The Arrival/Central Shoa No. 3 [September 18, 2006]
Crouched in the baggage claim at Bole International Airport, tucking passports and cash into money belts and secret pockets, Robyn and I were steeling ourselves for the expected onslaught of pickpockets, beggars and unscrupulous taxi drivers. It was a grim Monday, our first in Ethiopia, and we were still slightly dazed from our circuitous route from London. The airport itself was surprisingly modern, and - aside from the smell of stale urine on the baggage conveyor belt - Bole was relatively indistinguishable from the half-dozen or so medium-sized airports I had used while flying back and forth between London, Edinburgh and Glasgow the previous week.
As we bent over beneath a large pillar, checking our money and passports, relocking our bags and securing the straps, a faint familiar smell drifted through the arrivals hall. I looked up and scanned the room, but nothing had changed. No one was smoking, no more doors had been opened, and no stray animals had paraded through the building. All the other passengers had left the baggage claim area. The smell disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving us truly alone in the giant hall. We hoisted our bags and started for the exit.
Walking out into the open-air reception area, we were hit not by vagabonds and thieves, but by the same smell that had tiptoed through the baggage claim. It wasn’t the powerful blast that threatens to dislodge passengers stepping out of the hermetically sealed airports in London or Toronto, but a slight nudge, as though Addis was welcoming us home.
The intermittent breeze was dusted with pale scents of smoke, grass and fresh air. Even under a slightly graying afternoon sky, the air danced around our shoulders. I felt an inward tug and a smirk crept across my face, appreciating the inside joke. The air sparkled with the lustrous memories of childhood. I drew in my grin and turned to Robyn to let her in on the secret: “It’s just like Pakistan.”
The fond remembrances were gone within minutes, dissipating in the face of the irrepressible currents of peculiarity and confusion subtly directing Addis Ababa. Home was home, but Addis took little time in sweeping away any misgivings created by the circumstances of our arrival.
PRE-ARRIVAL...
Stepping out into the reception area, we both instantly saw our greeters. Robyn had been assured by her NGO that there would be someone waiting to pick her up, whereas the infrequent and vague nature of the conversations I had with my supervisor had only cemented my belief that there would be no one waiting for me. In fact, of all the alleged information I had received from my organization since our first contact in early July, the only piece of useful, concrete news was the email I had received days before I left Canada.
I had been in an irregular email conversation with Samuel (whose name I later discovered was pronounced Sam-well, as if he were an Abyssinian hobbit), the Executive Director of the Ethiopian Bar Association (EBA), about setting up my initial stay and the projects I would be working on. The Canadian Bar Association (CBA), our program sponsors, had given us rough outlines of what to expect and the needs of our host organizations, but we were still required to file a work plan with the CBA prior to leaving. In spite of my best pestering, nothing of use was forthcoming from Sam. He kept avoiding the issue of work plans, even as July became August and the day of departure crept nearer.
Robyn and I had booked flights to spend a week in the UK prior to arriving in Addis, and our planes were scheduled to arrive in London on September 11, and then in Addis on the 18th. I emailed Sam again about whether or not I should get a visitor’s visa. There was no response, so Robyn and I went ahead and got business visas instead. Nothing from Sam. I quit my job, broke up with my girlfriend, bought health insurance, and started making pancakes with chocolate milk every morning. No answer from Sam. I scraped the leftover pancake batter into the trash, left the bowl to soak, and went to check my email. The inbox had one new message. From Sam. With images of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan flashing through my head, I immediately opened the letter and leaned forward to read the first of what became many incomprehensible, inexplicable, and unintentionally hilarious letters written by Ethiopians:
Hi Asad , you can come through visitor visa and once you arrive here we process you to get a residence permit here and to
get a residence permit here we will write letters to the concerned government organs once you arrive here . Since i am
leaving the bar to conduct my further studies abroad you can keep on contacting the president of the bar ,getachew since
the governing board is looking forward to meet you ,donot feel strange
sam
My jaw dropped. I was dumbstruck. I couldn’t stop laughing. I read the letter again, aloud. It was outrageous! Scandalous! I couldn’t help but adore his brazenness. After six weeks of chasing him, I couldn’t help but love how the only answer I got from him was that he had been planning on leaving the organization all the while.
