Chapter IV - Ethiopia I
So I've been working on a book about my travels 2012-2022. Well I've spent I think nearly two years now just on the first year, which is not a very promising pace to ever finish but I think it's accelerating now a bit. In other news, writing a book length memoir is an interesting endeavour with entirely different challenges from the usual short story writing, and I assume even from writing a fiction novel, as it requires a lot of introspection to identify the plot arcs and to portray the protagonist as going on a fully fleshed out character journey.
Anyway I had posted the first three chapters here, and if you missed them and/or fancy reading everything up to this point all in one place, please to be seeing this google doc; and if you do read it, any feedback is always appreciated!
And now, the first draft of Chapter IV: Ethiopia I, is complete and so I'll proceed to post it here in bite sized chunks (or you can read the whole thing here, which I'm always grateful if someone wants to read it all in one go so they'll see it in the context of itself as intended)
Pictures won't necessarily go in the final book since novels don't usually have pictures, but then again, if it proves feasible to include some pictures why not. Art should stretch boundaries after all, not rigidly conform to established norms.
[ In the immediately prior section I was just finishing the Nigeria project]
[if I could somehow re-create this image from the in flight map without all the blur it would be a good illustration for right here]
Sunday, April 22nd, 2012, Day 16 in Africa - In the dark of night, from 30,000 feet above, southern Sudan is a vast expanse of darkness with just a few faintly flickering orange specks. Then as one crosses over into Ethiopia one senses the ground below rising up in an endless series of mountains. Finally the plane clears one last ridge and reveals a galaxy of blueish electric lights twinkling like stars reflected in a pool - Addis Ababa.
I breeze through the airport passport control and the baggage claim, emerging from the terminal expecting to find a someone holding a sign with my name on it, but I look around in the chilly night air in vain. Presently, seeing me looking flummoxed, a young woman who has been booking people into her hotel asks me if I need help.
“There’s supposed to be people here to meet me but I don’t see them” I explain
“Can you call them?” she suggests
“I have a number for them but my phone has no service in Ethiopia”
“Here use mine”
“Are you sure? I don’t have any money to pay you with” I have cynically learned that in some places (*cough* Egypt *cough*) nothing is free to tourists.
“Haha yeah no problem at all” she answers laughingly. I call the contact from the Organization and he informs me the driver is just running a little late. I chat with the woman for a few minutes until the man from the Organization shows up. What friendly people they are here.
Arriving at my hotel, the porter, a young man named Addis, takes my bags, and in the lobby, under an ornate chandelier, an attractive female receptionist named Addis checks me in. Welcome to Addis!
The porter Addis shows me to an elegantly appointed room and flits around the intricately carved wooden bed frame to turn on all the light switches and TV, as seems to be the custom when showing a guest to their room throughout Africa. When he leaves I look for all the switches to turn half of them off, especially the TV, and then finally have a moment to marvel at how elegantly appointed this hotel room is, and it costs less than a Motel 6 back in the States.
[There's a few more foreshadowing remarks about Egypt before eventually the storyline will actually arrive there]
Monday, April 23rd, Day 17 - Complimentary breakfast in the hotel is a buffet, which is normal the world over, but where in other places coffee might be available in an urn, this is Ethiopia, and coffee is serious business, so it’s made to order and attractive waitress Samrawit brings it out to me just as I’m about to dig in to what I mistakenly believe is scrambled eggs.
Just as I take a big mouthful of what is not in fact scrambled eggs but a sort of scrambled version of injera, the national dish, Samrawit informs me rather nonsequiturly that I’m very handsome. Injera, when not diced up to resemble scrambled eggs, is like a large crepe, and often, as is the present case, quite sour, and not at all like what one expects scrambled eggs to taste like. I nearly gag from surprise at both the flavor and the unexpected compliment.
[the above paragraph is included both “because it happened,” but I’m worried this may be taken as like I’m trying to portray myself as a lady magnet which isn’t a good look, what do you think?]
I have a meeting with the Organization’s staff at “4:00 this morning” on this date in 2004, which is fine because I traveled back in time whilst hurtling through the darkness last night in a pressurized tin Ethiopian Airlines tube with wings. Ethiopia, you see, doesn’t use the same (Gregorian) calendar the rest of the world does, and by Ethiopian reckoning it is not April 23rd 2012 but 15th of Miaziah, 2004. I’ve posted on facebook informing my friends that I’ve traveled to 2004, and they are commenting that I should buy stock in Apple while I’m there..
And time itself runs differently here: they don’t consider the clock to start counting from midnight till noon and again from noon to midnight but rather from dawn (standardized as what we’d call 6am) to dusk (standardized at what we’d call 6pm). So my meeting at 4 is actually at what I’d consider 10.
[is this date / time stuff too confusing? I definitely want to note their different date / time system but maybe there's a better way to go about it? Even deleting the "15th of Miaziah" but leaving the time and year difference might streamline it?]
The staff of the Organization take me to their office which isn’t far from the hotel, and after we’ve gone over some things there we drive across town, which takes an hour in the city traffic, to meet with the Other Organization they are partnering with to put on this conference. The sky is grey and threatening to drizzle, and the air is chilly. At 7700 feet Addis Ababa is on par in altitude with American ski towns such as Mammoth and Aspen. It seems to me every fourth lot in the city is a construction site (and every fifth lot appears to be a bank), and I note a surprising number of women in dresses splattered with grey mud pushing wheelbarrows of concrete at the construction sites.
The Other Organization has the extremely creative name of OCAV-ODCA. In their office I meet Mr Mulufird, who may represent the Other Organization in Ethiopia, or is high up in the Ethiopian ministry of Agriculture, or both. He goes over the plan for the project:
“Ethiopia has a long tradition of beekeeping” Mr Mulufird explains to me, “the Ethiopian government has organized unemployed youth to produce 60,000 frame hives per year. These are sold at a subsidized price to farmers throughout Ethiopia, but their traditions and knowledge are for traditional hives, not frame hives, and this is why we’ve organized this training.”
“How much are they sold for?” I ask, pen hovering eagerly over notepad
“800 birr” he says, and seeing me struggling to make sense of the 17.5 birr to 1 USD exchange rate he continues “that’s about $46. Which is a problem since the farmers only make an average of 200 birr per month, or around $12. But frame hives can produce twice as much honey as a traditional hive and Ethiopia has a very strong potential in beekeeping.”
“With a frame hive of course you need a spinner to extract the honey, do they have spinners?” I ask
“There’s some co-ops and NGOs that are making spinners available to them” he explains. I’m wondering just how easily accessible these resources are, but I guess I’ll find out.
“For this project we’ll hold three different training sessions in different parts of Ethiopia. Bahir Dar and Finote Selam in the Amhara province to the northwest, and in the town of Korem in the Tigray province in the highlands of the northeast. In addition two other volunteers will be doing beekeeping projects in the mountains of the West and southern forests.”
The ambitiousness of this project makes my head spin a bit. The projects in Nigeria had turned out alright but they weren’t expecting me to help revolutionize an industry on a national scale. I smile at Mulufird with a confidence I don’t feel.
So there you go. Hopefully these two scenes bring the reader to Ethiopia without too much exposition, mention the time thing without too much confusion, and established a sense of narrative tension in the project's goals.
This chapter lacks the historical-fiction flashbacks that Nigeria I had, partly because they didn't seem to play well with readers over at scribophile.com, though I suspect they may be a bunch of philistines. Experimenting with doing a few little things a bit different in the different chapters to get a feel for what works best and then maybe in the end I'll bring them all in concordance with eachother.
Original entry covering these days.