There Is Hope Here

Ethiopian Airlines has a ton of daily internal flights that are quite affordable if you are an Ethiopian resident OR if you are a foreigner who entered Ethiopia via Ethiopian Airlines (which we did). We hadn’t taken advantage of this option yet, so last weekend we decided to take a quick trip to Harar. We worked most of a Thursday and then boarded a 4pm flight out of Addis Ababa and arrived in Dire Dawa, in eastern Ethiopia, before 5.

As we stepped off the plane onto the roll-up staircase, the warm, humid air enveloped us like a hug – welcoming and friendly in contrast with the cold, smoggy air of high-altitude Addis during their “winter.”

We wandered out of the tiny airport and down the street towards town, following the small crowd of people who got off our plane, and eventually found a cluster of taxis parked nearby. The drivers lounged in their vehicles and languidly offered to take us to our hotel for a hugely inflated price.

We stayed in this hotel for about $20/night – the pool was amazing!

The next morning, we got up and started making our way to Harar. We had heard that we could travel there in an hour or so by public transportation, so we got a bajaj (a small rickshaw-style taxi) from our hotel to the bus area. After some wandering and asking of directions from strangers, we found our way to the minibus park, where the sleepy atmosphere switched abruptly to dozens of young men shouting destination names at us and pulling forcefully at our arms to direct us to one place or another.

Once they figured out that we didn’t want to hire a private car, but were determined to go by public taxi, at the cost of $1, there was a lot less commotion. We climbed into the back row of a mostly full minibus (which seats about 16 people) and immediately regretted not wearing cooler clothing as we waited for it to start moving, sweating profusely.

We had heard that Harar people were very friendly, and the minibus ride seemed to confirm this. We sat next to two young men who made a valiant effort to talk with us despite very limited shared language. The other people in the taxi stole glances at us with what seemed to be friendly amusement and curiosity as we climbed the gentle rolling hills of the area. We drove through small towns of stone houses with corrugated iron roofs, livestock and children wandering through the corridors between the houses and chilies laid out to dry on sections of the shoulder.

The car stopped frequently to let people on and off of the minibus, and it was a beautiful opportunity to glimpse a slice of rural Ethiopian life.

Harar itself was a much bigger city than we expected. It’s called the city of peace because of the legend in Islam that when the Prophet Muhammad was exiled, he sought refuge in Harar and people welcomed him even though they were a majority Christian town. It is considered the 4th most important city in Islam.

It reminded me a lot of Morocco, in that it has two main parts – the new and old cities. The old city is enclosed within a stone wall, in the style of Moroccan medinas, and the new city is the part that sprawls outside of those walls. A lot of the old city is residential, with traditional Ethiopian houses, many of which are painted in vibrant colors, and narrow alleys weaving between them. It even smelled like Morocco – something like a mix of nice soap, tea, and spices wafting through stone alleyways.

We spent most of our time wandering around the small alleys, searching for and then eating recommended food items, and saying hi to small children and old people who greeted us everywhere we went with cries of  “ferenj-o!” and wanted to shake hands. (In Addis, we’re used to the word ferenj being used to refer to foreigners, but we were enamored with the addition of the “o” to the end of the word in Harar.)

We met some fascinating people in Harar, including a woman who read our fortunes from coffee cups. We heard about her from a guy we met at a café, and he helped us to procure the necessary materials to use her services, including coffee, incense, and khat (the leaf in the foreground of the picture below, which grows in the area and is a stimulant used by a lot of people in the area).

Fortune teller in Harar preparing to tell us about our futures

We also attended a ritual hyena feeding that has been happening in Harar for decades, which was fascinating (I first learned about this on an episode of the Netflix show, Our Planet, which I highly recommend).

In a lot of Africa, hyenas are feared animals that can attack livestock or even people, but in Harar, the community has forged a relationship with the hyenas that is mutually beneficial. Every night, butchers give the hyena man piles of bones, skins, and other parts of the animal that can’t be used, and the hyenas are treated to dinner just outside of the city. In return, they hyenas don’t attack the Hararis’ livestock or children, and people don’t fear them.

