the side of the road can be a magical place

This morning I went to visit a couple of farms where five elephants were shot late last year, but that is another story entirely, and if I get closer to a grip on it, I will share later on. But in far more trivial matters, my truck was covered with dust and crusted dirt and splattered bugs and really needed a bath. So on the way back, I stopped at a CAR WASH sign on the roadside – in front of a few poles covered over with green shade netting and no indication of anyone working there. I got out anyway.

“Hellooooo,” I called, wondering if someone was in the house just behind the netting.

“Hello!” came a voice from the other side. Snake, as I soon found out was his name, was apparently more often called Rasta [in honor of his hair] by the friends passing by in cars and on foot over the next hour and a half.  I asked if he was the one washing cars and he said yes; we agreed on a price and I maneuvered my truck under the shade into the spot he preferred. He brought out a camp chair for me and I sat to wait, sweating and squinting in the afternoon sun.

I took the time to write notes from the morning’s farm visits; since these were first encounters touching on a sensitive issue I did not want to show up with a notebook and say hey, can I ask you about those dead elephants? I thought it would be wiser to introduce myself and chat a little, invite the farmers to the upcoming kgotla meeting, and leave it at that for a first visit. I have been thinking a lot lately about the importance of the ‘coming back’ in my research, how repeat visits shift the feel and content of conversations and interviews, and how a simple thing such as coming to ask permission first and then returning for an interview later can tune the tenor of a discussion.

At some point in my scribbling, in between looking up at Snake’s meticulous scrubbing and rinsing and greeting those folks walking past who greeted me, I realized that it was probably not every day that a white girl sat at Snake’s place on the roadside to wait for her car to be washed. Most white people here have someone working for them to do this at home. So I grinned to myself at being a bit of a curiosity.

A shiny little white car slid to a stop at the roadside just a few yards away. A young man got out and walked up to me in my chair; “I was just driving by and I thought I should greet you!” he said.

“Ahhh, but it has been a loooong time!” I said with delight, seeing Thata’s face beaming back at me. Thata was a student on the first field school in which I was a faculty member, one of the few African students in the group. We hugged and chatted; “I’m just around, helping my mom,” he replied when I enquired what he was up to. I got his number, both of us excited by the possibility of him helping me with translation and some work in the village. He climbed back into his car and I sat back down in my chair.

Finishing my notes, I put away my pen and paper. Snake asked, “I must vacuum also, no?”

“Yes, please, if you can,” I replied, not sure about the equipment or the electricity. But Snake was prepared; I retrieved my Ipod from inside the car to entertain myself.

A few minutes later, a little girl of perhaps three who had been peeking at me from the side of the house wandered up beside me. She looked at the Ipod; I shaded it with one hand so she could see the screen more easily. The cards from my hand of Solitaire flipped quickly to their piles as I won the game and she watched intently. I opened up my photos, bringing up a video of wild dogs on the side of the road I’d shot on the way into Kasane. “Dijo,” I said. “Dijo,” she said. She was transfixed, leaning in now, pressing her head against my arm. Soon she aimed her first finger carefully at the screen, mimicking the way I touched the pictures to make them move.

I played a video of my nephew feeding the giraffes at the zoo in Colorado; every time he reached up with a lettuce leaf that got swiped by a long purply tongue, he giggled. Then I giggled. Then the little girl giggled. We watched the video three or four times as she worked her way closer to me, up against my arm, then under it, then draping herself over my left thigh and popping the screen with her index finger to make the images jump.

She looked up at me. I pointed into my chest and said slowly and clearly, “Rachel. Rachel.” I pointed to her chest. “You?” I repeated my name and looked a question at her.

She pointed to my chest. “Ratcha.” She did it again. “Ratcha.” Then she pointed silently to herself.

“Ah, but is she not bothering you?” Snake asked me. I’d had the feeling he was moving more and more slowly as we watched giraffes and wild dogs and giggled, running his cloth over every crack and crevice two, three times, cleaning the dashboard and the doors and the windows meticulously, but with a lightness that showed he noted our playing and perhaps wanted to give us more time.

“Not even a little,” I said. I proceeded to show her how we could take a picture of the truck as he washed it, and of her, and of us together when I switched to the front camera. She giggled wildly and crawled up onto me like I was a tree.

When Snake finally finished, I stood and she skittered away. “Stay a little, let it dry some more,” he urged. “That one from before, who was here, he is my cousin,” he added proudly.

“Ohhh, good, I have known Thata for a long time,” I said, both of us pleased at this connection. I asked him the little girl’s name. “She is Thamelo, my daughter,” Snake said.

We chatted a bit about tourism, and his work, and my work, and elephants. “They are trouble,” he said somberly. An old man who had just zoomed in on a bike added, “They finish your garden in one night, just like that, you sleep and you wake and it is finished.” I told them about the upcoming meeting with the chief to talk about the problem and said I hoped they’d come.