The only downside to Sam’s spectacular email, aside from the fact that I wouldn’t get to meet him, was that I still hadn’t received any of the information I needed. I emailed Getachew, the President of the EBA, in the hopes that he would be able to fill in the missing pieces. A familiar pattern followed, to the extent that a week before we were to leave Toronto, I had given up on getting anything from the EBA. Instead, I made up a plan that was quickly filed with the CBA and completely forgotten as soon as it was out of my hands.
After filing the plan, things became even more silent. I slowly packed my things and moved them to my parents’ house. Nothing came from the EBA. Stephen Lewis torched the South African government for its obsolete response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. I took a day in Scarborough, picking up records with Eddy and looking at phones in Pacific Mall. Still nothing. I paid a visit to the dentist and had some wisdom teeth taken out. No answer. Still on painkillers, I spent an afternoon making last minute sock and underwear purchases, in a determined effort to pre-empt any untoward heat rashes baked under the brutish African sun. Woozy from the drugs, I wandered into my brother’s office and shot off one last email to the EBA, reminding them of my planned arrival time and telling them not to bother meeting me, as Robyn’s NGO would pick us up.
A week later, I was sitting at an internet café in Heathrow with Salman. He was on his way to Uganda, and I was waiting for Robyn so we could fly to Dubai. We did our last-minute email checks. To my surprise and relief, there were two emails from Getachew - one acknowledging my arrival schedule and another detailing exactly what work I would be doing. No one was coming to meet us, there was no overpriced hotel reservation, and the work plan was almost exactly what I had filed with the CBA. Things seemed to be falling into place, which is why I was so surprised to see a sign with my name on it as Robyn and I walked out into the reception area. Stale scent of urine aside, this was the first sign that Addis had its own way of working things out.
ARRIVAL & THE SEARCH BEGINS...
“Hello Mr. Asad!” The large man carrying the sign with my name was grinning from ear to ear. He was dressed for winter, with a black sweater and blazer layered over his dark shirt. Hi smile was infections. “Glad you made it! I am Alemu. Ato Getachew asked me to pick you from the airport!” I introduced him to Robyn, and the four of us made our way to the parking lot. There was a moment of mild heartbreak as Robyn and I got into separate cars for the ride to the hotel, our first separation of more than six feet in over two days.
Ato Alemu directed me to his car, a large ramshackle Land Cruiser that had once been white, but was now tinted orange by the dust that had no doubt battered the truck for much of its life. He popped the trunk, apologizing for not helping me with the bags as he had a bad back. I told him not to worry about it. Considering he was at least twice my age, it would have been churlish to carp about the lack of a porter to accompany my surprise escort. With Robyn and her driver following, we headed for the city. I tried to guess where we were headed, but the streets were so confusing I was soon lost without the aid of my Bradt guide maps. We rolled through wide boulevards and narrow connecting streets, past packs of dogs sunning themselves in the middle of the road, skirted by crowds of street hawkers and panhandlers.
The Land Cruiser pulled up a steep hill at the gates of the guesthouse we had been recommended, and which Robyn’s boss had booked us two rooms. Ato Alemu got out of the car and began speaking in low tones with the lady in charge. Robyn and I exited and watched with curiosity as the conversation became increasingly energetic. Alemu walked up a set of stairs to the guesthouse watchtower/office, then back down, chasing the conversation the entire way. The talks returned to the courtyard floor as a horribly scrawny cat wandered between the two. There was a pause as another employee of the guesthouse was summoned for clarification purposes. After another five minutes of back and forth, Alemu threw his hands up in disgust and clambered back into the Land Cruiser. I quickly followed Alemu and Robyn jumped into her car as we backed out of the guesthouse.
“What happened?”
