May 14, 2007

A good day

Let’s start backwards. At about 1:30 am, my night ended with me and my fellow Condom Project friend, Tim, looking out of his 6th floor window onto the median in the road. We argued how many sheep were grazing. He easily said 85. My max was 60. Those numbers quickly went up when another herder came down the street with his 100+ sheep. I tried to take pictures, I still need to play with it to figure out how to use it.

Herds of sheep and goats is not unusual to see here-neither are little mules carrying a load around. Other animals we see are cows, a few stray cats and a coupe of dogs.

I think it was surreal abouyt the close to 300 sheep was that it was in the middle of the night…needeless to say I counted sheep before i went to bed.

For dinner we went to a cultural dinner restaurant where we had amazing Ethiopian food-I totally filled myself with fasting food (just in case it will be a few days before i get to eat). I tried Tej-the honey wine. It was good and rather potent. Not being a wine drinker I only tolerated a couple of sips. And then there was the ‘cultural’ aspect of the dinner, traditional music & dancing from the different regions of the country. Everything it the show was amazing, the costuming, the dancing, singing, the cool instuments. Normally i don’t go fot the whole cultural dinner and show thing because its really geared towards tourists. This place was mostly Ethiopians. And the performers very genuine in making sure they gave us a real authentic show.

And in my travel books the traditional dance of Ethiopia was discussed and compared it to dancing like a chicken. Okay Okay, it was a litte like a chicken but alot of quick shoulder and torso movement and popping. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2NKKGJ_kVU

The drug of choice here is a plant called Chat. The leaves are sold in bundles everywhere. I have heard it is a hallucengetic. What I am gathering, it is used more with the impoverished communities. I guess anything that you can afford and it allows to escape from reality, serves its purpose.

Yesterday, while we were talking to some guy about sex workers, he was so high, and his teeth were green from the chat leaves.

Ah, yes and sex workers.

The other day, e went to this sketchy place that promoted themselves as a place to watch traditional dancing-but this place was unmarked andoff the beaten path. When we walked in the the gate, we can here men cheering and clapping, but I couldn’t see anything. we asked to speak to the boss of the establishment. We then were taken into a bedroom weher there were 2 women and four men, who politely listened to our schpeel. The room was dark, and had Chat stems all over the floor. There was a huge bag of it sitting next to one of the guys. Very reminsicent of walking into a crack house-dark and dingy. Our conversation went well, until the worker, the guy who brings coffee, went ballistic on us. He was anxious about our talk on condoms. He tried to kick us out but the boss wouldn’t let him. He then pulled out his cross necklace and said tha in there country if someone was HIV+ they would drink holy water and they would be fine.

At that point I was sitting next to him and gave him the WTF look. And quickly decided to keep my mouth shut. The owner tole him to leave because he was being rude and disrutpive. At the same time- the worker kept on trying to make us pay for taking up the girls time (yet being persistan that the establishment was only for dancing). The situation became akward and we handed out our cards and the women said they would call us.

If that wasn’t enough- we had our driver, Fasil (another story for another day), take us to a red light district. This is a residential area with small dive bars and brothels. We went to a couple places where we were received well. One place the owner was not in-and the women proudly tooka nd wore our condom pins. We went to another bar, where the female owner of the establishment invited us to come back to demonstrate the use of a female condom to the other women.

We went to one more bar.brothel. Didn’t go in b/c the room was filled with men chewing on chat. As we walked away, one of the men came out to ask if he could help us. This is the green teeth guy. Then we spent the next 45 minutes on this runned down street handing out condom pins, cards, candy (to the kids) and showing them the condom project films. [if you haven’t seen the films yet goto the condomproject.org, the visual voice project]. Everyone wanted a pin and was excited about us being there, from the youth to the older women. And, this is freaky coming from me-the kids were so cute. When I get a chance to post the pictures I will. You see what I am talking about-

Once again, the lack of information and the desperation of the impoverished here is just something that is very different then in the US. They really are behind in basic HIV and condom info, very behind.

All this confirms to me how baffling it is to me that something so basic and simple as giving people tools, resources, education is out of this world. And that even applies to the US.

Thats it for now, later

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