Law, Partially

I'm in the colonies -- Singapore, actually, and Singapore is not part of China. Singapore is far south of China. Singapore is a very small nation. It is an island nation, and the city of Singapore composes the entire nation that is Singapore. It’s a city-nation-state. My Singaporean friends tell me that Westerners always think Singapore is part of China. In a way, that’s not a completely uninformed guess, as China does have some special city-states that were former Western colonies – Macao and Hong Kong – and Singapore herself is a former colony city-state. And the majority of the population in Singapore is of Chinese descent -- as in, part of the Chinese Diaspora. But young Singaporeans speak English very well. It is their first language. The schools here are good. That’s why I came.  Can you picture the place now? One degree above the equator, snuggled between Malaysia and Indonesia, composed of nothing but a big island and a few smaller islands, ships with goods manufact

There were many tourism advertisement posters posted in my offices at the Ethiopian Ministry of Trade and Industry. The women of some tribes in southern Ethiopia don’t wear tops, and tourists actually go down there to gawk. It seems too voyeuristic to me, but maybe all tourism is anyway… And the lovely Ministry of Trade and Industry itself. This is the ministry in charge of Ethiopia’s bid to join the WTO, and this is where I spent my summer working. The squiggles above the Latin characters are the Ethiopic script, aka the Ge’ez script. Amharic is written in this script. Ethiopian attorneys. That is indeed a picture of an Indian god behind us because we went to an Indian restaurant for my Addis Ababa farewell lunch. I had a speech planned to give about my time in Ethiopia, but my boss didn’t ask me to give a farewell speech, so the lunch was unceremonious and featured mainly me impressing everyone with how much I can overeat. Ski Dubai inside the Mall of the

There are few streetlights on the roads of Addis Ababa, and often the power is out anyway. Businesses tend to be far from the street and sometimes behind walls, and the businesses aren’t brightly lit anyway, except for small fruit stands and meat kiosks with their huge sides of beef hanging inside. What I’m getting to is, the streets at night are dark and somewhat foreboding. On my second to last night in Addis Ababa, as I was walking the dark streets near my house, through the gauntlet of whores, to reach a restaurant that serves Ethiopian honey wine, called  tej , I was thinking of Lethal Weapon 3, where Danny Glover is in his last week on the police force before retirement when all hell breaks loose in Los Angeles. I thought, my last days in Addis, wouldn’t it suck if something bad happened now. But nothing bad did happen. The worst thing that happened was drinking the  tej . It’s not very delicious. And all the way from Ethiopia to Singapore was a series of minor disasters

And so quickly, it’s over. I’m ashamed that I complained so much during my short sojourn in Ethiopia, but as my Ethiopian colleagues tell me, the frustrations of Ethiopian life anger them too. The extortion and arbitrary rule of landlords. No water, then no hot water. No electricity, and I was treated to one last evening of reading by candlelight yesterday. All the hustlers out on the street trying to find you taxis, shine your shoes, hold umbrellas for you, all for a tip. Pick pockets. People on the street teasing foreigners. The dust. The mud. One colleague said that he grew up in the countryside, and even he gets pissed off by Ethiopia. I’m still embarrassed to be such a complainer because with all I learned about law, trade, development, and people this summer, I’m sure I’ll remember the good parts much more than the bad. I’ll miss fasting food (I’ve been to eat at my favorite fasting restaurant four times in a week and a half). Cheap food and beer. My colleagues. I’m having d