I fished coins out of the side pocket of my bag to pay; I was five pula short, or he had to break a 200 pula bill. He couldn’t. “No problem, it’s enough,” he said easily, readily, taking five pula less than we agreed. “You can pass by any time and I will clean for you, and if I am not here, then there will be some boys here to do it for you, no problem.”

I thanked him several times. “Ah, I’m sorry, hey! I will bring the other five when I pass by tomorrow,” I said, but he was unconcerned, waving me off, smiling on the side of the road.

visas and waiting and henna

By the time I noticed that everyone but me had a big purple dot stuck on their boarding passes, I was almost to the front of the line. So I handed mine to the gate attendant, already knowing this wasn't going to go well. But how-not-well I could not have guessed.

"Show me visa," she demanded.  I opened my passport to the page with my Ethiopian visa. "For Djibouti," she corrected.

"I don't need one, I can get it at the airport, I'm an American," I said, geturing at my passport, confused. Let it also be noted that I think this is the first time I have ever said to anyone while traveling, in a situation in which I was being questioned, "I'm an American" like it was an answer for something. And I would love for it to be the last.

"Do you have an ID?" she asked. This was a odd question, I thought, since I had handed her my passport already, which one could consider the mother of all IDs.

"This is my passport, so, what do you mean?" I asked her.

"Military ID," she said.

Military? What alternate universe had the stairs from the boarding area led me down into?

"Nooo," I replied, waiting, straining at the impulse to say something sarcastic.

"Wait," she instructed, pointing to her left, as she reached behind me for the next passenger's boarding pass.

"I don't understand, I don't need a visa, I talked to my friend there yesterday, and I can get a tourist visa on arrival," I said, tasting the irritation rising.

"No more, no more visa at airport, go upstairs and talk to supervisor," she said curtly.

I pushed my way back up against the line of passengers coming down to board the bus to the plane. Up at the gate, I found a dozen people crowded around the desk, voices loud and angry in at least three different languages. I waited. An older man waving a Belgian passport started talking to me through the gap of his four missing front teeth from both the top and bottom of his mouth. That, and the thickness of his French accent, made it a bit difficult to follow the particularities. But I did catch bits of "sheeet" and "fooocking" and other spit-punctuated niceties with which I wholeheartedly agreed.

When my turn finally arrived, I did the same visa-ID-invitationletter-thislooksreallybadforyou dance with the man behind the desk. Finally, I said, "I just want to go as a tourist for ten days. Ten. Days. And I have a return ticket," I stated plainly.

"Show me," he replied. I handed it over. He smiled and stuck a big fat purple circle on my boarding pass. Back down the stairs I went, wondering, what the hell was all that about?

It took all of 55 minutes to fly to Djibouti City. On arrival, we were herded into the terminal to wait. There was a line specifically for visitors with no visas, and it was significant. So much for the no-visa-at-the-airport issue. Once again I declined to shove my way to the front and waited. Eventually I handed my arrival form and passport to the man in the glass box and showed him my return ticket. He nodded, seeming to indicate no problem, and took my form and passport to the visa in a stack of others to the issuing office behind me.

I waited.

Standing outside the little office, I started chatting with a guy probably about ten years younger than me who said he was born in Djibouti but grew up in the UK. "I don't even like coming here, honestly, it is just such a mess," he said. I related my growing love of Botswana's relative ease of navigability compared to the last weeks in Ethiopia. We bonded. We waited. We kept advising the Yemeni guy standing nearby that he should really not try to bolt into the visa office every time the door opened but that he, too, should just. Wait.

Finally the three of us were admitted to the office, the last three remaining people from the flight. Apparently the Yemeni guy had been in China and this seemed to be some kind of issue. He was pretty jittery, that guy. And the official issuing the visas just could not figure out what to do about me.

"What are you doing in Djibouti?" he asked me when my turn finally arrived, his tone tilting towards accusatory but almost more puzzled than anything. I explained that I just wanted to visit, that I had a friend here and that I just wanted to be a tourist for ten days. He asked for the address where I would stay, which I had already written on the form in front of him. He asked me how I knew my friend. I said we had studied together in the US.  I showed him my return ticket. I showed him Ladan's email and contact information. I showed him her husband's contact information. He made a call. I sat. And waited.

Another officer came to the door of the small office. "Miss Rashelle Demoss?" he asked. I had a feeling.

"Yes," I said calmly. "Is Ladan looking for me outside?"

She was. In fact, they had started to turn out the lights in the airport and her concern led her to ask one of the officers outside to go and see if I was still in there. And there I was.

Remarkably, the officer returned momentarily with Ladan and her two daughters in tow. I could not believe that they had just let her in, but I am also familiar with her powers of persuasion. The girls were so excited to see me and so affectionate that they guy behind the desk asked if they were mine. Ilwaad, who is approaching four, hugged me repeatedly. Then she hugged the guy behind the desk. I grinned and kept quiet.

