Will you be my president?

 

The upside to having to be up before dawn on workday mornings is getting to see the sun come up from our balcony

I'll start this off without any words, to quote Kurt Cobain. Well, actually, all I have are words, plus a few photos, so let me begin again. Thanks to COVID-19, the coronavirus that keeps on giving, we've had to scrap our plans to travel during our daughter's upcoming spring break. The plan was to spend a week in nearby Tanzania, one of the few countries in the world keeping its doors open to international visitors. We were going to spend half the week on safari, with the other half on a beach in Zanzibar. However, the more I looked into the situation in that country, the worse the idea of traveling there became. This is a place that hasn't published any data regarding case numbers and deaths since April of last year, mainly because its president in effect denies the virus even exists in Tanzania. And with a plethora of recent news reports (like this one and this one) describing the COVID-19 situation there as getting worse, leading to my employer advising American citizens against traveling to Tanzania because of the high risk of catching the coronavirus while there, it seemed needlessly rash to take chances. And so, after discussing things over with my wife, the decision was made to stay put, not only over the school break, but until we leave Ethiopia sometime this summer. 

Woe is me, for this is the second time in my life I've had to cancel a planned African safari. The first was way back in 1997, when I was living in Tōkyō 東京. At that time I was going to fly to Kenya for the Christmas holidays, with stops in the Seychelles on the way there and back. Unfortunately for me, the Kenyan government decided to hold a presidential election for that time, and the people with whom I was going to stay in Nairobi advised me not to go, saying that due to threats of violence I wouldn't have been able to go outside (I ended up instead spending a few days in Okayama 岡山, and eventually made it to the Seychelles, with Amber and Shu-E, during last year's spring break, just as COVID-19 began causing many countries to close their borders). Going on a safari was going to be the highlight of our time in Africa, but it isn't something worth putting my health at risk, not to mention that of my family. And let's be real, here: if once COVID-19 is past us, in a time when nearly 2.4 million people have died from the virus, and so many others have lost their livelihoods, the worst I can say is I had to cancel a couple of vacations (I was going to take my daughter on a two-week long excursion to Japan last summer), then I have nothing to complain about. And  with that I'll now shut the hell up on the topic of traveling and move on to other topics, like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing#/media/File:Beijing_skyline_from_northeast_4th_ring_road.jpg

If you look at the link below the above photo, you can probably guess it's a shot of the Beijing 北京 skyline. You might be asking why I've included it here. The answer is this is where we'll be going next, following the completion of our tour in Addis Ababa አዲስ አበባ. I was notified by email on Friday evening that I had been "paneled", with is Foreign Service-speak for the assignment being made official. It's the end of a nightmarish bidding process that has had me questioning why I'm still serving an employer that treats its employees in such a humiliating manner. I ranted about the bidding process back in November (you can read it here), and by this point I'm exhausted, on the verge of burning out, and just glad to know what we'll be doing for the next five years or so...hopefully, because the State Department has a way of fucking up the best-laid plans of mice and diplomats. And hopefully an old dog can learn some new tricks, because I ain't getting any younger, and the job in China will not be a Consular tour. Due to the dearth of Consular positions in the East Asia-Pacific region, and the intense competition for those few jobs that were up for grabs during bidding season, I ended up accepting an assignment as a General Services Officer, meaning I'll be working in areas that may include housing, motor pool, procurement, property, shipping and customs, travel and VIP visits. There will be an intensive 8- or 9-week GSO course that I'll have to take in the fall, followed by almost two years of Mandarin training.

Yes, that's right, having suffered through a year of Mandarin at the Foreign Service Institute almost eight years ago, it's back to the nine circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno. I've blogged many times on these pages my frustration with the way languages are taught in the State Department, and the suffering I've put myself through, and yet once again I'll be dropping my drawers, bending over and asking the instructors may I please have another, linguistically speaking. The first year will be at FSI, but the second year, probably starting around August 2022, will be in China's capital. *Sigh* If I don't come out of this tour (three years of work starting in September 2023) a competent and comfortable speaker of 官话 (or 國語, as it's still called in Taiwan), I'll only have myself to blame. And FSI.

Shu-E, naturally, is pleased at this turn in bidding developments. She's a native Mandarin-speaker, and our two years in Shanghai 上海 familiarized her with the realities of life in China. And Taiwan will only be a short plane ride away. Amber is also looking forward to the tour, as she's also linguistically comfortable in a Chinese-speaking environment, though if she goes to college as planned, she'll only be with us for half the tour (is time really passing that quickly?!). As for me, I'll be glad to be back in East Asia. If the coronavirus is behind us by then, I'll be looking forward to the many travel opportunities. All three of us are keeping our fingers crossed this all goes as planned...

Meanwhile, back in the present, life goes on in the new normal. My daughter has returned to in-person classes on campus, I'm splitting my workweek half in the office and half teleworking from home, and my wife has decided the best thing to do in the face of COVID-19 (which is continuing to worsen in Ethiopia) is to stay at home as often as possible. Don't expect a lot of blog posts on excursions in the city between now and this summer, and especially, don't look forward to fascinating insights on different locales in Ethiopia - even if the coronavirus were under control, the security situation here has us confined to the capital for now.