We sat outside the hyena man’s home with about a dozen other people, mostly Ethiopians, who had come to see the feeding. The current hyena man is the son of the original hyena man, who is now old and passing on the responsibility to his son.

It was fascinating to see how comfortable he was with the hyenas as he fed them with a short stick or even by hand. All I really knew about hyenas prior to this game from The Lion King, but in person (in this and scared context) they were surprisingly cute animals. At any rate it was a unique experience and our visit to Harar was a lovely break from Addis.

 

It’s both reassuring and frustrating that after so much traveling and living in different places, I can still encounter a city that seems so entirely foreign to me as Addis Ababa.

Last year, by the end of the nine months I spent traveling, I was starting to feel like in some ways, the world is becoming so similar everywhere that it took some of the fun out of traveling. The ubiquity of English and American music, a general quality of life that you can purchase anywhere with enough money, the similarity of goods sold in different places (and the realization that global trade has brought a lot of those goods to my home town), the availability of western food in so many places… all these things made me kind of sad, thinking there was some global homogenizing going on. Were we slowly erasing all the differences between different places in the world? Were we heading towards one global society that would be all the same?

I came to Addis after reading that it was a place only “for the experienced traveler” and I can attest that this is definitely the case. It is not an easy place to live, though it is fascinating and alluring in some ways. And surprisingly, so many of the skills and techniques that I learned and used in other places don’t translate here. It’s a new place for me, quite different from anything I’ve experienced.

It’s surprisingly cold in Addis…hence the sweater and the scarf

Addis is a place where the push of modernity clashes brashly with the pull of the way things have always been. The city feels to me like it is constantly fighting itself. It’s turbulent, the process of growing and changing, and it pervades everything.

A lot of the city is comprised by modest neighborhoods, in which small houses with rusting corrugated iron roofs cluster together on wide swaths of hillsides, with narrow paths snaking between them. At first glance these appear slum-like, but look closer and you see that many of the homes have satellite dishes perched on the corrugated iron roofs. From afar, it looks like a collection of giant white mushrooms growing on rusty metal.

Fancy mall in Bole neighborhood of Addis

There is new money and all the things that people with money anywhere like – upscale restaurants, bars with imported liquors, posh shopping malls, fancy cars and places to live where security guards keep watch day and night. Men in suits wait in line for ATMs and walk away counting wads of bills.

But there are also a multitude of beggars, street children, and disabled people. At night, one notices that certain sidewalks or stairs of large churches are lumpy, moving slightly, an odd color; and then suddenly the eyes adjust and the forms of dozens of humans sleeping manifest. During the day, they patrol parts of the city in tattered clothing with their hands outstretched, or sit on thin pieces of fabric while people drop coins in front of them.

Future banks being erected in our neighborhood

The neighborhood we live in is aiming to be the new financial district of Addis Ababa, with at least half a dozen shiny new bank buildings going up around us. But on the ground, literally in the shadows of these new skyscraper-style buildings, there are informal housing settlements where families live in lean-tos covered with tarps, which flood in the rain, and children wearing old tattered clothing play games with old tires and sticks.

One of the biggest markets in Africa, Merkato, lies in the center of Addis. Enter there, and you get swept into a maze of vendors lining muddy streets, hawking traditional spices, fermented butter, live chickens (which can be slaughtered on the spot for a small sum), and much, much more. But the young, middle class people we meet tell us “don’t go to Merkato.” They do all their shopping in the supermarkets or small stores that are less hassle and more convenient, leaving the market for the older and more traditional generation.

In a lot of places, you can buy yourself a certain quality of life if you have enough money. Addis does not seem to be that kind of a place. Some of the basic things like electricity, power, internet, and the ability to move around are just not able to be purchased. The power and water both disappear from time to time. Nice hotels have generators that kick in when the power is out, but I’m not sure even they can account for the periodic cutting off of water. The internet and mobile data are shut down periodically by the government (which owns the only mobile phone company in Ethiopia), and the traffic is so bad at some times of the day that even paying for a private taxi doesn’t get you to your destination any faster than using public transit.

