Large and In Charge

I am legitimately concerned about becoming fat. For the first time in twenty two years I find myself consuming enough food to render my tweenish metabolism useless, and it’s completely my grandmother’s fault. Seconds after stepping foot in the family home on our first full day in Ethiopia, my dad and I were tethered to the dining room table with mounds of injera (the country’s sour-crepe-like staple), shiro (a thick chickpea soup), and lentils (you know, lentils). If my grandparents had not been fasting like all good Ethiopian Orthodox Christians do, there would have been more. Much, much more.

 So why don’t I simply tell my grandmother that I’m full? Am I afraid of seeming rude? Of course I do, and so what?! A stomach can only take so much punishment for the sake of being polite. While I’ve told my grandmother, “I’m finished,” at least one hundred times—“Bakaye! Bakaye! Bakaye!”—she has an unbeatable trick up her sleeve: She’s partially deaf. What this means is that even when she can hear my pleas, and I assure you she does, she can get away with ignoring me without seeming rude. When she actually did acknowledge hearing my “bakaye” at dinner, she just rolled her eyes and plopped more food onto on my plate.

Being old seems awesome. You can do whatever you want.  

After sleeping off our kingly feast in Debre Zeit—the air force town where my father grew up—we weathered the hour and a half drive to my new home for the year: capital city Addis Ababa. The images I saw on that drive both challenged and reinforced Western understandings of Africa. Fruit stands cowered in the shadows of massive factories, and worn-out Russian taxis shared the road with diesel spewing SUVs.

Ethiopia is identity-crisis-teenager-style complicated.  

My father and I parted ways when we reached Addis. He headed back to Debre Zeit, and I headed to the comfortable hotel that my organization put me in while my apartment was made ready. There’s nothing exciting to say about this part of the trip. I watched the news, it bummed me out, so I watched shows about fish on the embarrassingly named “Nat Geo” instead. The shows were about invasive fish species wreaking havoc on ecosystems so they also bummed me out. 

I have since moved into my new apartment and had my first and second day of work. There have been ups and downs this last week, but I'm happy and extremely fortunate to have two, soon to be three, other fellows here with me in Addis (I'm living with one of them). I’ll elaborate more on all of this in my next entry. 

By the way, there’s a gym next to my house. Sorry grandma.