The conversations switched to Somali. It seemed that he then began asking Ladan everything that he had already asked me. More phone calls were made. More conversation ensued. And I waited.

Finally, at a moment that followed nothing in particular, I saw him insert a blank visa sticker into the printer, wait for it to slide out the top, and adhere my permission to my passport. They unlocked the doors to let us out after picking up my backpack, and away we went.

The afternoon was the perfect antidote to annoyance. We sank into the couches in Ladan's sitting room, sipping cool hibiscus flower juice and pulling the curtains over the sunny windows to help keep the air conditioning inside (it is a lot freaking hotter in Djibouti than it was in Ethiopia). The girls giggled and played. We talked. Sitting down to lunch, Mariam, who is seven, asked me, "If you are in our family, then why are you a different color than me?"

We had told the girls to call me Auntie, which while relatively normal with many of my friends' kids, is apparently not usual for them. So I tried to explain to Mariam about kinds of family, about how we all have the family into which we are born, the one that we are given. But sometimes when we are really lucky, when we live our lives we find other people who feel like our family to us, even if they were born far away and look completely different. This, I told her, is what it is like for me and your mom, so that is why you and your sister are like my family, too.

Her expression turned especially serious and thoughtful, but I don't think she quite understood. Later, though, when it was getting dark and Ilwaad turned to me and asked, "Can you stay here with us?" This made me think, I hope they learn what I meant by feeling.

In the afternoon, a woman named Yasmin was fetched to paint us all with henna in preparation for the Eid Moubarak celebrations coming up on Friday. First, she decorated my hands with scrolling curving vines and flowers, tipping the ends of my fingers with the thick chocolatey paste, squeezing delicate swirling lines onto my skin like a pastry chef icing the perfect cake. Then, I think Dekha gave up her turn so that I could also have my feet done to match, but I didn't know that at the time.

Dekha, a friend of Ladan's, sat with me on the floor as Yasmin traced graceful lines along the arches of my feet. I wished I had scrubbed off some of the dry skin and dirt they carried after a month of travel, but she did not seem to mind. Yasmin spoke softly to Dekha in Somali, and they began chatting. After a few minutes passed, Dekha turned to me to translate.

"She say you are a good person, she can see," Dekha told me. I think I actually blushed; I felt a quick flush of red creeping up my neck. After so many weeks of the never ending crassly sexual aggression of Ethiopian men, such a gentle and quiet compliment warmed and embarrassed me.

I looked at Yasmin, her orange scarf slipping away from her face, so focused on my feet, copying the spontaneous glistening design of my left onto my right. "Well, I'm not so sure about that," I said, "but thank you."

"You are open, she say, she can see this," Dekha continued. I looked at Yasmin and she glanced up at me, with the quick flash of a surreptitious smile. I smiled too. This space, full of women who were so warm and welcoming, felt like refuge afer the constant harassment of walking around in Ethiopia.

I sat on the floor with the girls long past when my hands and feet were dry enough to peel and wash the excess off, trying to help them both be patient and still long enough for their to dry properly, too. Then there was spicy chai, and after sunset, little red beans cooked with wheat kernels and drizzled with sesame oil.

Yasmin kept working well into the evening, as the neighbor and her kids came over to join in. Later, I rode along when Ladan drove her home; she slipped out of the car when we paused on the main road that was apparently close enough to where she lived back in the winding neighborhoods of small dirt paths and puddles. I waved, but she had already turned her head towards home.

today sucked

(FYI, the today of which I speak here was actually last Thursday - and it has been a bit smoother since then)

There is no way around it, today was a pain in my ass. Often, I write glowingly about being away, make even the things that are hard seem lined with silver because they have some hidden redeeming value embedded in human interaction or the taking apart of some false view or a deeper appreciation of places where the basics are not so easy. This is pretty much the way I usually feel about things, so mostly, it is fair enough. 

All of these things make today suck no less.

As background, let me just say that I honestly arrived in Ethiopia with no real plan. There were three places I wanted to visit, but other than that, I had refused to lock myself into any kind of schedule. I figured that with nearly four weeks for three places I could allow myself to just get pleasantly stalled somewhere and not feel like I had to move on.

So get stalled I did, in the first place I went outside of Addis - Bahar Dar, on the shores of Lake Tana. I chose a hotel that was, let's say, more than a bit worn, but that had a beautiful garden right on the lake where I could sit and read and drink proper coffee. For the first five or six days, I did one touristy thing per day, and otherwise slept in and read and generally hung out. I made a friend of the hotel manager; we'd sit together in the evenings and sip something, talk about Meles' passing and Obama's future and here v. there and the why of certain things. It was lovely. But after about a week, I figured I should move on to Gondar.

