Our Big Weekend with Roger

When people are isolated long enough, things change. I met LeAnne and Danielle outside the Lewi Hotel in Awassa, the city of 80,000 in which they'd taken up the seemingly Sisyphean task of teaching Ethiopian students English. Because I already had met three of Ethiopia's 36 psychiatrists, I knew enough of psychological profiling to understand that taking on this task is sufficient indication for psychiatric evaluation, but for LeAnne and Danielle it seemed to be only the tip of the termite nest. Whether they encountered giant frogs, the variants of plague undiscovered by modern science carried by half of their students, or swarms of biting insects, their disaffected reactions and stony faces when recounting some of the challenges they faced chilled me to the core.

Awassa is remote in the way that only Ethiopian places are remote. The countryside around Addis Ababa turns to hills, which turns to plains, which turns to fields, whose solitary trees, drenched in the high afternoon sunlight, seem to glow. When you reach the great walls made of cacti tress taller than buildings, and pass even those, you've arrived in Awassa.

The Lewi Hotel's sole adornment, a color-changing neon strip, lent a tinge of futuristic unreality to the otherwise complete darkness of downtown Awassa during its present power outage. LeAnne and Danielle saw me before I saw them – a task surely made easier by the vanishingly low probability of seeing foreigners within 300 km of where we'd planned to meet. In fact, the three of us, together, formed a statistical impossibility.

With a customary Amharic exchange of “tardess” and exclamations at the fact that I'd actually located them without a functioning cellphone in a vast, dark city, we crowded into a bajaj, one of the many infernal semi-enclosed motorbikes speeding around downtown Awassa. “Can we close the window, please?” I pondered to myself, but then realized that there were no windows, only curtains, and in fact, only three wheels, fortunately arranged in an isoceles rather than a right triangle, but one cannot take this for granted because this is Ethiopia (TIE). We pulled up to their house about seven or eight and yelled to the cabbie, “Yo holmes, ziga ziga.” But seriously, LeAnne and Danielle's debate about where their house was actually located along the road we were driving along at was unsettling at best, especially given the curiously hunched posture of the bajaj driver, and the simultaneously empowering and frightening sense that he could drive us anywhere.

Behind the gate was the nicely sized and recently landscaped compound LeAnne and Danielle will ultimately call home for 6 months. The calm elegance of the central courtyard with decorative flowers belied the potential for the silent ambush of Guchee, their attack poodle. I would quickly become acquainted, even in the darkness, with the other residents of Leo and D's compound: a master jack-of-all-trades; a cook; a strange sojourner always wearing a blue bathrobe; two chickens of varying levels of dominance, among several more anonymous fowl; and the several hundred congregants in whatever nearby church that blasted its prayer-jams into their yard at 3:05 AM on the dot daily. Rise and shine (TIE)!

My first night with LeAnne and Danielle brought many firsts, including a lifetime record for most people spitting in a group as we brushed our teeth. I was introduced to Leo and D's shower, or rather, showering system, or rather, gravity-based showering system, or rather, hand-operated gravity-based showering system, or rather, cup and bucket in a dimly lit corner of some concrete monstrosity of a building (TIE).

At dinnertime both my stomach and I were introduced to an enduring concept in the L & D household: that of delicious food. After living off of canned beans, bread, water, and peanuts for my first two months in Ethiopia, I was shown the light, in the form of pumpkin soup. Pumpkin soup?, you ask. In Ethiopia? But your reptilian brain quickly takes over and cancels all active thoughts until the bowl is finished and you've already ladled yourself a second helping. Reflecting later, you feel like it was an otherwise normal afternoon in New England, eating a delightful home-cooked meal, rather than in rural Ethiopia millions of miles away from the nearest pumpkin or supermarket (TINE). Such is the magic of having a duo of two-time Brandeis University Iron Chef winners on your team. During my time in Ethiopia I had the good fortune of seeing several complicated surgeries, but that felt like nothing in the face of the coordination required to prepare a delightful pumpkin soup from scratch, with iron utensils found lying around and a single, finicky hot plate to work with. “It started off as a total experiment,” Danielle said modestly, but I wasn't fooled. Her words produced the same effect as a Nobel Prize winner saying “It started off as a high school science project.”

LeAnne and Danielle gave me one of their two beds to sleep in. I didn't realize what a sacrifice this was on LeAnne's part until I knew that sharing a bed with a cold Danielle is like sharing a cage with a boa constrictor.

