Hujambo!

I was just riding the matatu to work when an mlevi (drunkard) got on the bus. As soon as he saw me he started shouting, “America!” and then something indistinguishable about Jesus. I don’t know if it was in English or Swahili because he was slurring. By now he had put his teddy bear in my lap (I know, what the hell?) and everyone on the bus was obviously staring at me. When I finally understood that he wanted me to say, “Amen” I just smiled and looked nervously around.

How can you out wit a charismatic drunk man with Jesus on his side? I admit I was at a loss for words… all I could come up with was, “I don’t say ‘Amen’.” I didn’t say it too loudly because I didn’t want to start a debate. I guess I shocked him but it didn’t matter because after a few seconds he went on shouting about America and Obama.

Today was International Women’s Day and ILRI held a few events to honor women in science. In addition to listening to speeches and drinking coffee, seventy girls from local high schools came to tour the labs and talk to our female scientists. In the afternoon we watched a few videos, one of which, by writer and activist Isabel Allende, was very moving. The speech was given as a TED Talk in 2007.

If you want to see more inspiring videos, check out ILRI’s video archive on blip.tv or head over to the TED Talks website.

If you don’t like the sour Ethiopian bread injera, steer clear of Tibs Firfir! It’s number 50 on the menu at the National Cafe in downtown Addis, next to the National Theater and the big lion statue. In Amharic it looks like this: ጥብስ ፍርፍር. Don’t say I didn’t warn you… I made a bit of a mistake ordering dinner tonight with a friend in Addis Ababa. We decided we both liked tibs, an Ethiopian dish with roasted meat and, sometimes, tasty sauteed vegetables. What we didn’t know is that the “firfir” changes the game completely! Your itty bitty pieces of meat come mixed with shredded injera wrapped in a huge, pancake-like… injera!

I’ve eaten tibs a few times now, and every time it comes differently. I’m going to stop saying I like tibs until I speak better Amharic and I can explain that, “I want the one in the bowl with veggies, not wrapped in injera.” My friend and I had a good laugh when the food came, and we never let on that we were expecting anything different. We did our best to eat it, her continually asking for more water, and me asking for more bread. Add it to the list of things I’ll never forget about Ethiopia.

Live and learn… injera is not for me! Oh, and I need to learn Amharic if ILRI is going to be sending me to Ethiopia more often.

There’s some Ethiopian Orthodox holiday going on right now. Nobody’s explained it to me, but most of my Ethiopian colleagues have sworn off milk and meat until April, and there’s a man chanting over a loudspeaker in some church next to ILRI’s campus for hours at a time. I asked someone at lunch today what the man was saying but he said nobody knows. I laughed for a second but realized he wasn’t kidding; the man is chanting in Ge’ez, a dead language from Ethiopia’s past.

Add it to the list of things that make Ethiopia completely different than any other country I’ve ever been to (especially its neighbors in East Africa). I’ll be in Addis Ababa for another week; plenty of time to buy a bunch of gourmet coffee beans and postcards. Stay tuned and wish me luck!

I’ve been in Addis Ababa since this morning. The taxi picked me up at my house at 5:30 and I was in the ILRI Addis office by 10. Not bad! I’ll be in Ethiopia for another ten days or so, mainly doing some capacity building of the ILRI Addis web development team on the Linux platform (they currently use Windows as a server platform but want to move some applications to Linux servers). I was in Ethiopia last year, but I didn’t take a bus this time so I am already off to a better start.

I’ve got a great room in the hostel here at the ILRI campus. The campus is much more beautiful than I’m used to (hard to believe if you’ve seen the Nairobi campus). For example, today I was sitting in my office just before dusk and I saw a dik-dik grazing in the grass just outside my window. The working environment here is much different too. After lunch we all went for coffee in the campus bar, then took a walk around the compound. I thought my counterparts just wanted to take a stroll, but looked behind me and saw another twenty people just walking and chatting. It felt like a walk to cure cancer or something, very leisurely and social. We don’t do that at ILRI Nairobi…
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