Law, Partially

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 ...

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...

And a fine photography job I did on the Lion of Judah. Eh, it was raining, and some hustlers were yelling at me not to take the photo. They probably wanted to charge me for the privilege. Who knows? This statue is a national symbol of Ethiopia and predates the Italian invasion of the 1930s. During the occupation, Italy tore it down and buried it; apparently it was dug up after the occupation and perched atop this pedestal. A stamp in this statue’s shape appears at the beginning of printed collections of Ethiopian laws dating from the Emperor’s time. It is a symbol of the country. Below is the modern Lion of Judah that was erected in the ’60s and was thought quite progressive for Ethiopia. I am fond of the filthy statue. It’s cool and unique.

What a beautiful name that continent has. Like Asia, India, and America, it's Latin. It invokes in my mind a 2 dimensional outline of the continent's borders, the interior colored by three stripes of green, gold, and red, the colors of Ethiopia's flag, adopted by Pan Africanists as their symbol. (for pictures of the African flags utilizing these beautiful colors, click here ) Last summer I did South Asia. This summer, I do East Africa. Ethiopia. The cradle of humanity. The rallying point for Pan-Africanism. And the spiritual home of Rastafarianism. Their vaunted Zion, Jamaica being Babylon, where the Rastafarians felt enslaved. Africa. Ethiopian flag (I can't find a picture of this three-striped Africa map I've seen before) This also means the blog will be returning.