The next day brought a trip to Wondo Genet, the famed hot springs. However, between us and the hot springs laid one of the most infamous obstacles in the entire country, known universally among travelers: the town of Shashemene. Shashemene is one part prison break, two parts biannual malingerer convention, and three parts simmering hostility. LeAnne and Danielle, being cooks, know that this is a recipe for disaster.

But the immediate question was not how to get to Wondo Genet, or even Shashemene, but how to get...anywhere at all. We walked out onto the road abutting our home, with the occasional bus speeding by, but prospects looked dim and we had no concrete plans in any case. Suddenly, though, a white Land Rover (cruise control for cool in Ethiopia) slowed, spun around, and drove back along the other side of the road to where we stood in the sun by the roadway. Alex Bergstrom, my friend and a student from U Washington volunteering in Addis, later reenacted the driver's thought process as, “Should I rape and murder anyone today? Nah...actually, yes” with comic effect. My own reconstruction, on the other hand, takes into account that LeAnne and Danielle, though only 66% of our group, constituted 100% of the reason why the driver came back.

The seemingly crowded occupants of the Land Rover were only too happy to let the Americanos hitchhike with them, and squeezed us in, even taking seats in the back and allowing us theirs. The leader was a large, boisterous woman, plated solid with jewelry and only too eager to yell to her only American friend over her cellphone, “We've got some of your countrymen here in the Land Rover with us!” We did not realize it then, but this woman was to be quite adequate in-flight entertainment to us throughout our trip to Shashemene.

The young boy in the back played with my arm hair (“He likes white people,” his mother said, by way of explanation) as we drove at tremendous speed up and over the distant ridge visible from the road outside L & D's house. We didn't know it then, but this Land Rover and its hilarious, friendly occupants would be a real deus ex machina (machina is the Amharic word for “machine,” which is used primarily to designate cars). Before reaching Shashemene, we drove through the boisterous woman's old stomping grounds: right past her previous house in Shashemene. We slowly rolled past an old neighbor, who paced up to the open window and initiated the battery of exchanges that serves as a prelude to all Ethiopian conversations: “How are you? How are you doing? I'm fine. How are you doing? I'm fine, thank God. How is everything?”

However, after a few moments, dread set upon the woman. “What if we see any more of our old neighbors! We didn't invite any of them to the wedding (a huge slight in Ethiopia, especially for a wedding as well attended as this woman's must've been)! Drive quickly, drive quickly!” The comedy of this was immeasurable (TIE). It was a great morning.

Following an abortive attempt in which we were dropped off at some anonymous crossroads in Shashemene, and quickly surrounded by no less than 50 intrigued locals, our hosts were gracious enough to delay their own trip and drop us off directly at the bus station. I think all three of us were ignorant of the darker side of Shashemene, recounted in vivid details by other travelers I've met in Ethiopia, and would come to appreciate the importance of our benefactors only well after our delightful backroads trip through Shashemene, which was just transient enough to be satisfying with no threat of being mugged. We were dropped off directly in front of the Wondo Genet bus, which was preparing to leave.

From the Shashemene bus station, it was a bumpy bus ride through hill and vale to Wondo Genet. The ride was rural Ethiopia epitomized – sustenance farmers, cattle herders, children playing, mules hauling carts.

The town outside Wondo Genet consisted of a single drag along which hundreds of people milled about. We decided to take the nearest horse-drawn cart from the emptying bus to Wondo Genet.

The ride on the cart was and remains the most enjoyable form of transport I've ever experienced in my life, including skimobile, cigarette boat, antique train, and single-prop plane – we were there bouncing along, clinging tightly to the handrail. The drive was amazing. Rural Ethiopia is resplendent with its flowering trees, the distant mountains surrounding the Rift Valley, and equatorial sunshine. Compared with the bustle and smog of Addis, where I had been full-time since arriving in Ethiopia in September, it was a real paradise.

The springs themselves proved to be anticlimactic – the place seemed an orindary public swimming pool in the middle of nowhere, full of joyous, splashing men. At least we got a free soap out of the deal. We sat and talked by the water for some time before heading up the hill to the hotel, the second location recommended to us by our Land Rover friends. The steep mountains of the Rift were incredible sights.

The hotel was a nice place surrounded by various kinds of monkeys. We walked through the gardens, which boasted a huge tree with a 100 yard wide canopy, before deciding to hike up the path to the Valley itself. A self-appointed guide along the way attempted by various means to become a non-self-appointed guide, even vaguely threatening, “Someone may come out the woods!” But the only things coming out of the woods that day were the three of us, by successfully escaping Shashemene.

