Where Chester Lives

This is our last full day in Ethiopia.  I’m thinking of a Grateful Dead song right now…can you name it?

So, yesterday we drove back from Awassa to Addis Ababa.  I didn’t really explain the sights and sounds of the drive very well the first time, so I will do that now.  The road between the two cities is dotted with villages along the way, and between the villages are vast areas of countryside.  Anywhere along the road you will find mud and grass huts, dwelling places, fenced with grass or cactus.  During the drive, you are competing for road space with other vehicles, pedestrians, cattle, goats, and carts pulled by donkeys or small horses.  Usually donkeys.  The carts are just a makeshift platform with a car axle on the bottom.  The wheels are either small car wheels or solid metal wheels that have been made by the owner, I suspect.  Carts can be carrying grain, hay, wood, people, or any combination thereof.  The competition is more intense in the villages and towns.  As you drive along this road, you use your horn and lights to communicate with people, livestock, and other cars.  It isn’t rude, it’s totally expected behavior.  If someone in front of you is going to slow, you pass them.  It’s like a 270 km game of chicken with integrated obstacle course.  At any place along the road there will be places to buy vegetables or fruit.  Or charcoal.  Or small hand axes.  Or chickens.  It’s an event, let me tell ya, and you had better be an aware and slightly aggressive driver to survive.

On our way back, we stopped at Lake Lagano.  Yay!!  More Pictures!  You’ll see in the pictures that the water is a muddy brown.  So are all the rivers and streams that I see.  I don’t know if that’s pollution or a natural phenomenon.  Shimeles asked me, “So, when I watch television, the water I see there is blue.  How do they make it blue?”  I told him it usually comes that way in my experience, and tried to describe Lake Tahoe.  He then asked me why the water at Lake Lagano was brown…I couldn’t answer that.  It wasn’t busy at the lake (it was a work day, after all), but there were a few people there, and some fishermen as well.  It was pretty warm, around 80 degrees or so, but more humid than we experience in California.  It felt kinda like late spring/early summer in Kentucky.
 
We got back to Addis Ababa at about 5:30 p.m., and dropped Shimeles off at his house before we went to the compound.  We got to meet his two children, who were great.  His little daughter is amazingly beautiful.

It’s ten after seven now, so time to get cleaned up, breakfasted, and on my way.  We hope to buy some coffee and a few more souvenirs today.  I would like to get an Ethiopian football jersey, but we’ll see.  There are a couple of more things I want to get for the girls first.  The jersey comes last, if at all.

It’s been an amazing trip so far.  I miss my family, but I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything.  I’ll be making my “Africa list” later, so stay tuned.

Yesterday was a really spectacular day.  We worshiped with the church in Awassa yesterday morning, and even though I understood not a word, it was one of the most deeply moving spiritual experiences of my life.  The people sang with intensity and feeling, they prayed fervently.  In all honesty, my teaching was the low point.  After I spake, Shimeles spoke for 25 minutes or so.  He spoke tenderly about his love for the church there, and he made himself cry.  He then spoke about Moses and how God wanted to use him but he didn’t want to go, but he went anyway.  He was passionate and his delivery was from his heart.  These people really love God, and talk about Jesus daily.  This is going to sound trite, but I’m going to say it anyway.  We would look at them and be so quick to place them in a place that reflects their monetary poverty, and it wouldn’t be fair to the richness of their spirit.  I have learned lessons in Ethiopia that I already knew on an intellectual level, but now they are part of me.  Now would be a good time to list them:

·Poverty is completely subjective.  When someone is destitute in Africa, they are DESTITUTE.  The actions a human will take in order to survive are way “lower” than you think you will go.  America doesn’t know what poor is, and I can say this with some authority, having grown up as a “poor person” in America.
·Ethiopia is far more than just advertisements for famine-ridden land.  Sally et.al., you have not done this country justice.
·We have so much more in common than you would ever think.
·As for myself, I need to show love more easily and freely.  Being reserved cheapens my relationships.
·Things are more expensive if you are white.
·It never, ever, ever, hurts to smile at someone.  Never.
·Cleanliness standards are completely subjective.  If you ever travel to Africa, let go of your American standards.  You will be fine.  Trust me.
·“The Ugly American” should be required reading for all who travel.  I have never worked harder to be a gracious guest, and it has paid off in spades.
·Tuck in your shirt.  This will help you to avoid ant bites on your back while taking pictures of flamingoes and monkeys next to a lake.

That isn’t all, by any stretch.  It’s just what I can remember this morning.

After worship and lunch yesterday, we finished up our work in the computer lab.  Remember me talking about the sketchy power?  Well, we overloaded a circuit yesterday and almost caused a fire.  We fixed it, but Harry got some good pictures of the melted adapter and plug end.  Ethiopians have a very loose association with safe electrical standards.  I would guess that is true for all of Africa.