Turns out the moving on, even to the town that is only about three hours up the road, is not simple. Unless you fly. Which of course I felt some prideful, I-am-a-traveler-not-a-tourist BS about, much preferring to get on a bus or a minibus or a donkey cart or some other local mode of getting around. Besides, I did really want to see the between-here-and-there. Maybe not the back again, but, nonetheless.

I was supposed to leave Monday, in my mind, anyway. Then it was Tuesday. Wednesday for sure I had a minibus seat. Then today arrived. You can go at ten, the manager told me, no problem. Chigarelem, is what 'no problem' sounds like in Amharic. I have heard it a lot in the last two weeks.

I got picked up at half ten. Not bad, considering that the guy who was supposed to come yesterday never showed at all, and that half an hour 'late' falls officially within the 'on time' window that I give my students when we arrive to help adjust their sense of timing.

There were three of us in the minibus, and I admit, my surprise at the lack of passengers in a vehicle that could easily carry 11 (you know, meaning minimum 16 or 17 in Africa) should have been a harbinger of things to come. But I had been having such a nicely mellow time that I didn't even bother to overthink it.

Of course we did not set off for Gondar. We went to the bus station to try to fill the remaining seats. But the mission unravelled at lightning speed. As we turned the corner off the main road into the chaos near the gates clogged with minibuses and tuktuks and big buses and people and people and people, our driver started to yell at the young man who was 'helping' him. There are always two guys working the minibuses, one who drives and one who collects fares, opens and closes the door, helps with luggage, trills 'Gondar, Gondar,' out the window to try to drum up more riders, and so on. The kid seemed to have done a perfectly reasonable job so far, but not speaking Amharic of course meant I had no clue about what was actually happening. It escalated rapidly; when we stopped on a side road across from the station the two of them were out of the vehicle and screaming at each other; the driver slapped the younger man hard across the face and got back in, driving away as the young man chased, crying, tears streaking his face in the dust.

We stopped. They seemed to reconcile, sort of. But we still did not have enough passengers. No inch of ass space can ever go wasted here, this, I know. Turning down another side street, we suddenly started backing up. And backing up. And then came a loud and deep metallic boom as we struck something and jerked to a stop. It was a tuktuk, one of the little blue and white autorickshaws that buzz around the city, and fortunately no one was in it. We promptly took off at a speed that far overestimated our ability to navigate the goings on of market stalls and donkeys and cows and goats and pedestrians and more tuktuks.

But within a couple of minutes we were stopped again, as the apparent owner of the tuk caught up to us and pulled right across our front bumper, likely in hopes of preventing us from driving off again. Our driver got out. His people followed, as the tuk owner's backup had come with him. A crowd formed and argument ensued, with lots of arm swinging and posturing and probably cursing. At least one would hope there was cursing, because it was certainly called for in this moment.

The next thing I knew, we had a new driver. He was just learning, the other one, I was told, presumably because I occupied the coveted front seat (secured for me by my friend at the hotel) when the newbie climbed in.

We made the loop again, looking for more passengers, Gondar Gondar trailing out the window with the dust and my growing trepidation. We stopped, another minibus in front of us on another side street.  I thought about getting out and hopping a tuk back to the hotel, as two other folks who had boarded with me at the hotel went off to see if anyone else was leaving to Gondar and then came back. Turns out, the out part wasn't voluntary.

This one does not have enough people, we were told as we pulled up. We were all expected to transfer to the next minibus in front of us. I decided this was not the greatest idea ever conceived, and I refused. Hiring a driver with a short enough fuse to fight with his assistant and stupid enough to smash into a tuk and then drive away did not inspire much confidence in me. I had just sent a text to my friend back at the hotel, as we were already a full hour into our 'journey' to Gondar (and not three minutes from the hotel, I promise):

Still in town. Fight. Accident. New driver. Other people leaving.

He called me immediately. Where are you? Of course I could only vaguely say somewhere near the bus station. I'm coming now, stay there, he instructed. I laughed. He'd already hung up.

Strapped into my backpack, I walked back towards the bus station. But of course, I have not yet described what it is like to be a lone white girl with big boobs just out walking around; the big backpack just adds to the freakish sideshow nature of my presence. This is no simple saunter. Absolutely every asshole sporting a dick was ready to 'help' me, 'direct' me, carry my bag, show me the way without giving a crap as to what my way actually was. Freya Stark put this well when she wrote that receiving consideration as a woman traveling alone usually meant being obstructed from what you wanted to do.

I kept walking. After a few minutes I let one of the guys who was on the first minibus with me talk me onto another one that was 'full' and leaving for Gondar. Of course it was neither. We started driving around again and I gave up, demanding my bag back, standing in the way of the sliding door as we started to drive off again, as the two women now jammed into the front seat giggled hysterically. The driver stopped and my bag was retreived from the roof; I slung it back on and started to walk.

