Unsinkable

Thursday.

I still feel pukey so I send Chuck and Rose up to breakfast while I shower.   I feel a bit better so I go upstairs but breakfast was some kind of meat on toast so I beat a hasty retreat back to the room and eat gummi bears for breakfast.  I take another Cipro and feel up to joining the group on today's outings (I wish I had Cipro with the last time we were in Mexico, it sure got me on my feet again pretty quickly!)

First we go to the Sheraton to change some more money, and because some folks need to cash advance money from a credit card, which they'll do for you at the hotel.  Apparently there is one working ATM in Addis Ababa, only it doesn't work with a US card, you need an Ethiopian account.  Apparently the Sheraton is the nicest hotel in West Africa, and it is certainly beautiful.  We successfully changed dollars into birr and bought a couple of croissants from the bakery there. 

Then we went to the National Museum to see "Lucy" (the most complete/oldest skeleton of a human ancestor).  She was pretty cool- small, about 3 or 4 feet tall…   The rest of the museum was cool too, although it was very small.  When I think "National Museum" I think Smithsonian or something, this was very small and pretty sparse, considering we were all patted down at a checkpoint on the way in.  Apparently, though, there are some fantastic modern painters in Ethiopia, as the museum doubled as a historical artifacts and art museum.  I will definitely be trying to find out more about the painters we saw there, that artwork was beautiful.  There was also some pretty cool photography, but at that point Rose was getting hungry – it was snack time.  Only I misread her signs at first and thought she had to go to the bathroom, but the museum is so small apparently no bathrooms are needed, so I had to walk her to the nearest one four or five buildings away!  And it was basically a hole in the ground/outhouse sort of thing that she was not interested in at all, which was good, since I didn't want to put her down.

On the way back to the museum we sort of got whistled at by a group of men, I think they were laughing a bit at the white lady with the brown baby or whatever.  Some coffee ladies tried to talk me into sitting with them for a traditional coffee ceremony (three cups of coffee are poured, apparently snacks are served, etc.  It is a social faux pas to stop after the second cup, you can stop after one or three with no problem).  But as I had left Chuck with all of the birr and as I don't like coffee, I passed.  One of the ladies took Rose out of my arms and kissed her but Rose would have nothing to do with her – she wanted to come back to me and pushed the lady away.  The other ladies seemed to think that was pretty funny.

After we left the museum we went to the former fuel-wood-carrying women's association, which is basically a collective of women who used to cut and carry wood for fuel (participating in serious deforestation) but have started a weaving collective making beautiful scarves.   I bought twelve of them, they were so lovely and I really wanted to support these women's' efforts.

We came back to the guest house for lunch but I still didn't have much of a stomach for it.  Rose ate well, she passed on fish but ate injera and vegetarian wot like an old pro (although she still wound up getting pretty messy).  Then we just hung out with a couple of other people in the family room.  One of the other travelers was sick, so her husband was kind of on his own with infant twins, but as far as I could tell he was doing great.   We had a very interesting conversation with Zach, a volunteer from India who was going to be staying at the guest house and volunteering for ten months.  He arrived a few days after us.  His father runs an orphanage in India that works with CHSFS.

No dinner was served tonight because everyone's supposed to be going out to eat at a local place.  I'm passing on that, though,  because even though it is an option, I really don't want to bring Rose back to the care center for the night.  I feel like we've made such great progress, and she really hasn't wanted anything to do with that place since we met her, so I feel like I might be undoing some trust by taking her back there.  We'll see how tomorrow goes, they do a big "good bye ceremony" for the children, so hopefully she'll be okay with that.

She didn't want Chuck to leave for the dinner, either.  They were all kind of talking and laughing in the upstairs hall while they waited for everyone to get ready and she motioned towards the door, so we went and hung out with him, but she cried when he left.   

This was by far the hardest night to put her to bed.  I sang songs for hours, running through my entire bedtime repertoire and then just singing every song I could remember from musicals.   (I do a killer rendition of Guys and Dolls.)  Then she finally let me sit down, and we spent another hour on the bed with her in my lap, and I told her all about what her life was going to be like in Milwaukee with her new home and family.  I had her at the slow, long blink and the deep sighs, but she was still totally fighting it.  She wanted me to put her down on the bed and then she got a bit wild rolling around on the bed until I covered her with her quilt and patted her back until she fell asleep.  

And that is where I am now, eating gummi bears in bed, writing by flashlight in a journal, listening to the rain outside and waiting for Chuck to come back.  I could go to sleep, but the door to the room is unlocked (there's only one key) so I had the choice of being locked in the room or the room being unlocked.  Since about the worst crimes they have here is pickpocketing, I should be pretty safe.

I have enjoyed my stay here but I can't tell you how happy I am to be going home tomorrow!  For one thing, I really miss Dillon (although Chuck is the one having dreams about Dillon being one of the children in the orphanage, so maybe he misses him more, I don't know.)  For another thing, there are so many wonders of America that we take for granted – like being able to drink the water out of the faucet without getting deathly ill.  Power that is mostly uninterrupted.  A social safety net that means that we don't have hordes of people starving to death in the streets.  And then there are just some comforts of home that I miss – a level bed, a shower that maintains a somewhat constant temperature, etc.

Please don't interpret my comments as ANY slight against Ethiopia.  I really do love it here.  I wish I was less of a "ferenze" (foreigner) because then I think I would have an even better understanding of it.  I stand out in many ways: I don't speak the language, I'm white, and reasonably well off by Ethiopian standards.  People are super nice to me anyway, despite my "otherness", but when we come back in 10-15 years, I hope we'll learn some Amharic in preparation.  When we come back, Chuck wants to come for a few weeks and all of us volunteer at the orphanage.  I'd like that. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 12:55 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.