“There is a problem,” he said. “They don’t have any rooms right now.”
“They don’t? Didn’t they have the reservations?”
“No, there is no reservation,” he said, obviously frustrated. “The lady said Mahedere made the bookings, but she never made the reservations. So she didn’t keep the rooms.”
His aggravation was plain, so I left the subject - as well as the puzzle of reservation-less bookings - alone as he drove on to another nearby guesthouse. This was clearly the second sign.
We were equally unsuccessful at the next guesthouse, whose only redeeming feature was its complete collection of Disney cartoons on VHS. Running short of affordable places to look at, Robyn and I scoured the Bradt Guide for suggestions. We threw suggestions at Alemu, most of which he rejected on the basis of location or cleanliness. Ultimately, we were left with Central Showa Hotel. The neutral if bland description in the Bradt Guide, seconded by Alemu, left us with little to go on other than the price:
Central Showa Hotel...One of several hotels strung along Hailie Gebre Selassie Road, this popular high-rise charges birr
165/196 for a dbl/twin with a fridge, telephone, DSTV and hot shower. A decent restaurant serves local and foreign
dishes.
WELCOME TO CENTRAL SHOA...
Two hours later, I was standing in a garish hotel room, looking up at ceiling tiles stained brown by water damage, listening to the clamouring of two enormous pigeons on the balcony, the only thing I could think was that I needed to sleep. I walked over to Robyn’s room down the hall. It was identical to mine, except that it didn’t have a phone. Instead, there was a small TV on the dresser, which my room didn’t have. We tried it, but there was no satellite - just the local ETV. She tried the shower - no hot water. I went back to my room to take a shower, only to discover there was no shower curtain. It didn’t matter. Central Shoa Number 3 was cheap enough and clean enough and comfortable enough and we were tired enough that it might as well have been the Sheraton.
Central Shoa quickly became our home. We spent two weeks there, having the same breakfast in the restaurant every morning, and waking up the same guard and night receptionist when we came home. We searched for houses with varying degrees of commitment. Aside from the bathrooms, life at the hotel was too comfortable. Robyn had switched to the room next to mine, which not only had a phone and TV, but intermittent hot water and a shower curtain as well. I didn’t bother changing rooms, since the only issue I had was the lack of shower curtain and the rowdy pigeons that kept trying to climb in the bathroom window.
Whenever I showered, I was sure to leave the toilet seat lid up, in order to keep the seat as dry as possible. The dust and pollution in Addis, however, demanded that we shower at least twice, if not three times daily. The obvious result was that my bathroom floor was perpetually flooded from my morning shower until the early hours of the morning, when the lake from the third shower finally evaporated. It would have been a more manageable situation had I remembered to bring flip-flops with me, but I instead found myself creeping around the cracked tiles on my toes, doing my best to avoid the ever-murkier sludge collecting beneath.
With a house finally procured and only a couple of days left in our stay, the toilet flush stopped working properly. It was a pull-handle that came out of the tank-lid, so whenever you wanted to flush the toilet, you had to lift the lid with both hands and pull the entire apparatus out of the tank. Countless times, having finished my business, I hovered over the commode, holding the lid six inches above the tank while the toilet finished its own business. The day before we were to move out, frustration got the better of me when pulling the lid, and I gave it an extra tug of spite that had the altogether undesired effect of cleaving the flush handle from the rest of the mechanism lying hidden in the tank. There I stood, watching water flush through the bowl for the last time, the chipped pink ceramic lid in my hands, the plastic flush handle dangling from beneath, water dripping into the already burgeoning pool of shower dredge stagnating around my feet.
I hadn’t bothered telling hotel management about the first toilet problem, and I certainly wasn’t going to bother with this one. Instead, I replaced the now-disintegrating lid as delicately as possible and proceeded to use the hotel restaurant’s toilets over our last day and a half. It was a delicate balance, and disaster was only narrowly averted when there was a few hours delay in paying our bill. That particular fiasco - which nearly led to a much, much messier one - resulted from the hotel’s refusal to take credit cards, despite over thirty different signs and stickers advertising its use of Visa. Yet in spite of its many minor failings - no credit cards, shower curtains, hot water, TV or windows that would shut properly - Central Shoa held a special place in our hearts, and it certainly seemed like home.
