‘We have no room,’ the clerk said.
‘Maybe you could check?’
There was a desultory fuss, he flipped pages in a scrappy school exercise book that was the hotel’s guest book.
‘No room with water.’
‘That’s fine’ — more than fine, I thought, since the water would be corrosive.
He was still flipping pages: ‘Okay, room with water, in the back.’
The room was dirty, very hot and vile smelling, much worse than the one at Shashemene, but at the Ethiopian equivalent of $2.50 excellent value. After I had drunk three bottles of beer and written my notes on a wobbly table I felt optimistic and happy, for here I was in a flop-house in a remote town in southern Ethiopia, within striking distance (420 km) of the Kenyan border. With luck we might be there tomorrow.
A young Japanese man sat among some Ethiopians in the dining room of the Get Smart, eating national food. I joined him, and on the assumption that vegetables were less likely to be tainted, ordered ‘fasting food’ — it was all they had, anyway. I sat at the common table and we shredded the injera bathmat and squelched the vegetables.
The man was Mr Daisuko Obayashi, sent to southern Ethiopia by the private company NEC of Japan to install a telecommunications system. He had been in Dila for two months. He spoke no Amharic, and his English was rudimentary. He had been in rural Tanzania for two years, but preferred Ethiopia.
‘Sometimes, Ethiopian people they buy me drink, but two years in Tanzania no one buy me drink!’
He said he did not speak Swahili. Hearing that I lived in Hawaii he said he did not want to visit the islands. ‘Too many Japanese people there.’
After ten minutes of this irritating small talk I thought: The only English speaker in Dila and he’s a fat head.
He said, ‘In Tanzania, I go to disco and girls say they want to have sex with me. But I say no because of AIDS. Almost three years — no sex! Ha! Ha!’
Perhaps that forced celibacy explained his tetchy demeanor, so I turned my attention to Tadelle and Wolde.
‘What do you think of this place?’
‘Is mess,’ Tadelle said. Tadelle was from Tigre, as was Mengistu, and so he missed the days of the Derg which everyone else deplored, for the years of famine, bankruptcy, mass murder, terror, and arbitrary imprisonment. Mengistu had built schools and hospitals, Tadelle said, especially in Tigre.
‘I sink zat Mengistu was good. Za Derg was good. Yes, some people was killed. But it was za soldiers and smaller people who did it.’
‘But there’s democracy now,’ I said, to needle him: the present government persecuted any group that dissented and turned the Ethiopian police into junkyard dog.
‘Za democracy we have is bad. Za government is just termites.’
Lying in my small hot room at the Get Smart that night, I twiddled the knobs on my short-wave radio and listened in the darkness to the news. Wall Street was in trouble: The Dow went south again for the third straight day … Tech stocks deep in negative territory … The Nasdaq hit a five-year low … No sign of an uptick … Fears grow for a recession …
But in Dila it made no difference.
In the morning, I asked the Get Smart clerk for coffee. This was after all a coffee-growing region.
‘Is finished.’
‘Any fruit?’ It was a fruit-growing region, too.
‘Is finished.’
‘How about Ambo?’ Ambo was Ethiopian bottled water.
The Get Smart clerk smiled: finished.
We ate some of the pineapples we had with us and set off for Yabelo and Mega and the border town of Moyale.
Steering around the deep potholes on the road south of Dila we entered long valleys, some of them green and cultivated, others no more than dust bowls. We came to the ramshackle town of Agera Maryam. ‘They have food here,’ Tadelle said, driving into a walled compound. A sad sweet-faced woman brought us some evil-looking goat meat and cold pasta. I ate some of the pasta, Wolde scarfed the goat, and Tadelle said, ‘Za people here are thieves. I must watch za car or zey will steal from it.’
The table covering at the eating place was a week-old Ethiopian English language newspaper in which there was an alarming item, reporting this southern region was being ravaged by outbreaks of meningitis. It did not specify which form. Ethiopia (and the Sudan) is in the African ‘meningitis belt.’ There is even a ‘meningitis season’ — these very months. I made a mental note to buy some cans of food. There were no cans. All I could find in the way of packaged food were some boxes of stale cookies, made in Abu Dhabi.
We drove onward through a wide mountain valley down an empty road past the town of Yabelo. The men in this region wore traditional dress, tunics and beads, the men carried spears, the women toiled on paths with bundles of wood on their heads, very young herdboys bullied goats with their crooks. The landscape had become hotter and drier, and in one sun-struck place a small boy was pressed against a tree for the relief of a little patch of shade.
‘The women very pretty here,’ Tadelle said, slowing down.
But he was slowing down for roadkill — fifty-nine hooded vultures surrounded a dead hyena on the road, flapping their ragged wings and tearing at the animal’s flesh, while other scavenging birds, the kites and marabou storks, kept their distance. In the fields beyond were wild camels, or at least roaming ones, unsaddled, unhobbled, plodding towards the hills.
This was the region of the Wolayta people, who lived in beehive huts that were topped with bald ostrich eggs, a token of fertility. Clusters of these huts lay along the road. The women were beautiful, with long plaits of braided hair and bright cloaks, some of the women heavily burdened with bundles of firewood. Men in fields were using yoked oxen and wooden plows shaped like wishbones, and all the boys striding with spears.
The town names were large on the map, but the towns themselves were tiny. Mega was just a wide place in the road. There was nothing to eat here, but being among so many hungry people had killed my appetite. In Ethiopia I ate one meal a day, injera and vegetable glop, or pasta, a dish that was a hangover from the Italian occupation.
Tadelle said, ‘There was a war here in 1983’ — no sign of it, though, except for some wrecked vehicles on the low bare hills. The war had come and gone, people had died, life resumed, nothing had changed, still the plow and the herd of goats and the cooking fire and the bare buttocks; the African story.
I walked from shop to shop, making notes on what was for sale — cheap Chinese clothes, aluminum pots, knives, enamel basins: no food. Since I was the only faranji in town, I attracted attention, and boys began following me.
‘Please give me one birr. I am poor and I am a schoolboy.’
They took turns begging. I said no, to discourage them from pestering farajis. Is this the right thing to do? I wrote in my diary that night. I don’t know. Everyone asked, everywhere I went from Cairo to Cape Town, people — kids mostly — had their hand out: Meesta. These kids in Mega I gave some of the Abu Dhabi cookies before shooing them away.
Tadelle said it was too hot to continue for now. We would stay in Mega for a few hours and set offagain for Moyale later in the afternoon. We sat in the shade, Tadelle complaining genially about Ethiopian politicians (‘Zay are termites’) and we were joined by some girls from a shop who brought us bottled water. To kill time I demonstrated the blades of my Swiss Army knife.
‘One month’s salary,’ said Tadelle when I answered his question about the price of it. Fifty dollars, I had said. But most Ethiopians earned nothing at all.