A briefing from Addis

First some anecdotes, impressions. The funny signage in Addis: A hoarding trumpeting the Society for the Erection of Martyr Advancement Foundation; a hardware store marquee advertising Pumps, Hoses, Paint and Vibrators.

All around the streamers and flags and garlands from the millennium celebration at the beginning of the month. In Ethiopia, you see, it is the year 2000, just turned. Also—and this is something I failed to notice the last time I was here—their reckoning of the 24 hour period begins not at midnight but at daybreak, i.e. six in the morning is their hour zero.

An anecdote overheard, spoken by a road-tripping wzungu couple: “We travel with a little plastic snake that sits coiled up on the dashboard. It gives every African who peeps in through the window a fright. Once we flung it at some children who were giving us trouble. They ran away screaming.”

The cab drivers all want to know if I can give them an in to get to your country, get to your country, get to your country. Cabbie Markos has a friend who has been in a 'refugee camp' in Hamburg for five years. The government will not let him work.

The hills around Addis range to 3,000 meters, and on those high ridges is where the world's best marathoners get their practice. And yet down in Addis’s cauldron where the diesel-choked air shimmers dully with a color like slate, it is an effort just to keep putting one foot in front of the next. The aridity and elevation give the smoke a granular acridness that refuses to clear, unlike, say, the sootiest diesel in rain or humid air.

Addis is squalid, yes, but its people maintain a dignity whose betokening facial expression verges on haughtiness. On the subject of the people, it would be an unforgivable omission not to mention the women. They are of the rarest beauty, yet—uncannily—in this place such beauty is no rarity. A silly thing to subject to analysis or taxonomy, perhaps, but it’s something about the sharply contrasting tones of lips and face, the delicacy of their faces, the high foreheads, the curves teased out to fit elongate frames, no less the conscious flare used everywhere to accentuate the beauty: Scent of musk, nails painted black or purple, scarves that hide one curve and set off another. Several times a day I feel as if I must surely be witnessing the passage of one of the world’s most beautiful women in the flesh. And as in Zambia, it also seems that the women here, and I mean the poor ones, are better kept and less weatherbeaten and careworn than the men. Why is this?