We didn’t even see our first cockroach until Wednesday.
As we bent over beneath a large pillar, checking our money and passports, relocking our bags and securing the straps, a faint familiar smell drifted through the arrivals hall. I looked up and scanned the room, but nothing had changed. No one was smoking, no more doors had been opened, and no stray animals had paraded through the building. All the other passengers had left the baggage claim area. The smell disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving us truly alone in the giant hall. We hoisted our bags and started for the exit.
Walking out into the open-air reception area, we were hit not by vagabonds and thieves, but by the same smell that had tiptoed through the baggage claim. It wasn’t the powerful blast that threatens to dislodge passengers stepping out of the hermetically sealed airports in London or Toronto, but a slight nudge, as though Addis was welcoming us home.
The intermittent breeze was dusted with pale scents of smoke, grass and fresh air. Even under a slightly graying afternoon sky, the air danced around our shoulders. I felt an inward tug and a smirk crept across my face, appreciating the inside joke. The air sparkled with the lustrous memories of childhood. I drew in my grin and turned to Robyn to let her in on the secret: “It’s just like Pakistan.”
The fond remembrances were gone within minutes, dissipating in the face of the irrepressible currents of peculiarity and confusion subtly directing Addis Ababa. Home was home, but Addis took little time in sweeping away any misgivings created by the circumstances of our arrival.
PRE-ARRIVAL...
Stepping out into the reception area, we both instantly saw our greeters. Robyn had been assured by her NGO that there would be someone waiting to pick her up, whereas the infrequent and vague nature of the conversations I had with my supervisor had only cemented my belief that there would be no one waiting for me. In fact, of all the alleged information I had received from my organization since our first contact in early July, the only piece of useful, concrete news was the email I had received days before I left Canada.
I had been in an irregular email conversation with Samuel (whose name I later discovered was pronounced Sam-well, as if he were an Abyssinian hobbit), the Executive Director of the Ethiopian Bar Association (EBA), about setting up my initial stay and the projects I would be working on. The Canadian Bar Association (CBA), our program sponsors, had given us rough outlines of what to expect and the needs of our host organizations, but we were still required to file a work plan with the CBA prior to leaving. In spite of my best pestering, nothing of use was forthcoming from Sam. He kept avoiding the issue of work plans, even as July became August and the day of departure crept nearer.
Robyn and I had booked flights to spend a week in the UK prior to arriving in Addis, and our planes were scheduled to arrive in London on September 11, and then in Addis on the 18th. I emailed Sam again about whether or not I should get a visitor’s visa. There was no response, so Robyn and I went ahead and got business visas instead. Nothing from Sam. I quit my job, broke up with my girlfriend, bought health insurance, and started making pancakes with chocolate milk every morning. No answer from Sam. I scraped the leftover pancake batter into the trash, left the bowl to soak, and went to check my email. The inbox had one new message. From Sam. With images of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan flashing through my head, I immediately opened the letter and leaned forward to read the first of what became many incomprehensible, inexplicable, and unintentionally hilarious letters written by Ethiopians:
Hi Asad , you can come through visitor visa and once you arrive here we process you to get a residence permit here and to
get a residence permit here we will write letters to the concerned government organs once you arrive here . Since i am
leaving the bar to conduct my further studies abroad you can keep on contacting the president of the bar ,getachew since
the governing board is looking forward to meet you ,donot feel strange
sam
My jaw dropped. I was dumbstruck. I couldn’t stop laughing. I read the letter again, aloud. It was outrageous! Scandalous! I couldn’t help but adore his brazenness. After six weeks of chasing him, I couldn’t help but love how the only answer I got from him was that he had been planning on leaving the organization all the while.
