Gayll's Posts from Ethiopia

Editor's Note: The Phifer-Houseman family consists of three adopted kids who recently went to visit their Ethiopian birthplace after many years of being in America.  They agreed to blog about their experience:

7 am

Waking up in Addis Ababa...  I’m snuggled under my heavy wool blanket, on my wholly inadequate cot on the floor (gotta work on that), and waking up--- to plaintive bleating of the sheep who is today’s dinner is in the yard below me, the sounds of roosters crowing in the distance, birds singing in the trees across the way, horns honking and Orthodox priests chanting their praises to God.  They (the priests that is) have been going since 4am.

We arrived yesterday at about 6am, after a second long red-eye including an extra 3-hour wait on the tarmac in Damascus.  I’ll think again before I fly British Midlands.  For some reason we could barely sleep on the flight so our greeting of Addis was blurry-eyed and scruffy.  Three of our bags never made it on to the plane.  We have 50 pounds of sponsorship letters for the kids at Hope Enterprises, but just one change of underwear.  Such is international travel . . .

6 pm

This afternoon’s quest for groceries turned out to be quite an adventure as the road to Debra Zeit is entirely torn up.  I don’t mean just a little construction with a group of orange-jacketed men in hard hats here and there.  I mean stripped to dust, rubble and gravel for miles with huge trenches dug right up to the very doorstep of the desperate little shops and businesses along the way.  In the midst of all this, buses, taxis, minibuses and crowds of people try to make their way up and down the road through swirling dust and expansive puddles of mud.  This is African re-development with a vengeance.  What should have been an hour’s worth of errands turned into a two-hour cross-country trip on hot, crowded minibuses (imagine fitting 13 passengers into your Toyota soccer van and you get the picture) bumping over dusty rubble, and on foot—beaten by the sun and buffeted by the dry wind.

We finally caved in and paid $3.50 to take a private “contract taxi” to take us to the equally packed Bole Rd. --- the center of shopping for the Ethiopian elite — to shell out American prices for the basics that we needed.  It was exhausting on both ends of town.  Ironically, the worst part of the day was finding ourselves in the “modern” part of town where we “belong” amidst the seductively dressed young women who have come home to Addis to visit grandma for the holidays.  To me this kind of wealth is more disturbing than the struggle of the dusty-shoed kids picking their way through the rubble and redevelopment along the Debra Zeit road.  The flashy, over-sexualized, convenience-dependent world of Bole is cleaner and more orderly, but somehow attenuated from its roots, from reality---or at least from the literally gritty reality in other parts of the city.  Which then makes me wonder about “development”.  Does it trickle down?  Effect real change? Or does it just create enclaves of convenience and comfort where we can forget the grit left behind in another part of town, or the world?