Rounding up: Playing a round, prep for voting, telling ATM tales, and GORILLAS!
With a few days off from school that happen to coincide with Maya’s birthday, we’re leaving Ethiopia today. The entire world seems consumed with COVID-19 stories and concerns, so we don’t necessarily know what impact there will be on travel in Africa. Ethiopian Airlines is still flying routes to China and the paranoia is high. Yet we welcomed friends from Seattle (Deb Oyer and Tom Weeks) a few days ago, and Sarah’s sis, Katie, arrives in a few hours. Soon we’ll be heading back to the airport to leave for Uganda where we’ll be doing two days of gorilla trekking along with other exploration (expect LOTS on that in a post next week). You have to be at least 15-years-old to do a gorilla trek. Maya’s quinceanera is today. Timing is everything in life.
Side note - our internet connectivity has been total “trash” as of late. This post is at least in part a mash-up of some unposted previous updates. The bottom line being that I wanted to get something out before we’re truly off the grid on our gorilla trek. Updating our lovable little audience is still job #1 here at Living Entoto - nevermind the professional wordsmithing the perfectionist in me would prefer.
Golfing - I was certainly curious to try the one full course in all of Ethiopia during our time in Addis, given that it’s nearby and open to anyone. It took our friend Tom’s insistence that we do so on his first full day here. Tom’s a semi-serious golfer back home (plays a lot, doesn’t expect the world). He and Deb raised two scratch golfers. This was Tom’s last continent aside from Antarctica upon which to play a round across a lifetime of travels. When I called ahead and found out the prices for a round, clubs rental and the required caddies fee (all together - around 1700 birr or $52 per person), the encouraging nature of the pro’s tone left me quite hopeful. The ferenji-level pricing surely had something to do with the fact that literally not one other golfer was on the course during the three hours we played there. The weather was perfect. I shocked myself by warming up, hitting a handful of totally acceptable good shots, and altogether loving the experience. Our caddies were knowledgable and figured out right off the first tee that we were there to have fun. It was a friggin’ hoot. The pic above captures the shared good feelings after our round. If you have the time and can justify fiddy bucks for a once-in-a-lifetimer, I fully recommend it. Famous slippery slope words - I think golf is an activity I could at long last enjoy.
Election Update - I’m really overdue in offering some of the election updates from Ethiopia. I fall very much in line with all ferenji who are obsessed with the date and makeup of Ethiopia’s first national election in five years. News comes in drips and drabs, followed by a stunning mix of reactions. If I lived here for a few decades and traveled extensively, I might get a handle on it. Just like in America where writers holed up in the urban core try to speculate on what “flyover country” thinks about politicians and their policies, there’s more smoke than productive fire in that effort. So I’ll just boil it down to a few dates and reactions to summarize for those keeping tabs elsewhere.
There are 20 African nations expecting to hold elections in 2020 or early 2021. Ethiopia had one multi-party national election (back in 2005), and the pushback from an opposition party winning around 160 of approximately 550 seats in the legislature led to one-party rule. Prime Minister Abiy has dismantled that one party which currently holds every seat and started a new one (the Prosperity Party). Other ethnic and regional parties are trying to get themselves organized while the National Election Board (NEBE) is setting rules for that and voter registration and polling and a whole buffet of challenges.
After much deliberation, the national election’s timing was moved from May to August 29th. Some argue that the traditional “rainy season” makes that August date a bad choice. The Ethiopian calendar turns from 2012 to 2013 on September 11th. Trying to get the election done according to their calendar I believe is an important motivator for Abiy’s administration. That’s possibly also tied to their shorter-than-usual vote counting period - the NEBE has called for the results to be authenticated by September 8th.
Outside groups like Amnesty International have been trying to draw attention to ethnic tensions and rising unrest in regions like Oromo. I think I Google “Ethiopia August elections” almost daily for any new English-language reporting. Much of the reporting and many of the judgments being made about the current risk come from a parroting of past unrest, which seems legit. As postulated above, trying to forecast as a newbie and an outsider is foolish. I won’t claim special knowledge. I’m just reading literally everything published (in English) and trying to game this out.
As a dose of reality, however, I recently spoke with the former construction site manager for our apartment building. He’s a young man, with Tigrayan roots (a northern region with about 15% of the population and much former influence given the fact that they spearheaded the fight to remove the former controlling Derg - the brutal regime in power from 1974 to 1991). When I asked him about the elections, his response was that “all politicians do is talk, talk, talk” followed by an address of the real issue for the citizens of Addis. Water. There’s currently rationing in effect and a frustrating lack of water flowing in city pipes has been going on for weeks. Our apartment building recently dug a bore well for a separate system and has been turning it on periodically for the residents of the surrounding areas to fill up their storage containers. It’s a delightful sight to see the kids playing in the outflow. But the larger point makes me think of all those “person on the street” interviews back in America. Most people don’t care about the things politicians say or the nature of elections. Until they have actual effect on people’s lives (hence the water). Regardless, I’m sure I’ll return to these subjects often in the months ahead.