Emerging from the forest into the floor of the Rift Valley was transcendent. We were in a huge amphitheatre of bright green mountains and escarpments in the late afternoon, and the humid air was a pale blue under which successive mountains seemed stacked upon each other, arching rather than proceeding towards the horizon. Pastoral farmers sat in a circle underneath a solitary tree, saying nothing to each other. The silence was broken only by some unseen waterfall.

We caught another horse back to Wondo Genet, and then a bus back to Shashemene, traveled by bajaj to the main road, despite a suspicious wrong turn by the driver resulting in a mid-trip bailout, and then by bus back to Awassa. The adventure took up the whole day and we returned near sunset.

The night, nearly starving to death, LeAnne and Danielle made another great decision: pizza. Near the Awassa post office was a pizza restaurant with pizzas so wonderfully made, with such an appetizing green mystery sauce, that, in conjunction with our hunger from the trip, made them the best pizzas I've ever had (Sorry Ernie, boss of 100-year-old family-owned Espresso Pizza in Lowell, Massachusetts).

The next day, I was treated to a wonderful home-cooked brunch that was an actual breakfast rather than the poor simulation to which I'd become accustomed. We set out upon LeAnne and Danielle's customary morning walk of several miles across the serene countryside with its sunlit fields – gold upon gold – and distant mountains, furled with ridges, then headed towards Lake Awassa. During the walk I heard many stories about LeAnne and Danielle's debatable choice of friends in college and their transient run from the law one winter evening after a carjacking.

Lake Awassa was gigantic and impressive, and surrounded by strange waterfowl, including a brown bird with an oval head. We had several encounters with two species of monkeys, and LeAnne and Danielle told me that they had deduced from careful experiments that 9 of of 10 discriminating monkeys prefer orange soda to coke. The little monkeys would come up and cautiously lap the soda from the table. Seeing the monkey's acrobatic flips from tree branches to the roof of the bar was incredible – they would time their release from the branches at the nadir of the branch's swing.

We tried to arrange for a boat ride – an independent consultant reminded us that the going rate for boat rides was 15 birr – but the owner wanted 300 birr. Joking that 300 birr was enough to buy the boat itself almost got me killed, which would have left LeAnne and Danielle to fend for themselves.

We had delicious home-cooked pasta for dinner, completely spoiling me from ever enjoying any food I would eat in Ethiopia ever again. The palate desensitization was complete. In a breach of their usual custom of saving some food for leftover lunch at the Ethio-American Friendship School, I simply ate all of the pasta. No regrets. We ate raw sugar cane for desert, sucking up the sweet juices and spitting out the woody pulp.

The next day I got a chance to see the heart and soul of L & D's trip to Ethiopia: their teaching at the Ethio-American Friendship School. Especially noteworthy is the fact that they seemed to be the only competent teachers at the school. Class after class, across more than half-a-dozen grades, they knew all the childrens' names and worked hard to bring out the best of the kids, most of whom were genuinely interested in learning, with the one exception of a single grade that for privacy reasons I will not mention. And to this day I do not know which is more endearing – a classroom of adorable Ethiopian children attempting to learn the hokey pokey without mispronouncing any words, or LeAnne attempting to dance without falling over. After an incident involving a false hand, we went past Moe's Landfill of Storks and Vultures, the scariest vision of hell imaginable. Lunch was home-cooked lentil soup. Soon, it was time to return to smelly Addis with its plain bread, smelly air, and lack of hilarious company.

Overall, I found two aspects of LeAnne and Danielle's lives here truly admirable: 1) how hard they work at their incredibly difficult and draining job and 2) how thoroughly connected they've stayed with what's important to them. I had capitulated in many ways to the rigors of Ethiopian life, but here they were in rural Ethiopia rather than bustling but easy Addis, where everything is either more scarce or harder to procure, and they had made a space for themselves. Daily walks, preparing meals together, continuing little traditions they had invented during the long time they'd known each other despite the drastically different setting. They are full of laughter, and simultaneous foils to each other. They both have a second, stronger smile within their first smiles. Both will have made a mark on many children before leaving Ethiopia who, quite factually, would otherwise have no better educational opportunity for the rest of their lives. That takes effort – and courage.


Written by our dear friend, Roger (doctor volunteering in Addis, by
way of Massachusetts)