Speaking of little girls growing up too quickly, Amber turned fifteen last month. Which means that this summer she'll be old enough to get a learner's permit and begin learning how to drive. A good thing I lost my hair a long time ago:

Cereal with a local flavor. They're pretty good, actually, though it wouldn't hurt to sweeten it a bit, would it? (in case you're wondering, teff ጤፍ is the crop from which injera እንጀራ, the staple of Ethiopian cuisine, is made):

Weekends here these days mainly consist of my daughter and I going to swim in the embassy pool, and lunch outings. Like the time we ate at the Gazebo restaurant at the Hilton Addis Ababa:

Shu-E complains about the high prices there, but the "China market" is the only place in Addis Ababa where she can buy many familiar food items, so we're frequent shoppers. This cat was minding its own business at the back of one of the Chinese-owned grocery stores in that neighborhood:

The embassy has a jogging/running track that makes a circuit of the grounds. I never tire of the view of St. Michael አንቀጸ ምህረት ቅዱስ ሚካኤል, looking to the northeast, especially on days as clear as the one when this photo was taken:

My wife might despair over the dearth of good Chinese restaurants here (she was disappointed to find out a couple of weeks ago that her favorite eatery has closed), but spare a thought for her Japanophile spouse. I've yet to come across a Japanese restaurant in Addis. There's a Korean restaurant called Ari Rang that we often go to (Shu-E likes the tofu there) that also serves a few Japanese dishes; the last we went I decided to try their tonkatsu 豚カツ (or "donkatsu", as it was written in the menu). The result was edible, but it was nothing like the Japanese pork cutlet treat I love so much. Sure, it was pork in some kind of breaded batter, but the sauce was...I don't know what it was, not quite sweet, not quite sour, and definitely not the tonkatsu sauce you would expect to find. The drought continues:

I still go cycling occasionally, though conditions here aren't exactly bike-friendly (the elevation!). Here I pause on a street where a wedding was being celebrated - the cars with the floral decorations on their hoods are part of a wedding procession, a common sight on city streets:

Traffic congestion can be an exercise in frustration on narrow neighborhood roads. The truck on the left discovered too late that there wasn't enough room to get around the truck parked on the right. I had to detour on my bike in order to get around the snarl and make it home:

I love the sunsets as seen from our balcony, but even dusk has its charms at times:

Addis Ababa is a fast-growing metropolis of almost four million souls, with a skyline of multiplying construction sites. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that there's a dearth of parks and green spaces in the city. However, my daughter and I were pleased to find a quiet oasis called the Zoma Museum only a ten-minute drive from home. The "museum" seems to be trying to be all things to all visitors (there's an art gallery, library, gift-shop, vegetable garden and even an elementary school on the premises), but for us it was nice just to among trees and shrubbery again, even if only for a few hours:

The gallery had an exhibit of photographs taken in Ethiopia between the 1940's and 1960's by Johannes Haile:

If for nothing else the Zoma Museum is worth a repeat visit for its onsite restaurant and coffee shop. While Amber had a chicken sandwich, I tried the fatira, an Ethiopian breakfast dish that tasted much like French toast:

Another weekend, another burger joint. At least this time Amber had a steak, while I tried the "minty limeade" (and seemed to age considerably in the process):

An advertisement for a drink called Dankira. If Google Translate is to believed, I'm being asked to drink this later at night:

Roadside stalls selling goats are a common sight in Addis. Business is especially good around the Muslim holidays:

For those who follow such things (like us) this past Friday saw the start of another Lunar New Year. Shu-E did her best to prepare a traditional dinner on the New Year's Eve, with fish as the centerpiece. 年年有餘 niánniányǒuyú - "May you have abundance year after year" (the word for fish 魚 yú is a homonym for 餘 yú, meaning "more than"):

And of course our daughter received her 紅包, the red envelope stuffed with cash:

More early-morning shots from the balcony:

This weekend Amber and I had lunch at Sishu - yes, another burger restaurant. We've been there many times (it's less than ten minutes on foot from our residence, meaning we don't have to deal with the traffic snarls caused by the ongoing construction project on Pushkin Street), but Saturday was the first time we noticed the booths are decorated with newspaper clippings in several languages. Nothing like reading about horrific plane crashes while waiting for your food to be brought to the table:

Taken by my daughter from the passenger seat on one of our drives back home after swimming at the embassy:

On Valentine's Day Amber and I went for our weekly swim (with the water almost unbearably cold thanks to a recent emptying and subsequent refilling of the pool). For lunch the two of us had a leisurely meal at Coffee.com. Addis Ababa surprisingly (or perhaps understandably, depending on how you interpret history) has a wide choice when it comes to Italian restaurants, despite the atrocities committed by the Italian military against Ethiopians in the 1930's. There's an apparent lack of bitterness towards those years - Ethiopians I've spoken to about the Italian occupation period always refer to "the Fascists" and not "the Italians", as if they were different people. 