So, after we finished at the lab, Shimeles and Bekele took us to Lake Awassa.   It cost Harry and I 40 birr (about 3.50) to gain entrance.  Shimeles and Bekele were outraged that it was so expensive, and couldn’t believe we were getting price-gouged.  Ah, perspective.  Once we parked, we kept getting followed around by boys and teenagers who had bags of leftover bread, fruit, and fish and would attract the flamingoes and monkeys towards you for pictures.  We avoided them, since we knew it would only cost us, and we were able to take amazing pictures anyway.  Harry has a better camera than me, so I’m jealous. J  The sun was setting when we got there, but we still had very good light to get some shots of local wildlife and the lake itself.  There was a wedding going on as well, so that was pretty neat to see.  There are lots of boats that you could rent and they would take you out on the lake itself.  If we had more time, maybe.  There is a string of lakes north-ish of Awassa, so there are lots of birds.  We’ve taken some pretty good photos, which I will share, obviously.

Today, we are going to drive back to Addis Ababa.  There is a lake-side resort on the way that we are hoping to convince them to stop at once we get close to it, for more pictures.  We’ll see.

Signing off.  Time to pack my stuff for the day.

GAH!!  Mosquitoes!!!!!!!!

Okay, so we’re in Awassa.  And there are mosquitoes everywhere, anytime of day.  Saying that they make me a bit nervous is a massive understatement.  They haunt my dreams.  I’m dousing myself in DEET and sleeping under mosquito netting, but I still think I have a couple of bites.  Of course, that could be purely psychosomatic.  Either way….MOSQUITOES!!!!

We left Addis Ababa (New Flower, as translated) and drove to Awassa yesterday morning.  Bekele, our driver, is a really funny guy.  We stopped at a hotel in a roadside town and had breakfast.  While we were there, it started raining really hard.  It didn’t last too long, but it did last for most of our breakfast time.  I had Spanish omelet with mushrooms and onions, hold the cheese.  Harry had the American Breakfast (ha!).  Bikele and Shimeles had injera.  I would have ordered that as well, except that my digestive system is a little edgy.  Not completely unhappy, but not entirely sure what’s going on, and I don’t want to push it over the edge into full rebellion.
Anyway, the drive.  It took us about five hours to drive from Addis to Awassa yesterday, with two pit stops.  Harry and I took several pictures along the way…we saw loads of people along the road, and donkeys and horses, and goats, and camels.  Oh, and pelicans!  They were huge.  I hope that we can stop at one of the lakes on our way back so that we can take some more pictures.  Speaking of the lakes, we saw two massive lakes on our way there.  They have names, I just don’t know what they are.  The views into the countryside on this drive are amazing…majestic mountains in the distance, dry and dusty scrublands with stunted trees and bushes, farmland that looks barely arable.  Later, as we got closer to Awassa, it got much greener and the trees got really big.

We got to Awassa and had a late lunch at one of the local restaurants ($12 for the four of us!), then went to the church compound and school for the deaf.  In Awassa, they already had a computer school that Harry setup 7 years ago, but it had been changed and his vision for the setup had not been fully realized.  His network cables, while still in place, were in a state of disrepair and had never been used.  The printer is nowhere in sight, and therefore the jet direct print server that Harry had “hotwired” for use there never got used.  The original layout had the workstations placed along the wall, and they had changed them to put them all in the center.  Two wall outlets were feeding the entire setup (and still are).  One of the power strips had its cable extended by taping two wires to the cut-off cable, and then plugging those two wires into one of the wall sockets.  Yeah…so we fixed that.  We got all the computers setup yesterday, with one DOA.  We tried to talk Shimeles into bringing a couple of spares, but he only brought one spare.  He kept telling us that there were eight computers in the training lab, but there are nine.  So, we are short one computer, which we robbed from the deaf school administrator in order to fulfill the classroom needs.  I think that the administrator is unhappy.  We will be configuring a system for him as soon as we get back to Addis, but I don’t know when it will make it down to Awassa.  It’s kind of out of our hands.

In Addis, there is a guest house on the compound.  In Awassa, all the guest quarters are being used so we are staying in a hotel, called the South Spring Hotel.  Harry and I are sharing a room…he graciously gave me the slightly larger bed, so my feet only hang off a little bit.  Harry had a really hard time sleeping last night; the mosquito netting made him really claustrophobic. The bathroom would not meet with standards as set forth by Teresa.  In fact, if she had been accompanying me, I don’t know what she would have done.  Teresa has a low tolerance for “outside the norm” in regards to shower and toilet facilities. As for me, I’ve seen worse.  Today, we will be attending a worship service (I’m teaching for 30-35 minutes), and then finishing up the computer lab.  We should be able to head back to Addis tomorrow morning.

More to come later.

