The Hopeful Smell of Sewage!

Every day, it seems, we are smacked in the face with loads of information that we are learning about our new home. Today, Thursday, was no exception. Today was the day that we were scheduled to go to the US Embassy for our residence registration. But before that, our missionary friends (our boss and landlord) took us to the restaurant attached to the Ethiopian National Museum (near the US embassy). The museum is famous for housing the Neanderthal skeleton named “Lucy.” She is supposedly one of the few (if not only) remains of a transitional species between apes and humans and she was found right here in Ethiopia. Apparently, Lucy is actually not at the museum right now, she is travelling to some US museums to show off her beauty, but nevertheless, I ordered the Lucy Special Pizza at the her home museum’s restaurant. It was interesting: ground beef, mushroom, pepperoni, onion, and tuna, yes, tuna. It must have been Lucy’s own recipe from billions and billions of years ago, since it didn’t retain popularity as the species transitioned into full human. I’m always open from trying new stuff, but I don’t think I’ll be craving this one any time soon (Andrea’s Nile perch on the other hand was very good!). When finished at the restaurant, we went to the massive, fortress-looking embassy. After going through two very thorough checkpoints, our US passports became a free pass to the front of the line as we used the “US citizens only” window. It was very nice, but we felt bad for the long lines of Ethiopians waiting to see if they could get US visas. The process went fairly quick for us and we were soon back on the street. Andrea and I then went shopping with our friends in what is called Shiro Meda, a part of town known for its ethnic dresses. One co-worker is headed home to Canada on Monday (for medical tests as well as support raising). She wanted a new ethnic dress to wear during her presentations. Although, I (Travis) was certainly out of place in these dress shops, I did enjoy seeing the bright colored dresses and imagining my wife in front of an American church wearing one of them. We will wait and see what the Gmz people wear before making a purchase here. (I will write Gmz to refer to the people group we intend to work with just to avoid obvious identification).

Then, our landlord (guesthouse manager), an American whose name is also Andrea, took us by taxi to the top of a high hill called Entoto. Once at the top, she asked if we would mind walking down. Sure, we love to hike, so we took off through the woods with the theory that a 6-10 million person city is somewhere at the base of this hill and as long as we go down we should hit it. The woods was very nice and peaceful with an occasional flock of goats or woman picking up firewood. The women here do all the heavy carrying. As we were riding up the hill in the taxi, we passed probably 20-30 women walking down with MASSIVE loads of firewood rolled up into what looked like a huge cigarette. By huge I mean taking hundreds of twigs (about a centimeter or two in diameter) and rolling them into a large cylinder about 2 to 3 feet in diameter and probably 8-10 feet long. We wish we had a camera with us to show that we are not exaggerating the size of these HUGE bundles. So anyway, back to the trek down the hill. After walking about 15 minutes, we came upon three guys carrying big logs up the hill. They asked us (in Amharic) where we were going and Andrea (the guesthouse manager) said “to the city” (in Amharic). Puzzled, he said, “there is no city this way.” After a flurry of Amharic spoken between the three men and Andrea, we were directed to veer more toward our right, which we did. Andrea had warned us that she had never gone this particular way and she is kinda a free-spirited “let’s just set off and see what happens” kind of person. We continued to walk downhill through the beautiful forest knowing that a massive city like Addis Ababa could not hide for long. After 45 minutes or so, we caught glimpses of the city, and finally after one hour of hiking, we smelled the smell of hope. In this case, it smelled like a dirty truck-stop’s restroom. The smell of sewage was encouraging because that meant that we were now on the outskirts of the city. Sure enough as we turned another corner, there was a young boy making his deposit before running back to the city. He and all his friends joined the welcoming committee as three “farengies” (foreigners) just walked out of the forest (or toilet, if you will) and proceeded confidently up the street. All eyeballs were on us as we passed by with a few brave souls trying out their English on us (“Hello, how are you?” and “I love you very much!”). After flagging down a taxi we learned where in the city we had landed and soon made our way home (with a quick stop for soft serve ice cream – a very special treat to celebrate a successful hike). There was probably never a point that we felt totally lost or actually in trouble, it was the just the excitement of being off the beaten path and out in nature. Although tired feet and an empty stomach welcomed the hopeful smell of sewage.