The only downside to Sam’s spectacular email, aside from the fact that I wouldn’t get to meet him, was that I still hadn’t received any of the information I needed. I emailed Getachew, the President of the EBA, in the hopes that he would be able to fill in the missing pieces. A familiar pattern followed, to the extent that a week before we were to leave Toronto, I had given up on getting anything from the EBA. Instead, I made up a plan that was quickly filed with the CBA and completely forgotten as soon as it was out of my hands.
After filing the plan, things became even more silent. I slowly packed my things and moved them to my parents’ house. Nothing came from the EBA. Stephen Lewis torched the South African government for its obsolete response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. I took a day in Scarborough, picking up records with Eddy and looking at phones in Pacific Mall. Still nothing. I paid a visit to the dentist and had some wisdom teeth taken out. No answer. Still on painkillers, I spent an afternoon making last minute sock and underwear purchases, in a determined effort to pre-empt any untoward heat rashes baked under the brutish African sun. Woozy from the drugs, I wandered into my brother’s office and shot off one last email to the EBA, reminding them of my planned arrival time and telling them not to bother meeting me, as Robyn’s NGO would pick us up.
A week later, I was sitting at an internet café in Heathrow with Salman. He was on his way to Uganda, and I was waiting for Robyn so we could fly to Dubai. We did our last-minute email checks. To my surprise and relief, there were two emails from Getachew - one acknowledging my arrival schedule and another detailing exactly what work I would be doing. No one was coming to meet us, there was no overpriced hotel reservation, and the work plan was almost exactly what I had filed with the CBA. Things seemed to be falling into place, which is why I was so surprised to see a sign with my name on it as Robyn and I walked out into the reception area. Stale scent of urine aside, this was the first sign that Addis had its own way of working things out.
ARRIVAL & THE SEARCH BEGINS...
“Hello Mr. Asad!” The large man carrying the sign with my name was grinning from ear to ear. He was dressed for winter, with a black sweater and blazer layered over his dark shirt. Hi smile was infections. “Glad you made it! I am Alemu. Ato Getachew asked me to pick you from the airport!” I introduced him to Robyn, and the four of us made our way to the parking lot. There was a moment of mild heartbreak as Robyn and I got into separate cars for the ride to the hotel, our first separation of more than six feet in over two days.
Ato Alemu directed me to his car, a large ramshackle Land Cruiser that had once been white, but was now tinted orange by the dust that had no doubt battered the truck for much of its life. He popped the trunk, apologizing for not helping me with the bags as he had a bad back. I told him not to worry about it. Considering he was at least twice my age, it would have been churlish to carp about the lack of a porter to accompany my surprise escort. With Robyn and her driver following, we headed for the city. I tried to guess where we were headed, but the streets were so confusing I was soon lost without the aid of my Bradt guide maps. We rolled through wide boulevards and narrow connecting streets, past packs of dogs sunning themselves in the middle of the road, skirted by crowds of street hawkers and panhandlers.
The Land Cruiser pulled up a steep hill at the gates of the guesthouse we had been recommended, and which Robyn’s boss had booked us two rooms. Ato Alemu got out of the car and began speaking in low tones with the lady in charge. Robyn and I exited and watched with curiosity as the conversation became increasingly energetic. Alemu walked up a set of stairs to the guesthouse watchtower/office, then back down, chasing the conversation the entire way. The talks returned to the courtyard floor as a horribly scrawny cat wandered between the two. There was a pause as another employee of the guesthouse was summoned for clarification purposes. After another five minutes of back and forth, Alemu threw his hands up in disgust and clambered back into the Land Cruiser. I quickly followed Alemu and Robyn jumped into her car as we backed out of the guesthouse.
“What happened?”
“There is a problem,” he said. “They don’t have any rooms right now.”
“They don’t? Didn’t they have the reservations?”
“No, there is no reservation,” he said, obviously frustrated. “The lady said Mahedere made the bookings, but she never made the reservations. So she didn’t keep the rooms.”