The next car that pulled up to me was a 4x4 from the hotel. The guy sitting in the front seat wordlessly handed me his cellphone. On the other end was my friend, urging me to just get in and come back to hotel. I did, gratefully.

When we pulled up to the veranda of the hotel, the two folks with whom I'd started out were already back. We all started to laugh. Ethioooopia, the young woman said, dragging the word out and pained in tone, they all just lie about everything. We chatted for a few more minutes and then they set back out for the bus station to try again. I wished them luck.

My friend and I sat on the veranda. It was suddenly just so cool and green, I thought I could just stay and not mind missing the sights. But he had already rearranged for me, knowing that I was ready to leave, and another minibus pulled up. But this is just the same as the last, I said, eyeing three occupants in a space built for more. No, no, I know this driver, he is good, and will go directly, my friend promised. I think I knew it wasn't true, and I suspect my friend did too, but I went anyway.

Back to the bus station we went, trolling for more passengers. This time, seats filled up quickly and quietly. The driver bailed, and another young man took his place. But we did leave town within about half an hour.

The drive itself was gorgeous, the countryside and hills and mountains verdant with grass and trees and teff and water lilies flourishing in the pools of water lingering at the roadsides. How could anyone ever starve in a place so lush, I wondered for the hundredth time, thinking of the scores of skeletal images I had seen from this place over the years. The politics were completely beside me and it seemed utterly impossible.

But of course, we kept stopping along the way, for reasons which were possibly explicable to everyone but me. We almost got clipped by a truck. We came to a roadblock consisting of an overturned semi truck that forced us to crawl past its rusting hulk in the grassy gravel to the side. We ground our way further up into the mountains, creeping past other minibuses and trucks and donkey carts and hoping that the driver could actually see far enough ahead to justify the straining of low gears to get by the latest obstruction just in time. A basket on the dashboard in front of me kept slowly sliding from side to side, carrying a postcard–sized image of the Virgin Mary and some fake flowers. She had better be full of grace, I thought to myself as we whipped past another pack of donkeys loaded down with bulging sacks of something and being chased by a boy with a cracking stick.

We came into the edges of what I thought must be Gondar, and nearly rammed into a horse drawn cart that squirted into our path at the last second. The guy at the reins appeared beyond clueless, eyes glazed over, yanking ineffectually on the strips of leather in his hands. Disaster was averted, but this did not stop our supermacho driver from pulling over in front of the cart to leap out, his backseat assistant beating him to the literal punch, swinging and yelling, as if somehow it was a shock that the car outpaced the horse or that the cart was on the road at all. It was the third fight of the day and I still could not help but think, really? The testosterone was so thick I half expected them to just whip out their penises to measure in comparison and get it over with. 

We drove over a bridge and past the Obama Pool House. I desperately wanted to take a picture of the sign only marginally less than I wanted to get out of that fucking minibus. Sliding up to an intersection, in view of nursing kids nuzzling their furry goat mothers underneath a dump truck parked at the roadside, our genius driver decided to pass the Toyota Hilux in front of us. Which was turning left. Making it that much more logical for us to pass him on the left. Just as he tried to turn.

He gave us the Ethiopian equivalent of the finger, which we richly deserved in any language. But once again, our brilliant jack wagon of a driver figured he was the one who had been wronged, pulled over, and leapt out to express his indignation. A crowd gathered. A fight boiled over. We all turned to watch out the back window. Idiots, I thought. But the irony of the repeated assholery of the day is that none of them seemed to have it in them to actually hurt anyone else.

We drove on to the university, where most of our passengers piled out. Just up the road, we slid to the side again, where I was foisted off on another minibus going further into town, despite the fact that I knew I was supposed to be dropped off at the hotel where I was to meet several others going up into the mountains. This was the point of my doneness.

Shucking off the 'help' of those guys standing around where I finally got out of the last minibus of the day, I found a place to stay, with the help of a friend of my friend who came looking for me where I was dropped off. Thanks to the almighty for our people, for sure, because without them I may well have yanked my hair out on the side of the road somewhere today. But somehow, with the apparent generosity of another guy who really wanted to get into my pants, I found myself in an odd little guesthouse with red and white walls up above a restaurant that made me a pizza and served me some wine. Granted, the pizza was made with cabbage and carrots but without cheese, but it was pizzaish nonetheless.

By the way, Ethiopian wine also sucks. The first one I had last week tasted like a shakeup of stale vinegar and cherry cough syrup. It did come in a beer bottle, so, there was that as a warning. The one in front of me right now is a bit better, I am ashamed to say, because it's more like pixie sticks dissolved in watermelon vodka with just a hint of salad dressing. Deeeeelicious.

lunch in debre markos

I had never before taken a bus trip to get from one place to another that involved a stop for lunch. But the second time we pulled onto the side of the road to stop, everyone piled out and into the nearby restaurants. The first time we stopped was for a pee break, which was not hard to figure out because, well, we were in the middle of nowhere and everyone split up by gender to turn their backs or look for a bush. But this time I was unsure of what to do, because all I really wanted was to eat last night's leftover pizza which I had brought along. However, with the throngs of people from the buses and passersby and boys selling gum and oranges and packet of tissues, it seemed impossible to just pull out food and start eating. So I stood for a moment somewhat stupidly and considered my options.

