Sylvia's Journal

If I would have forgotten that it was our queen’s birthday yesterday the gentleman with his orange tie and the woman with her orange shawl at his side, dropped off by a KLM car, would have reminded me. They arrived at the Sheraton to celebrate the event in style and partake, no doubt, in the herring and bitterballen (a small round croquet) flown in with me from Amsterdam. I missed the event. There was clearly no search of the guest register for Dutch nationals. They wouldn’t have found me since I am here under the American flag.

I was woken up from a dream or dreams that included a rowdy group of young men messing up an artist studio and a little child that was given the ride of a lifetime by a bunch of whales tossing it around like a beach ball. It was a happy sort of tossing, not as scary as it sounds now in daylight. What woke me up sounded first like a small kitten in pain which turned out to be a bird that perched outside my open door, singing something very sad in a whiny sort of chirp.

They say in Ethiopia that a visitor who brings rain brings luck. The rains started yesterday and I walk around with a halo. I met my Ethiopian colleagues as well as two from Boston. A small group of potential facilitators was brought together when I insisted on being hooked up with local folks rather than doing the whole event on my own. I have gotten in the habit of doing this even though it does complicate matters. Today is a holiday and the workshop starts tomorrow. One by one they will come in today and give up part of their holiday to prepare with me for their role.

I have inquired about Ethiopian music, something I know nothing about. During the workshop I would like to play the kind of music that people here love to hear. It is hard for me to gauge what is cool and what is not. I downloaded some Ethiopian music from the internet last night and will test it out today on my co-facilitators. I discovered that the golden age of Ehtiopian music was in the late 60s and early 70s. It is a wonderful collection of a mostly jazzy kind of music with titles I cannot pronounce. I can’t remember what was happening here then but suspect it was still during the days of the emperor.

I also searched the internet for more information about the AIDS commission here, its mission and vision, but I could not find it. We had a long conversation about what comes first, mission or vision. In my book it is mission but here, clearly, it is vision. That is going to create some anxiety which I will need to manage in ways that keeps everyone happy. There are so many models that trip over each other. Here I come with yet another.

Armed with my last Dutch purchase, vitamins for ‘zakenmensen’ (business people), I arrived in Addis in the dark, after a brief stopover in a very hazy, dusty and sandy Khartoum. Addis is new territory for me. Exactly 29 years ago I missed a chance to go here, from Dakar, and never forgot the disappointment, but here I am, finally.

I was greeted by several signs that either meant ‘Americans welcome’ or ‘we want to to be like America,’ or both. We passed the Denver Café, the Boston Day Spa, a large statue of liberty and something that looked like Starbucks, same typeface and colors, but with a different name. We passed more cafes; this is after all coffee land. From my shaded view through the tinted windows of the Sheraton shuttle I saw a city that looked like a mixture of America, India and Africa: shopping mall ads, beggars in rags and momuments to celebrate the ephemeral African Unity. My co-travellers in the van were sitting with their blackberries in attention, waiting for a signal which they may never get. Communication with the outside world is restricted. My CGNet program does not list Ethiopia. I could have left my Skype headset and cellphone at home. One way or another communications with the homefront will be expensive, a scarce resource.

I am in Addis’ fanciest hotel, according to blog entries in the Virtual Tourist. The concierge and his helpers wear hats, either Fedoras or Bowler hats or, in some cases, one that is a cross between the two. My room was not ready and I was parked in the heavily draped and carpeted lounge where a pianist who looked like Angela Davis played hotel music. A gaggle of young beautiful women was, I imagined, waiting for further instructions from their impresario.

My bathroom has a scale with a paper sheet taped to it with ‘ideal weight’ for ladies on one side and for gents on the other. I am 2 kilos over the top of the ideal range; the result, no doubt, of 3 days of unrestrained consumption in Holland; another objective for the next 9 days to get myself in shape for two more days of unrestrained consumption after landing in Amsterdam on the 9th and before heading back home on the 11th of May.

I had a hard time going to sleep. My room has a door that opens on a small balcony overlooking an idyllic scene of pools and palms, more idyllic at night than in daytime. I slept with the doors open, sung to sleep by crickets, the sound of small waves (the pool?) and the faint barkings of dogs faraway; nothing that told me I was in the middle of a big African city.