Anyway, we don't go to Italian restaurants very often as Shu-E isn't a fan of the food (the culinary highlight of our trip to Italy in February 2018 for my wife was eating out at a Korean restaurant in Rome). For my daughter and I, lunch on Saturday was an enjoyably leisurely affair, as both of us started off with a bowl of minestrone soup, before diverging with a plate of carbonara for me, and an order of chicken cutlet for her, all the while talking about what it means to be bi-racial and bi-cultural in Taiwan and other weighty topics. I miss the little girl she used to be, but I'm enjoying what she has to say these days as she transitions into adulthood:

I'm going to close this post on a somber note. Back in December I had tried to visit the "Red Terror" Memorial Martyrs Museum, only to find it closed. Today being Presidents' Day I thought I'd try my luck again, and as luck would have it, the museum የቀይ ሽብር መታሰቢያ ሙዚየም was open. It was set up in 2010 as a memorial to the hundreds of thousands who perished at the hands of the Derg ደርግ regime during a bloody campaign that came to be known as the "Red Terror" ቀይ ሽብር:

The origins of the Red Terror lay in the September 1974 ouster of Emperor Haile Selassie ቀዳማዊ ኃይለ ሥላሴ by the Derg, a secretive group of leftist military officers. The revolution came about in response to the imperial regime's poor human rights record; atrocities committed against Eritrean separatists; the Wollo famine of 1972-1974 that left up to 80,000 Ethiopians dead by some estimates; and the effects of the international economic downturn resulting from the 1973 oil crisis. The emperor was out of touch with the struggles his people were going through - as the photo caption below described it "the emperor used to consider himself a messiah and enjoyed the naivete of his subjects in considering him as a king sent from the heavens":

In a famous photograph following his ouster, Haile Selassie was driven away from the Jubilee Palace in a VW Beetle, never to be seen again. He was strangled in his bed in August 1975, with his remains being stashed under a concrete slab on the palace grounds (they're now entombed in the Holy Trinity Cathedral):

Some 60 officials of the imperial government were executed without trial in November 1974, along with members of the Derg who were expressing opposition to pursuing a military offensive against separatists in Eritrea:

Like with many other radical leftist revolutions (see China, Cambodia, North Korea and the Soviet Union), the regime began to turn on itself, under the direction of Mengistu Haile Mariam መንግስቱ ኃይለ ማርያም, who emerged as leader of the Derg following a shootout with rivals in early 1977:

 

The Red Terror was a campaign of repression led by Mengistu against competing Marxist-Leninist groups (led by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party, or EPRP) in Ethiopia and Eritrea from 1976-1977, but soon swept through the population as a whole, ultimately claiming up to 750,000 victims by some accounts:

In a public speech in 1976, Mengistu shouted "Death to the counterrevolutionaries! Death to the EPRP!", and then dramatically smashed three bottles filled with red liquid to the ground to demonstrate what the revolution was about to do to its perceived enemies. It was the beginning of a bloodbath that would last for two years, with thousands of young men and women murdered by militia attached to neighborhood watch committees known as kebele. Families had to pay the kebele a tax called "the wasted bullet" in order to obtain the bodies of their loved ones:

The children in the photo on the right below are those of detained prisoners; the shot was taken in the courtyard of a prison:

The person who wore this shirt miraculously survived an attempted execution and later donated the garment to the museum:

Children were among the victims:

The most chilling part of the museum is a room with a couple of cabinets containing the remains of Red Terror victims removed from mass graves. On some of the shelves you can see what the person was wearing at the time they were killed, along with a photograph of the unfortunate victim:

Personal possessions that were removed from the mass graves:

The Derg officially came to an end in February 1987, but Mengistu and its other surviving members continued to control Ethiopia, with the assistance of the USSR (and Cuban soldiers who fought with Ethiopian forces in the Ogaden War). The Ethiopian Civil War (which resulted in the deaths of 1.4 million people) and the famine of 1983-1985 (which killed more than 500,000) kept up pressure on the regime, but Mengistu was able to remain in power until May 1991, when he fled to Zimbabwe (and where he continues to evade facing justice to this day):

As the statue out front reads, "Never again" (and yet insanities such as the Red Terror continue to happen around the world). The "Red Terror" Martyrs Memorial Museum is small, and free to visit, though donations are welcome (I contributed ETB200 at the end of my visit). It's well worth the effort to see, in order to gain some understanding of the sufferings of the Ethiopian people that continue to this day, the result of ethnic and political disagreements:

Even though we won't be traveling during the school spring break period, I still plan on taking that week off, to do another staycation like the one I had when the girls were doing their quarantine at home following their return from Taiwan, and to burn off some more of those accumulated vacation hours that I haven't been able to use thanks to you know what. I'd like to get out that week and see some more of this city, though my wife thinks I'm idiot for taking the risk (and she's probably right). Still, with an abundant supply of face masks and hand sanitizer, and my natural anti-socialism ensuring social distancing, I should be okay. After all it's a New Year!

新年快樂! 恭喜發財!

Yet another early morning shot, this one taken from our second-floor bathroom. You can see a plane making its approach to Bole International Airport.