A couple sitting out in front of the nearest cafe gestured to me. I walked over; 'Join us, would you like to sit?' the man asked. 

'Thank you. But really what I'd like to do after the last six hours is stand,' I replied, smiling, sitting down anyway.  He smiled, she smiled. 'We are a bit foreign as well,' he said, acknowledging my awkwardness gently. 'We are from Germany,' he added. They were Ethiopian by ethnicity, but German by residency, he explained. His wife was a nurse, working in a hospital not far from Frankfurt.

We talked about how terrible the road was, what our travel plans were, a bit about Botswana in comparison. When their 'tibs' (bits of roasted meat sizzling in a clay pot) and injera arrived, they asked if I wanted to try. I begged vegetarian, and excused myself, hoping I was not being too rude. They did not seem offended.

I walked off the main road a little ways, skeptically marveling at the signs for computer stores with banners proclaiming access to Gmail and Yahoo and Skype. There were also lots of corrugated tin shops selling fruit and cigarettes and bottles of water. The sides of road were russet mud, separated from chunks of tar by ditches full of garbage that seemed poised to overflow and retake the narrow rough strip of asphalt that passed for a highway.

It started to rain. After the dry of the last five months in Botswana, I did not mind. But then it started to pour. I ducked under an overhang in front of another computer shop to wait.

A small boy darted up from my right, slightly behind me as if he had not quite decided that he wanted me to see him. I waited for him to ask me for something, as nearly every other child who had come up to me in the last few days had. The poverty here is grinding, pervasive, filling space like smoke, worse than anything I have seen elsewhere in Africa and honestly, from my limited experience, in India too. So I waited to be asked for something, with that mix of dread and guilt and compassion and anger that simmers when I want to help, but remain at a loss of really knowing what to do, and it never gets any easier.

But he didn't ask. He didn't make a sound. He just stood at the perfect edge of my field of view, looking at me. He was perhaps five years old, wearing a dirt-patterned tan sweater and navy track pants with stripes of red and white down each leg, neither of which were really red or white any more. His expression was plaintive, perhaps the most direct look I have ever been given by someone I did not already know - reaching but not pleading, curious but not intrusive, open but not completely unafraid.

I was still hoping to eat my leftovers, but I knew there was no way I could do it in front of him. I'd share, I thought. Then I wondered what the odds were that the child had ever seen pizza, despite its being everywhere in Ethiopia like a weirdly delicious leftover of the Italian Fascist occupation, or if the rich cheese might make him sick if he did eat it, dairy not being a usual part of Ethiopian food in general and much less that of a kid on the street.

Instead, I reached into my bag for a granola bar. I smiled, leaning forward to hand it to him, a peanut butter pretzel, one of my favorites and I hoped, a flavor he would like. He accepted it gravely, and carefully tore at the plastic, ripping it open just enough to start eating as he perched on the concrete lip at the base of the storefront. The bar looked huge in his tiny hands, and he ate deliberately, not ravenously as I had thought he might or protectively to hide what he had - just like he was appreciating something precious and not taking a single mouthful for granted. I took out my slice of pizza and we ate together, just barely out of the downpour, chewing slowly as the sound of the water drowned all other noise into the background.

Suddenly the boy shouted, pointing at my feet. Water was swirling around my right shoe, backflow from the rain that cascaded down the side of the building. I grinned and stepped closer to him, out of the growing puddle. He triumphantly finally managed to remove the entire wrapper from the bar, and flung the crackly plastic maybe three feet out in front of him onto the dirt-wet concrete with relish.

A few minutes passed, and another boy approached us, this one perhaps ten or eleven years old, carrying a bundle of branches with neat-cut ends and waxy dark green leaves. This was chat, a mildly narcotic leaf that is a huge part of the Ethiopian economy even as it is illegal in most surrounding countries. It is meant to be chewed slowly, tucked into one's cheek and then turned over and over in the mouth to release a high that is said to be best experienced with others while sitting around talking. 

The boy looked at me and brought his fingers to his mouth; I brought out another granola bar and extended it to him. He looked puzzled, unsure of what I was offering. The little boy saw his hesitation and immediately piped up from below, apparently telling the older one in no uncertain terms that he should take it - which he did, tucking it safely into his shirt pocket. He looked at me again, still rather grave but with some of the serious worn off, and then he reached into his bundle of branches, wrapping his narrow fingers around a single stem and starting to pull. It was a trade, I realized. He wanted to give me something in return.

