Civic Duty

I voted on Monday. I was really excited because I didn't think I would
be able to, since I don't really have an address. But, I was informed
by a fellow American that we could vote at the US Embassy. It was
fairly easy, despite the cheesy seven year old pictures of Bush,
Cheney and Condi staring down at us (Bush looked young, Cheney had his
classic smirk going).I had no idea who was running for any other
offices so I hope nobody good loses in Oakland by one vote, but we got
the important one done. No 'I voted' stickers though..

It is surprising to me how closely everyone follows the American
election here. It's one of the top stories in the news every night and
Ethiopians are definitely talking about it. One of the first people I
met, the taxi driver who took me to AHOPE, asked me about the election
as soon as he found out I was from the United States. It is a very
partisan Obama crowd. Everyone seems pretty sure that he will win, and
they are happy about that. You see Obama t-shirts, stickers and books
around. Not everyone is as clear on McCain, people tend to pronounce
his first and last name as if it were all one word: johnmccain.

I voted for Obama. I hope he wins, it will definitely make America
more popular in Ethiopia, and just like the rest of the world, we will
watching the results come in (on Wednesday).

Extra bonus note: I just picked up a shirt at the seamstress that
needed a new button, and she refused to take any money. People really
are pretty friendly here. I'd like to say I will take all my sewing
and patching needs to her, to earn the goodwill she bestowed upon me,
but I'm not sure I will have any. So I am advertising for her here
instead.

Blame and Innocence

A nine year old boy died. This is not normal. He contracted meningitis, not a common problem in Addis, but the children's compromised immune systems make them susceptible to a lot of uncommon diseases. His death was surely preventable. In most places if a person is diagnosed with meningitis it is routinely treated by a hospital. Just a couple of days before, he was as alive, and lively as any of the other kids. He was at school when it became clear that he was severely ill. The school called, and we went to pick him up, and he was at the hospital within an hour. He died two days later.

It is hard to say who is to blame for his death. Some say nobody is to blame, and terrible things happen. But I think there is a lot of blame to go around. It is easy to blame the hospital and the doctors, because better care might have helped him. Or, maybe if we had watched him closer at AHOPE we would have caught it sooner. But there are bigger issues as well, there seems to be a fatalistic aspect of the culture that is foreign to the Western idea of there always being something more one can do. Do we blame the underlying reasons of the systemic poverty that makes the living conditions in Ethiopia what they are. One thing is certain, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Fortunately this is not a common occurrence at AHOPE. Since the advent (belatedly in 2004) of anti-retroviral drugs their have been very few funerals. The future is wide open for these children, both good and bad.

Hometown Team

It seems like as good a time as ever to talk about a big part of my
life: Boston sports teams. Despite being 8000 miles away, I still have
an affinity for the Red Sox. You might think I have better things to
do than vicariously follow a sports team, but you would be mistaken.
And this seems like a particularly auspicious time to write about
them, as you may well know better than me.

Unfortunately I have not found a place to watch games on TV, and
though the satellite feed may well exist, most of the start times are
at around 3:00am for me. And, I really haven't even been able to
follow them that closely on the internet, just the occasional
boston.com article. However, despite this lack of traditional bo-sox
related media outlets, I have had some great sox related experiences
though I realize not everyone will relate. Currently there is a couple
adopting a child from Newburyport, and when the husband (Brett) was on
the phone with his mother the other night and I asked about the game,
I realized that they might not be the biggest fans.

One of my most prized moments is when I can occasionally catch a
highlight or two on the BBC or Aljazeera. While they spend the
majority of their Sport time on soccer (By the way, the stations are
broadcast out of Dubai, but I have been asked an inordinate amount of
times which English Premier League team I support), cricket,
car/motorcycle racing and the like, if I am really lucky there will be
a quick re-cap of a playoff game or two. But the best part is
listening to the Saudi sportscaster in a British accent say, "Dustin
Pedroia batted two runs and Boston won the match." The Nation.

Just on Thursday I had a Coming to America-esque experience at a
starbucks colored coffee shop. I was in the bathroom and I heard this
Ethiopian looking guy speaking perfect English to his little brother.
When I went to wash my hands I saw that he was wearing a Red Sox hat,
so I said something like "go sox", and we proceeded to have a ten
minute conversation about Mike Lowell's hip and the bullpen before
Papelbon etc. It turned out that he was born in Ethiopia but he grew
up in Boston and was here visiting family. We walked out of the
bathroom both happy to have had some to the hometown team.

Go Sox

Strategic Internet

I never have considered myself much of a computer person. Computers
never seemed to like me very much, and I was always pretty indifferent
about them. But recently there had been an uneasy truce. I've been
unemployed and had time to procrastinate with the internet instead of
study for the GREs. Scrabulous! However, in Ethiopia it has been a
whole different story.