His aggravation was plain, so I left the subject - as well as the puzzle of reservation-less bookings - alone as he drove on to another nearby guesthouse. This was clearly the second sign.
We were equally unsuccessful at the next guesthouse, whose only redeeming feature was its complete collection of Disney cartoons on VHS. Running short of affordable places to look at, Robyn and I scoured the Bradt Guide for suggestions. We threw suggestions at Alemu, most of which he rejected on the basis of location or cleanliness. Ultimately, we were left with Central Showa Hotel. The neutral if bland description in the Bradt Guide, seconded by Alemu, left us with little to go on other than the price:
Central Showa Hotel...One of several hotels strung along Hailie Gebre Selassie Road, this popular high-rise charges birr
165/196 for a dbl/twin with a fridge, telephone, DSTV and hot shower. A decent restaurant serves local and foreign
dishes.
WELCOME TO CENTRAL SHOA...
Two hours later, I was standing in a garish hotel room, looking up at ceiling tiles stained brown by water damage, listening to the clamouring of two enormous pigeons on the balcony, the only thing I could think was that I needed to sleep. I walked over to Robyn’s room down the hall. It was identical to mine, except that it didn’t have a phone. Instead, there was a small TV on the dresser, which my room didn’t have. We tried it, but there was no satellite - just the local ETV. She tried the shower - no hot water. I went back to my room to take a shower, only to discover there was no shower curtain. It didn’t matter. Central Shoa Number 3 was cheap enough and clean enough and comfortable enough and we were tired enough that it might as well have been the Sheraton.
Central Shoa quickly became our home. We spent two weeks there, having the same breakfast in the restaurant every morning, and waking up the same guard and night receptionist when we came home. We searched for houses with varying degrees of commitment. Aside from the bathrooms, life at the hotel was too comfortable. Robyn had switched to the room next to mine, which not only had a phone and TV, but intermittent hot water and a shower curtain as well. I didn’t bother changing rooms, since the only issue I had was the lack of shower curtain and the rowdy pigeons that kept trying to climb in the bathroom window.
Whenever I showered, I was sure to leave the toilet seat lid up, in order to keep the seat as dry as possible. The dust and pollution in Addis, however, demanded that we shower at least twice, if not three times daily. The obvious result was that my bathroom floor was perpetually flooded from my morning shower until the early hours of the morning, when the lake from the third shower finally evaporated. It would have been a more manageable situation had I remembered to bring flip-flops with me, but I instead found myself creeping around the cracked tiles on my toes, doing my best to avoid the ever-murkier sludge collecting beneath.
With a house finally procured and only a couple of days left in our stay, the toilet flush stopped working properly. It was a pull-handle that came out of the tank-lid, so whenever you wanted to flush the toilet, you had to lift the lid with both hands and pull the entire apparatus out of the tank. Countless times, having finished my business, I hovered over the commode, holding the lid six inches above the tank while the toilet finished its own business. The day before we were to move out, frustration got the better of me when pulling the lid, and I gave it an extra tug of spite that had the altogether undesired effect of cleaving the flush handle from the rest of the mechanism lying hidden in the tank. There I stood, watching water flush through the bowl for the last time, the chipped pink ceramic lid in my hands, the plastic flush handle dangling from beneath, water dripping into the already burgeoning pool of shower dredge stagnating around my feet.
I hadn’t bothered telling hotel management about the first toilet problem, and I certainly wasn’t going to bother with this one. Instead, I replaced the now-disintegrating lid as delicately as possible and proceeded to use the hotel restaurant’s toilets over our last day and a half. It was a delicate balance, and disaster was only narrowly averted when there was a few hours delay in paying our bill. That particular fiasco - which nearly led to a much, much messier one - resulted from the hotel’s refusal to take credit cards, despite over thirty different signs and stickers advertising its use of Visa. Yet in spite of its many minor failings - no credit cards, shower curtains, hot water, TV or windows that would shut properly - Central Shoa held a special place in our hearts, and it certainly seemed like home.
We didn’t even see our first cockroach until Wednesday.