I put my hand out to stop him and shook my head; 'It's ok,' I said, knowing he would not understand the words but figuring he would understand what I meant. He nodded and walked back out into the rain.

I stood there a few more minutes, and the rain let up a bit. I heard a bus horn and figured I had better go back, not sure if it was my bus but not wanting to find out the hard way. I turned to the little boy, still sitting on the concrete, and I smiled. His face burst into a grin for the first time, beaming at me in the rain, still carefully chewing little bites of peanut butter pretzel. I waved. He waved. And back to the bus I went, dodging red rivulets pouring down the road and climbing back up into the bus - the last one to come back from lunch.

opuwo

“Ahhh, but we saw the license on your car but it was different, and we thought, now where is she from?” Linda said, grinning, as I answered the where-are-you-from question with, Botswana. Just to see how they’d react.

Linda and Queen Elizabeth were the first two people I met in Opuwo. I had just walked out of the grocery store and there they were, a cluster of women sitting under a tree, selling souvenirs. Himba souvenirs.

Opuwo is the regional capital of the Kunene region, in the far northwest of Namibia. It is known for its vast scenic desert, craggy mountains, foggy coastline, and the Himba. Pastoralists with a love of their cattle, the women wear skirts carved out of animal hides and rub a mixture of otjize (ochre) and omaze (cow’s fat) into their skin and hair, giving them a russet luster that is distinctly beautiful. They are gorgeous. And they are ogled. Did I forget to mention that they wear only skirts and necklaces?

When I first drove into town this afternoon, I was unprepared for how striking the mix of people walking and mulling and driving and sitting and talking along the sides of the road would be. There were Herero women in their full-swinging Victorian-influenced dresses, regional government professionals in suits, teenage girls in flouncy skirts, packs of sunglassed young men ready to spend their August paychecks at the bar, wildlife officials in olive drab.  And Himba women, burnished and half-naked, everywhere with their children, waiting in the back of open pickup trucks, bargaining at the market, sitting by the side of the road, sipping a Twist in the grocery store while pushing a cart carrying a finger-handled jug of an alcoholic sparkling ginger drink.

As the only white person walking around town this afternoon, I made a great target for the ladies in the parking lot. It was Queen Elizabeth who struck up a conversation, selling of course, but also chatting. Linda chimed in, we talked about where I was from, then where I was really from, what I was doing here (of course, they know IRDNC, Red Cross, VSO, Peace Corps – the development crowd), all the while putting bracelets onto my wrists, one woman busy adorning each arm, pushing me to buy.

Traditionally dressed as my two new friends were not, an elderly Himba woman just behind the Queen wanted to sell, too, but did not speak English – other than to keep repeating, “Himba!” She said it loudly, as if asserting some obvious authenticity or authority granted her by the tone of her skin and the length of her bare breasts. She took my right arm, adding bracelets too, repeating, “Himba, Himba,” holding up a bracelet and then pointing to those on her own arm, verifying, illustrating, asserting visually what she could not verbally.

In the end I bought one from each of the three of them, but I did not bargain. This was not just because I often don’t, unless I find the price offensive – but because what the women asked was next to nothing. I paid a bit more than the equivalent of $5 for all three. This style of bracelet is actually made from rounds of PVC piping, so the material is not pricey – but a design is then carved into each one, and it is tinted with the same ochre-and-fat paste that women rub into their skin. I wanted to look up how much the Until There’s A Cure Foundation charges for those they sell online that have ribbons cut into the PVC to raise AIDS awareness; I was sure it was at least $20 each. My brain took off for nerdville and I started thinking about marginality and access to markets and middlemen and marginality and then I looked down. Some of the ochre had worked its way off the bracelets and the women’s hands as they decorated me. I rubbed it with my finger. And I smiled as my brain returned to the parking lot where I was standing, where the sand and dirt was so powered with dry and the grinding of footfalls that it was like walking through a fine layer of flour puffing gently with each step.

Perhaps an hour before, as I’d driven slowly all the way through town to have a look around before checking in at the campsite, I stopped on the hill at the northern edge of the business district. I looked at the dirt road leading to Angola to my left, and the pavement leading back to where I’d come from. Despite how close I was to places I’ve worked before, this is a whole other place entirely, I thought. And as the week progressed, and the "meetings" for which I had traveled were "canceled" or "rescheduled" because of certain "circumstances," I found out a bit just how different (and not) it was. But that, too, is another story entirely.

Uncertainty

I’ve been thinking a fair amount lately about what it means to be uncertain.  Anyone who has spent time ‘here’ knows that things often do not happen when we want them to, or when we think they are going to, or at the time for which they were planned.  And sometimes, even after all this time, I wonder why that is.  There are lots of practical reasons for that here in Maun.  I’d like to take a shower, but there’s no running water.  I’d like to buy some onions, but the government decided not to import them any more.  I’d like to make a phone call, but the network just crapped out again.  So it isn’t always easy to count on the basics that we often take for granted in the US, for one thing. 