It’s a fascinating place, built into rolling hills, at high altitude and quite beautiful in some ways. Some days, living here feels like such a fun challenge. Other days, I’m just so confused by it that I don’t know what to do. Three months is such a short amount of time to spend a place like this – I suspect that as soon as I start to figure this city out, it will be time to leave it.

For now, I am stumbling around in a state that feels familiar from the early days of Peace Corps– it’s the feeling of being totally lacking in all grace due to unfamiliarity with culture and language and perpetually doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Such is life when you fling yourself unprepared into a new place that is so totally different.

Addis in the early morning

This summer I accepted an internship working on public health in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and I thought I would try to resurrect my blog.

I’ve been here for about six weeks now, with a friend of mine from Columbia: Alex. We are doing the same program at school, pursuing an MPH with a certificate in Public Health and Humanitarian Action.

My work here is with the government – a subsector of the Ministry of Health – so I won’t be able to share much about the work, but I’ll definitely be writing about what Ethiopia is like, how it is to live here for a summer, and I hope to go on a few short trips throughout the summer as well, so I’ll be sharing about those.

Addis is an interesting city, and we’ve been stumbling through the culture shock and getting used to living here.

I honestly am a bit surprised at how difficult it has been thus far. I have so much experience living and working in other countries that I thought I was fairly well-prepared for this. But this city and this work situation is very different than anything else I have experienced, and it’s requiring a new set of skills that I am striving to build as time goes on.

A few observations about Addis so far:

Addis is a surprisingly expensive city, especially in terms of housing.

The building where we live

We aren’t being paid for this internship, and Columbia gave us only a small stipend for the whole summer. We had A LOT of trouble locating a place to live that was less expensive than living in New York, even for apartments that were inconveniently located or lacking in amenities. It was quite surprising.

Now that we’ve been here for a while, I see that inexpensive places do exist (as I knew they must). It’s just that as foreigners, we were getting an inflated price, and we didn’t have any local friends to help us when we arrived. Apparently most foreigners who come here are working for the UN, WHO, or other international organization, and they get a generous living stipend. This has inflated the housing market in Addis and as graduate students with relatively little money, we ran into trouble with this.

We did eventually find a place (pictured above from the outside) – still more expensive than we were hoping, considering Alex and I are sharing a room and we share the apartment with another woman. But we’re happy with it. It is a modern apartment, with tile floors, a television, hot water in the shower, a functional kitchen, and a balcony that looks out over the city.

Apparently the city relies on hydroelectric power.

Dinner by candlelight

This is very exciting from a climate change and environmental perspective, but it also means that because this is the end of the dry season, the water level is low and there isn’t enough water to power the whole city.

So, the government has been shutting off power to in shifts throughout different parts of the city for 4-8 hours a day the whole time we’ve been here.

So some mornings we wake up and there is no power for the hot water heater in the shower. And some evenings we come back from work and we can’t cook anything because the stove is electric and needs power, so we eat bread and peanut butter by the light of a flashlight or candle. It’s a slight inconvenience but it’s manageable. We do have consistent power at work, due to a backup generator that turns on automatically in an outage, so that helps in the ability to at least keep essential devices like my phone charged.

The coffee is plentiful and fantastic.

Traditional coffee being brewed

Ethiopians have a huge coffee culture. They brew a special type of traditional coffee that is prepared in a wooden jug over a charcoal stove and served in small cups. It reminds me a bit of Turkish/Greek coffee in that it is thick in texture and very strong.

Small coffee stalls abound throughout the city. These are small affairs, often informally placed and protected from the sun and rain by a tarp, with crowded seating on small stools or benches. The operation consists of one woman who sits on a low stool and busies herself with the various tasks of preparing the coffee – roasting the beans, pounding the roasted beans by hand, brewing batch after batch of coffee, washing the tiny cups over and over as people cycle through and pay 5 birr (the equivalent of about 17 cents) for each cup of coffee.

