Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday was an entire day without obligations because today Ethiopia celebrates Patriots Day. Offices are closed. I did not have to prepare anything.

I read, and finally finished, the hefty library tome that I have schlept to Kabul and now to Addis, about the Peabody Sisters. It is a book about the first four decades in the life of three extraordinary gifted women who lived about 200 years ago in New England in the shadow of famous men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann. They lived in a time where women’s lives were too circumscribed to acquire lasting fame and recognition on their own. We have come a long way since then.

Karen showed up in the afternoon and we rehearsed her presentation at a conference later this week. Tae, although not able to join us, had recommended we have dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant (Ali Baba) but we never found it. Our Amharic is limited to hello, thank you and goodbye which was not sufficient to find the place. In the end the taxi driver drove us to a place that he thought sounded similar enough, Al Mendi. We were enthusiastically received by several wait staff and were seated in a small, simple and very empty restaurant. We remained the only guests for the duration of our meal. We had been assured the food was ‘arabic’ but what we got was probably closer to an Ethiopian version of such food.

The explanations of the menu made our choices a little adventuresome, since everything on the menu was translated into English as ‘meat.’ It was good that Karen had become a flexible vegetarian as she calls herself now. We both got a bowl of lamb broth with a spicy sauce, followed by a mountain of orange and white rice, accompanied by small bowls with chunks of various meats in thick and spicy sauces. My dish had a giant drumstick on top that was too big for a chicken and too small for a turkey. What was I eating? Asking made no sense since the English of our wait staff was very rudimentary. In the background the Ethiopian TV channel was showing something about the big athletic event going on, so loud, that we could hardly hear each other. On our request they toned it down. Now they could watch us instead of the TV. A trip to the rest room was an adventure by itself, over a muddy path with scattered stones of various sizes, in the dark. The ankle hinge is still not functioning properly but the trip had to be made and was completed successfully. Karen and I parted ways in different taxis to our respective hotels.

In the evening I clicked through the available TV channels and found nothing but programs about people who were about to die a violent death: Elite US soldiers in the mountains of Afghanistan ambushed by bearded men with big guns, hapless holiday makers in a plane about to crash into the Red Sea and a young couple stranded in the open ocean after their diving boat took off without them; they both ended up being eaten by sharks; nothing light. I did not recognize how depressed I was getting until I opened my email and found another distress message from Tessa from Canada. The closing pages of the Peabody Sisters lifted my spirits before I fell asleep; a sleep full of dreams which evaporated while I took a shower.