EthioGrandma

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I work in a typical office for Africa. Meaning that we have a tea, or coffee in the case of Ethiopia, setting for continued tea (or coffee) drinking during your time in the office. We also have a lovely staff member who works for us. She delivers tea or coffee to your desk, per your preference. In my culture, younger folks ought to serve the older folks so at times, I feel very self-conscious when she comes to ask me if I need some tea as I am typing away on my laptop. She is grandmotherly, speaks a few sentences of English and is forever telling each and everyone of us how much she likes us. Today, my officemate played a cruel trick on her. When she came to fill up my huge cup with my preferred tea of choice (mint), he mentioned that she is the parent of one famous Ethiopian singer. Of course, I googled the singer right away and some of her videos came up on youtube. So, naturally, I showed this to EthioGrandma who was in our office and asked if that was her daughter. She was amazed! She had, in a previous conversation, shared that she had never attended school and could not read English or even Amharic. She leaned in a kissed the screen of my laptop as her daughter’s video played. Then, my officemate decided to tell her that I could show her on my handy laptop what her daughter was doing right at that moment… Continue reading →

Do You Remember Me?

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So you know how you try and read different reviews on different places when you are heading to a different country for tourism or, in my case, for work? Then perhaps it never happens to you. Well, I read somewhere about a particular scam in Ethiopia, specifically in Addis, where a guy walks up to you (the obvious foreigner aka faranji) and proceeds to ask if you remember him and tries to trigger your obvious bad memory with the story of how you met at the airport. Well, it happened to me. I mean, I did not get scammed (I am Kenyan, after all) but I did have a Continue reading →

Untitled

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I had a crisis while I was living in Liberia. I was living in a lovely, air-conditioned apartment that was a few hundred feet from the American embassy, with a mzungu roommate who worked for the World Bank, and I was working on public-health-capacity-building matters. I would lounge in the spacious living room, admiring the green plants that dotted our living room, lovingly tended to by our Plant Guy, and I would casually flip channels on our telly, switching between watching E! or some other satellite movie channel. Then I would go to the kitchen to wash my dishes and, beyond our iron-grated windows and high stone wall that was completed by a twirl of fencing wire for security, I would stare upon the families that were squatting on the heap of trash and dirt that were located behind our large building. They lived in makeshift huts that were often made of a combination of plastic paper, mud and stones. It broke my heart. In more ways than one, because I was African, living in West Africa for the first time and confronting severe poverty right at my front door. I cannot say that I have never been poor but I can honestly say that I have never been THAT poor. My parents sheltered me for my first seventeen years, then I took off for the US and for that grinding life there. I was conflicted during my time in Liberia because I thought my work was helping those who needed it the most. However, right in my backyard, there were some people that obviously were not benefitting from my USAID-funded organization. Thinking about it, my work focused on midlevel workers at the Ministry of Health so, despite my best efforts Continue reading →