Drinking coffee is a communal experience in Ethiopia. Our coworkers go out for coffee every day after lunch (they’ve been kind enough to adopt Alex and me into this tradition) and someone always picks up the tab for the whole group. They find the American idea of everyone paying for their own drink to be hilarious.

It’s a nice part of my days – a few minutes spent sitting around, balancing a tiny saucer and cup in the palm of one hand, chatting and enjoying a cup of coffee that Alex says tastes like chocolate in its richness.

Needless to say, there is no Starbucks here. Ethiopians are proud of their coffee and they don’t want an expensive global chain coming in and changing things.

That’s all for now. More soon!

P.S. If you want to see more photos of daily life in Ethiopia, you can follow me on Instagram (@ckay444). I post photos to my Insta “story” almost every day, when I have internet connectivity, so feel free to keep up with me there.

The experience of trekking in the Himalayas was, in a word, incredible.

I am so grateful that I had this opportunity and that I didn’t let fear stop me from going for it. It was truly one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

Eva and I did a trek in the Annapurna region of the Himalayas called the Mardi Himal trek.

It took seven days, including one day which was spent sitting around the trekking lodge because the weather was too bad to bother trying to hike.

Eva and me right before starting our trek

We spent most of our days hiking on well-maintained trails through beautiful forests.

It did rain several times, which made the forest look magical (above) but also made the trail really muddy.

We stayed in trekking lodges along the way, like the one pictured above. In the foreground is the kitchen/dining room/common area. Behind is the building with rooms and to the right is the latrine/shower.

Our guide told us that when he first started working as a porter, about 30 years ago, he helped build these lodges by carrying stones up the mountain for days.

I thought about that a lot with all of the things we saw along the trail – the lodges, the hundreds of steps made from stone – a huge amount of effort went into getting the materials to that place on the mountain and building them. A lot of human labor went into building these things so they could be used by tourists like me.

There are roads to some of the lower points on the mountain now, but after about a day of hiking, there are no longer any roads. So the only way in or out is walking or by helicopter.

We hiked for 4-8 hours a day, stopping for tea and for meals in the lodges along the way. Our guide, Ammar, was very protective and careful with us and insisted on these frequent stops and a steady pace. He also carried a seemingly endless supply of Snickers bars in his bag, and doled them out to us when we seemed tired in between stops.

The infrastructure that exists in Nepal for trekking was really rather remarkable. I imagine my trek was a very different experience than that of someone who did this 20-30 years ago. At that time, Ammar told us, trekkers (or their porters) would have to carry in all their food and camping gear as well as all the other gear that we were carrying.

We woke up very early in the unheated lodges and saw some absolutely breathtaking sunrises.

The feeling I got when stumbling from my sleeping bag, out the door of the lodge, and being surrounded by such magnificent nature was just incredible. These mountains are definitely another example of a thin place – where the border between heaven and earth is blurred (I wrote about this concept in Greece, read it here).

I experienced such an intense feeling of gratitude on these mornings. The phrase “achingly beautiful” came to life for me here. Because that’s the only way to describe sitting in nature and seeing the sun slowly climb over the jagged Himalayas as they reach boldly into the sky. It is so incredible that it actually hurts your heart in a way.

And even though the lodges and the trails are well-developed, it is still quite a remote place. So many people will never get to see this magnificence, and I was so overwhelmed with the good fortune that allowed me to experience it.

The plan was for the trek to culminate at the Mardi Himal Base Camp – the place where alpine climbers start an ascent to the actual top of the mountain. But on the day that we were supposed to hike to the base camp, we woke at 5am to the entire mountain being covered in a cold, dark, cloud. Ammar said there was no point in hiking – we would be miserable and we wouldn’t be able to see the spectacular view at the top. Eva and I trusted his advice, but we were worried that we were missing out as other groups decided to hike, assuming the cloud cover would lift later (it didn’t, as it turns out, and everyone came back soaking wet and freezing).