So, Harry and I are completely wiped out, but it’s been a very productive day.  We got the computer lab in Addis almost complete.  The only hold-up is that one of the student computers crapped out at the end of the day, and the people we need to get another one out of storage weren’t around to unlock it.  Either way, we were too tired to deal with it.  The computer lab is called Addis Ababa Computer Training School.  The computers themselves came from an organization called Healing Hands, and I think they got them from somewhere else.  There are some niggling issues; failed BIOS batteries, the occasional odd OS configuration.   So, would you like to know what we did?  Of COURSE you would!

·Setup 14 Student PC’s and one Teacher PC.
·Installed Office 2k3 on all systems
·Built network cables for all systems, and configured them on a 10.x.x.x network.
·Built power plant for all PC’s.  This was ALL Harry.
·Setup a Windows Workgroup and joined all the computers.
·Created privileged and limited accounts on each machine.
·Created a network share on the Teacher PC, which allows him to share assignments and to accept assignments for turning in without printing things out.

Tomorrow we head for Awassa.  It’s a five hour drive, so I expect that to be a long day, since we will begin setting up the computers once we get there.   I hope to get more sleep tonight than I did last night…I keep waking up really early.  Oh, we came up with nicknames for the team members.  We have Bill “Sign the Guestbook” Mara, Matt “Mayor of Sleep” Huddleston, Harry “Discerning Palette” O’Laughlin, and Coy “Makes Me No Nevermind” Thorp.

Until tomorrow, then.  Peace.

Okay.

So, today we worked about half a day, then we went into the city to buy network cabling and power strips.  Remember what I said about the driving?  Yeah….forget I said that.  The drive into the city was absolutely insane.  There are these blue and white vans everywhere, which we were told are taxis.  Each van I saw had at least ten people in it.  The taxi drivers are extremely aggressive, and have no sense of space on the road.  There is no way on God’s green earth I would get in one of those things.   Most intersections aren’t governed by any system at all, and the ones that are weren’t working because of power outages.  Some of the things I saw while we were driving:

·More stray dogs than you can shake a stick at.  I stopped even trying to count.
·Six homeless people on top of a garbage truck, picking through the refuse to find food or things to sell.  The truck was driving down the road at the time.  One of them was eating the leftover bits on the inside of an orange rind that he had just retrieved from the rancid pile.  An image I won’t soon forget.
·A palace behind large stone walls topped with steel spikes and guard towers at the corners.
·Lots of people.  LOTS.  I think the population is around three million.
·Men and boys approaching cars at intersections attempting to sell CDs, tapes, and sunglasses.
·Men and women on street corners with grass baskets full of salted nuts and wrapped candies that they are trying to sell.
·Goats and cattle grazing on the roadside.
·Revolutionary Square.  This was a square built during the Ethiopian communist regime.
·The equivalent of a state fairground.
·Okay, this isn’t a sight thing, but the smells are overpowering.   Largely dominated by diesel exhaust and something like burning charcoal.

Moges drove with Harry, Shimeles, and I in this Datsun pickup.  We went to a small computer store first…it seems like, from this store’s stock, the number one computer peripheral in Ethiopia is speakers.  Any kind, any size, any color.  There was also a webcam constructed to look like a ladybug.  We bought a box of CAT-5e cable for about $85 US.  For those in the know, that is exceptionally cheap.  We also got some surge protectors for the computers.  We then went to an electrical store and bought power strips that would accept any plug style.  These were about 10 bucks a piece.  Moges and Shimeles were really shocked that our prices on these things were so much higher in the states.

After we were finished buying those things, they took us to a shopping area with an American style coffee shop called Kaldi’s Coffee.  It has a circular green label and some very block-like font in its logo…trying to remember where I’ve seen that before.  Anyway, I had a macchiato, and it was really good.  We followed that up with ice cream for Harry and I, and cake for Shimeles and Moges.  After that, we did some shopping in the attached complex.  There were shops for just about anything, but we spent most of our time in the souvenir shop.  I got a little something for the girls and for Teresa.  I asked the clerk about one of the things I was getting, and she started teasing me.  We all had a good laugh at my expense…something that I am also unfamiliar with.

We got back to the compound about an hour ago, so now Harry and I are just relaxing.  Harry is lying down, I’m typing this then I’ll probably grab a book and read for a bit.  We are both lamenting the lack of a deck of playing cards and the broken phone line that is impeding our ability to do email.

So, tomorrow we finish up the lab here in Addis and prepare for our journey to Awassa on Saturday.  It takes about five hours to drive there, so I expect we will be leaving early Saturday morning.  Bill and Matt left this morning for Awassa, and then to make several trips out into the countryside from there.  We won’t see each other again until the Sunday after we get home.  Harry and I have the guest house all to ourselves.

Good night, all.  Until my next entry. Obviously, because of my lack of net access, you will be reading all of these at once.  I’m not going to write them that way, though.  So you can take breaks between entries, if’n you want.

Peace.