than the Mercato in Addis Ababa. There was a wide variety of fruit and vegetables for sale as well as many open-air butcher shops selling mutton and goat. I bought some oranges, ten for $2 US, which is fairly expensive (how much do oranges cost in Canada anyway?). In general the cost of living in Sudan is higher than that in Ethiopia. A gentleman approached us in the market and informed us that he had worked for Talisman Oil in the south for many years. He also offered to exchange our US dollars at the black market rate - we declined the offer. We also discovered that although Sudan is a Muslim country, there is still alcohol to be had. We were offered a case of Heineken for $55 US, or mini plastic sip sacks containing a shot of “Johnny Walter Red” whose only relation to Scotch was the tape holding the bags together. I declined both offers. The next morning I went to Nyala to have another meeting (meetings bloody meetings!). Nyala is much bigger than El Fashir, though the latter is the capital of the old Darfur province. It also is greener and has many restaurants and shops. El Fashir has one restaurant: the Roast House. I returned to El Fashir in time to catch my flight back to Khartoum and my visit to Darfur was over. I will likely be back in the fall. Sorry if this particular post seems to have a lot to do with food, but besides work, there is not much to do in El Fashir, or Khartoum, for that matter.

Bishangari Photos 2

Three photos from our Bishangari visit. The first is the sunset over Lake Langano. The lake is the colour of strong cup of tea, but is the only one in the area free from parasites, always a good thing. It is also quite warm and full of tilapia, so if any of you order that type of fish in a restaurant and it has a size 13 footprint on it, don't send it back, that's the one I stepped on. The second photo demonstrates Ethiopian ingenuity and recycling as it shows the sea container used as a bridge on the road to Bishangari. Makes for great security as the bridge is locked up every night. The last photo is one of the baboons in a fig tree next to the tree bar. He looks like he is about to host the baboon version of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."