So we spent a day in the lodge, sitting around a wood stove with other trekkers and their guides and the staff from the lodge as the cloud sat outside and rain and snow fell intermittently. It actually was a pretty fun day. At one point, we organized an impromptu yoga session around the wood stove. Those of us who knew some yoga each took a turn leading some poses and teaching a group of giggly young Nepali women who had never done yoga before. I also met a young Nepali man who had lived in Colorado. He had gone to college there, and then worked on search and rescue in the mountains. After ten years, he decided to come back to Nepal to help his country build the type of search and rescue capabilities that we have in the States.

The next morning, we awoke at 4:30am to discover that the sky had cleared and the mountains were visible by the light of the sun that was just starting to creep up behind them. No sooner had we seen the beautiful view than the clouds rushed over and covered it again. But Ammar said that today would be a good day to hike, so we packed breakfast, had a quick cup of tea, and started off.

It had snowed the night before and it continued snowing at intervals as we hiked through the clouds. But after a few hours, we hiked a pretty steep ascent and found ourselves on a long plateau with the clouds clearing. Before our eyes, the mountains emerged one by one as gentle winds pushed the clouds away.

“The mountain is smiling,” Ammar told us as we pointed at each peak that poked out of the cloud cover, “everyone is happy today.”

We kept hiking as far as we could go, but shortly after this point it became clear that we couldn’t make it to the base camp, another hour or two away, because of our shoes. I was wearing worn-out running shoes and Eva was wearing slightly less worn out sneakers. We had opted not to rent trekking boots because others had told us that sneakers would suffice for this trek, and that we were likely to get blisters by trekking many hours in shoes that we weren’t used to. Sneakers probably would have been fine had it not snowed the night before, but when we started to ascend near the base camp, there was a section of snow-covered rocks that was just too slippery to risk with our footwear.

But it didn’t matter. Neither of us was seeking to reach a certain point – we wanted the experience of doing the trek, and seeing the Himalayas, and we had done both of those things.

We found a few rocks to perch on and have our breakfast/tea that we had brought and we took in the surroundings.

Eva, me and Ammar

Soon, two Nepali trekkers appeared nearby and started playing music from a phone and dancing. Everyone was so happy to be there and to be seeing the mountains so clearly – the joy was infectious. Eva and I went over and joined them, and soon Ammar joined us as well. What a funny and beautiful moment – five people dancing out of pure joy on a mountain.

The clouds started creeping back up and we turned around to head back to the lodge. It took a lot longer going down than it seemed like it should. Mountains are always like that – the descent is tougher than the ascent in some ways.

It took us a few days to get down the mountain from the peak of our trek, and each day continued to bring its own beauty. We followed the same route out until the last day, when we diverged from the route that we took in.

This final day, we hiked through several small villages in the foothills of the mountains as we made our way to the road where we would be picked up. This was one of my favorite parts of the trek. I was so in love with the Nepali countryside, the architecture of these small houses, the farmlands and the livestock that were grazing near the houses, the laundry hanging on lines to dry, the way the people fit into the nature.

I enjoyed this part so much that I seriously considered doing a second trek after we returned from this one. I was very interested in walking through more of these villages, taking my time, meeting people.

We had been experiencing natural beauty for the past six days, and this seventh day switched to human beauty, which is something I’m very interested in. The reason I travel is actually mostly in search of human beauty, to see the way other people live, to find the common humanity between all of us, despite our differences, and to experience human connection. So I absolutely loved this day of descending slowly through villages, through farms, and alongside Nepali people going about their days.

See the picture above, where it says “Once is Not Enough”?

It’s true. Now that I have experienced the magic of Nepal, I do feel the pull to go back. That’s the problem with traveling and expanding your view of the world. It introduces you to so many new things and ideas that you return home with an even longer bucket list than you started with.

What an incredible world we live in.