It’s also more than that.

A few years ago, I was running errands in town with a very dear friend of mine.  Among other things, we were supposed to drop off some paperwork at an office where someone was waiting for us.  He called my friend’s cell phone.  She said we’d be right there, just five minutes.

The thing is, we were nowhere near arriving in five minutes.  She knew that.  I knew that.  And I could not for the life of me figure out why one would not just be honest and give a realistic answer.  Although perhaps the easy answer is that no one expects things to run on time here (or, as I told my students recently, “If something I plan happens within, say, an hour or two of when I say it’s going to happen, that is definitely on time.”).

But even more than the why, I wonder what uncertainty really means and why it matters whether things happen on the schedule or now.

It seems to me that certainty comes more from a feeling than a reality, from the notion that one ‘knows’ with some solidity what is happening and when and why and how.  I wonder about this, in part, because isn’t certainty also illusory?  How often have you been ‘sure’ about something that turned out not to be true, or quite true?  How many times have you invested in an idea or a person that led you into more gray than black or white?  I’m guessing, often.  Probably more often than most of us like to admit.

Which raises another question.  Why does it matter so much for us to be certain in the first place?

Sabbatical Finds Me in Maun

This year’s field school has already gone rushing by – three weeks of counting wildlife and discussions with community members and presentations by researchers.  And of course, some small incidents with the truck stuck in sand, and a disagreement over what constitutes a ‘souvenir’ at the border, but in each case no harm done.   One of our running jokes included keeping a virtual list of things that my students were not allowed to tell the university president on their return.  The last one I added after I dropped them off at the Zimbabwean border to catch a comby [shared minibus taxi] to Vic Falls for a few days after we finished up and before they went their separate ways; it was, uh, “Don’t tell Ron that the field school wound up beautifully with me dropping the students off at the…Zimbabwean border…so that they could catch a lift into Vic Falls…”


Now, with a year of sabbatical opening up in front of me, I’m settling in to Maun again – good friends, interesting research questions (mine and those of others), dust, power outages, new projects, inflated liquor taxes, Hilary’s pecan pie, rising river waters, strange looks at the white girl walking along the road instead of driving.  Not that I don’t have a car – I do.  But the view is different from the side of the road, and one thing I have always appreciated about living here is that, well, the view is different.


One of the things that I have been talking about with my current research student (who is doing an absolutely phenomenal job, by the way, and I say that not because he’s likely to read this but because I mean it most sincerely) is that most of doing research “somewhere else” is not about the questionnaires and surveys and interviews and formal processes known as data collection.  Most of it – if one truly wants to understand an unfamiliar place – is about relationships.  And building good relationships takes time.  A lot of time.  A lot of time doing things that seem, on the surface, unrelated to that research proposal that got you funded to get here in the first place.  Some excellent advice on this subject came from my dissertation advisor, who told me to be interested in everything – because one never knows what might become important later.  My own caveat to this is, be interested in the people around you – and what they are interested in, because while yes, it might help you with your research, most importantly – everyone is a human being and nobody wants to be treated like a patient at the dentist’s office [hold still while I yank what I want out of you!].


This philosophy has some funny consequences here.  In particular, when people ask me how the work is coming – like, how are the surveys, or interviews, or the data gathering they assume to a usual researcher’s task – I haven’t got much to say.   This is in part because, at some level, I’m not ‘doing’ a whole lot right now.  I’m spending a lot of time catching up with folks.  I’m reading.  I’ve been to a few meetings.  And I’ve initiated some discussions that are likely to evolve over the next year or more.  But with time and presence, in my experience, these are the kinds of things that mean much more – in human terms, as well as research parlance – than do quick ‘roadside surveys’ [a term used by a grad student I’ve worked with who is referring to the tendency of foreign researchers to cruise through rural areas interviewing whoever is closest to the road, rather than having to go into or, lord forbid, stay in villages].  There’s lots in the offing, I’d say.  But from the outside, it probably doesn't appear to be much right now.  As my best friend in high school used to joke, “People tell me I procrastinate too much.  And I say, just wait!!”


Admittedly, I am also taking some time to relax – to read things I want to read, watch some disappointing movies, see if I can sit in the sun long enough for my legs to take on the same tint as my arms, slow roast a pan of tomatoes and garlic and collect around town [which is actually possible now, craziness] the ingredients to make tiramisu for a party on Saturday.  This kind of space is also lovely for the settling in and out of ideas; with some love and deliberation, the itchy desire to write creeps back in – and here I am.


So among the many other things I’ve been thinking about lately, is nothing.  My Shambhalians will of course find that especially humorous.  But to quote Peter Gibbons, who did not get it right the first time but did well the second time around:  “I did nothing.  I did absolutely nothing.  And it was everything I thought it could be.”