Sylvia's Journal

A large billboard on the main drag advertises for ‘the best Ethiopian restaurant in North America.’ For this you have to travel to either Washington D.C. or to Baltimore. It seems a bit far when you are in Addis and hungry.

May 1 is a holiday. Nevertheless Tae, Hailu and I worked hard on putting the final pieces together for our ‘inception’ workshop tomorrow. The intent is to make a good case of why managing and leading is a skill that people who manage health programs ought to have. It seems so obvious but it is not.

I spent an hour each with the various members of our just-in-time facilitator team to rehearse their part in the workshop. Everyone will get to be the lead facilitator on one activity. Some people are a bit worried about this but how else to pass the baton to a local team?

I also tested out the Ethiopian music I donwloaded from the internet on my new colleagues. It turned out I stumbled upon the Ethiopian Cliff Richard and other musicians who had their peak in the 60s and 70s but are still well loved, especially by people with grey hair like me.

Tae and I went to see the workshop room in the Yoly hotel. The hotel felt more down to earth, more connected to Ethiopia than my Luxury Collection La-La Land Hotel that could have been anywhere in the world. So I changed hotels. Now I have a very large room that includes a kitchen, a balcony, and comes with permanent access to the internet, all for a much lower price. I can look into houses and yards that tell me I am in Ethiopia. My colleague Bannet, who is our project’s director, warned me that I am on the edge of the red light district. I reassured him that I usually don’t wander around at night in cities I don’t know. Nightlife, as seen from my balcony was active but did not interfere with my sleep.

Tae and I had lunch in a small café and I learned from her about the traditional coffee ceremony where, while the beans are roasted, a basket of popcorn is passed around. Then the aromatic beans are passed around like a smudge stick, the coffee brewed and served, sweet and strong, to be drunk in three small cup servings. Axel would like this place. Of course he expects I bring back some beans.

On the eve of the workshop I relaxed and ordered room service from the Italian restaurant below, wild mushroom ravioli and Tiramisu (the Italian influence is noticeable). I watched the National Geographic Channel which airs, every hour, an advertisement for a special next week with the words ‘Fasten your seatbelts for Air Crash Investigation.’ It shows images of terror-stricken passengers in airplanes that are crashing or exploding; my kind of documentary! Minutes later another advertisement says that donkeys and mules cause more accidents than airplane crashes. That ad was illustrated with a donkey kicking a pile of watermelons which rolled down a cobbled street and killed an old lady doing her marketing. Should I be relieved?

There was more good stuff on TV. A program about Dubai’s artifical island group (The World) showed how white-clad oil cheiks and Dutch engineers combine resources and ingenuity to do the impossible at unimaginable costs for the world’s richest people. It makes you wonder about our priorities. We could do a lot of other things with that kind of ingenuity and those resources in my line of work. At least it shows that, if we put our minds to it, everything is possible after all.