There is an internet cafe very close to me, and it is very reasonably
priced, about 2 cents per minute. The guy running it is friendly and
helpful, etc. However there are a couple of issues. First it can be
very slow. Though the real problem is that the speed is very
unreliable, sometimes very very slow, sometimes quite adequate. So you
never know what you are going to get. I've taken to going after lunch
when no one else is there which seems to help. However, my best
strategy is my patented multi-tab approach. This tactic involves
opening up something I want to read first. Then, after it has loaded,
opening up something else I want to do in another tab, so that it can
load while I am reading the Times (or whatever). The trick is always
have something else loading so that you won't be left sitting there
staring at the screen. It gets tricky when writing an email, and you
mean it to be short, but your second page hasn't finished loading, so
you try to write some more. Or vice versa, and you have to cut it off
to keep everything moving (some of you may have noticed my reply
length can vary tremendously). However this is all expected, I am (as
the Ethiopian say) in Africa after all.

What is causing me to make offerings to the computer gods is when
particular pages or even email addresses decide to not work. Sometimes
I restart, sometimes I just give up. I have switched browsers five to
six times (do you all know about Opera?). This very blog is not a
favorite of the Ethiopian Computer Gods (ECGs). It won't work at all
unless I get my friendly internet cafe owner to set up a special
connection, and sometimes it doesn't work even then. (I hope you
realize the effort I am making to make this happen). The most
mystifying and supernatural (definitely not natural) example is when I
tried to email my good friend Max McMahon; no matter what I tried (I
tried every browser, four different computers, etc) I could not send
him and email. I could send other people emails from the same account.
I could do anything else on the internet. I couldn't send him an email
from either of my email accounts to either of his email accounts. It
was crazy. I must of offended the spirit of the ECGs that day, but I'm
not even sure what I did or how I can appease them.

I am really not having too many cultural communication problems,
except with the computer culture. Computers are magical and I am no
wizard.

I will update this blog as often as I can (and I mean as often as 'I can').

Cell Phones

As you can you can imagine cell phones are as ubiquitous here as they are in America. A co-worker of mine changes his ringtone every morning! No matter how far you travel things are still the same. The particular point I would like to make is about the volume of cell phone conversations.

If you've ever complained (or felt like confiscating a abusers phone) about a person seemingly yelling into his (or her, but it seems more his) phone, feel better because you are not alone. It is clear that there are no cultural barriers to this phenomenon. In fact I might argue that the Amharic, Tigrenia or the 20 other languages yelled into a cell phone here can compete with even your champion phone shouters back home (I'm looking at you David).

 You can blame it on poor infrastructure, lack of personal space or whatever, but whoever invents a cell phone zapper that can disconnect offending parties, or a phone that cures excessively voluble speakers will be a happy millionaire (USD not birr).

Ethiopian Drivers

I have travelled a fair amount in the developing world, and despite the many amazing experiences, one thing I have not been impressed by is the traffic safety displayed your average taxi or tuk-tuk driver. As many of you know (probably all of you know), I grew up in Massachusetts, home to the worlds best drivers, so perhaps my expectations may be atrificially high. So, when I headed to Ethiopia I expected disregard for traffic laws and pedestrians on par your typical grand theft auto enthusiast.

I am shocked to relay that despite warnings of the opposite from well intentioned locals the driving is generally exemplary. Taxi drivers do not aim at pedestrians. People use turn signals with a regularity that would put Californians to shame. The horn is used generously, but most of the time it is a friendly warning, rather than an aggressive threat. There is a crossing at Meskel Square (pictured above) with more than 12 lanes of traffic, and only (I am told, I didn't even see it) one, tiny traffic light. I peered across this superhighway with trepidation about whether I would make it to across to Bole and an elderly Ethiopian couple proceeded to walk right by me into the abyss without fear..

I have even seen an organized line of drivers waiting to turn left, there was a red arrow.. but no one was coming from the opposite direction! No one was coming! the road was empty!

I am struggling with how to explain all of this. There does not appear to be any authoritarian secret traffic police force dragging offenders out of their motor vehicles and beating them. There aren't really a lot of cars (at least by American standards), so maybe this cuts down on road rage, but that also means not a lot of practice. People are very friendly in general (I know this is a trite) so maybe that explains why pedestrians are treated like people (though this doesn't seem to hold true for other parts of the world). Perhaps it is the religiosity of the populace, but I haven't heard about any Christian Fatwas about good driving..

I am baffled. I will continue to explore the mystifying cause for this strange behavior and will update this blog with any new information as it becomes available.