Voting abroad - We’re 93% positive that we’ve finally straightened out our American voter registrations to allow for overseas voting. I’ll loop back around on this later to expound upon just how nuts it is that we don’t have a cohesive system. There are 50 American states, at least that many approaches to voting abroad. For now, let me just say anyone who can should get out and vote or get their absentee ballots ready to send back in. Speaking as someone with the knowledge of how living in a country with no mailing addresses, I believe ever more strongly in the need to exercise that right as a citizen who gives a rip about the world around them.
Sporty news - Maya’s into her third season at ICS. Soccer is her fave, and she made the initial expanded roster for the ISSEA team that will travel to Johannesburg, South Africa in April for their tourney. More cuts are coming, however, and she’s unfortunately suffered an ankle injury that’s kept her out of practice for a week. Stay positive and wear a brace is our current approach. For me, I just found out that I didn’t get into the NYC Marathon’s lottery field for this November. So it may well be that I’m aiming for the Twin Cities Marathon. Here again, stay positive.
Finally, the following overly-detailed scene recounts a mishap from last week. Rather than just discard it, I’m putting it up. For now. No karmic deductions for logging off and waiting for the next update. With GORILLAS (one would hope). Ciao.
Losing an ATM card (and getting it back) - I encountered a challenge last week that I saw coming months in advance. One of the countless ATMs scattered around Addis went dark and stole my card. Whether it was a loss of power, an Achilles heel tweaked unintentionally, or just a stroke of bad luck landing on a Sunday pre-dinner platter, I got burned. Temporarily. We employ the knowledge that there's simply no other card to get here. And let's not forget that Ethiopian banks don't offer their own Visa or Mastercard-equivalent entry into their systems. In other words, we dance with what we brought with us. Which means lots and lots of visits to the cash machine to get stacks of bills. Some of those machines have low limits. Because the current exchange rate offered at ATMs is currently around 32 birr to one US dollar, you need to often take out what you can and then go through the same process again. It's certainly not unique here. When we were traveling in Morocco and needed to pay our driver in dirham (around 10 to 1USD), both Sarah and I had to use our cards time after time after time at a luck-of-the-draw ATM in Essaouira to settle up before hitting the road to Casablanca and cover the cost of the rental car and driver's salary for 10 days. In Addis, it's much more of an every-few-days leap of faith.
No one expects an ATM machine to shut down with your card in its craw. That's the one critical failure we simply can't excuse. Because once it's in there, what recourse do you have if something fails? Beat the snot out of it? Start a fire? Or would you prefer trying to slip another card in with the hope of squeezing back out both? In the heat of the moment, no remedy will crop up. The conundrum of what to do might be a good set piece for a thriller. Has anyone written a classic treatment about how to beat them? Whenever a "Mission Impossible" or James Bond high tech hack happens, there's a general understanding that movie logic requires even better tech to defeat this ubiquitous techie set-up. Instead, you're stuck waiting it out. Logic presumes that someone will come and service the offending machine. That's when the Ethiopia-ness of things kicks in. Because I've had a bit too many opportunities to see dudes coming to fill up the machines, both on ICS's campus and the following morning as I tried to scope out the scene of the offense.
Let me set the series of scenes I keep alluding to. Starting with Sunday's card capturing incident. After two prior failures up the street (the Bank of Abyssinia machine and a neighboring Commercial Bank of Ethiopia plum-colored nightmare near the Garden of Coffee where I'd run for beans in the mid-afternoon), I went back to what's most familiar in the entryway of Adams Pavillion. Zemen Bank has the bull and the big "Z" for a signature look. Because they also have a useful machine outside the Shoa up the street and the higher limit machine on ICS's campus, I'm pretty well-established as a repeat customer.
The first turn on that Zemen machine went as hoped. 4000 birr with all the requisite sounds and flurry before slipping me a sizable and slightly off-kilter stack. That wasn't enough, I decided. So I put my card right back in.
The screen went to black. A floating box with the message "No Signal" inside a gray border began moving around the dead-black screen like a Microsoft Windows 95 afterthought.
We all know that feeling. The "please please please don't do this to me" followed by the "there's nothing I can do but wait as I say a little prayer that's surely going straight to voicemail" purgatory. The passing minutes seened like, well, minutes. Lots of them. And then..."Starting Windows" came up. How many times has interstitial lightshow led to disappointment in our collective lives? If I had a nickel for every time it showed up and then let me down, I'd put a bid in on Bill Gate's pool house. Up next, came another form of Microsoft put-on.
An insincere "Welcome..." appeared. Followed by the indecipherable "CR2, Bankworld ATM Client, Initialising Platform, Please Wait..."
Translation - “Wait 10 more minutes and then slowly walk away. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
