FEB-C-6

 

DEPARTURE DAY FROM GONDAR,

DELAYED BY MECHANICAL FOKKER 50 FAILURE,

WITH RETURN TO ADDIS AND TOUR OF CLINICS,

POSTPONING THE VISIT TO MOTHER TERESA CLINIC

 AND VISIT WITH RICK HODES AND SONS

 

February 20, 2004

 

            I have moved south.  I have not changed much in altitude, as I can tell from the days that are quite warm under the thigh altitude thin air sunshine in the dry season just north of the Equator at 12* 37.16 N in Gondar to 9* 00.03 N at Addis, and by the cold nights when the sun is gone and the modulating influence of abundant water is noted by its absence.  I have also moved from a large town to the capital city, and I am now in urban Africa, the single demographic population segment with the highest growth rate on this continent.

 

            I was delayed in my departure from Gondar, after a very pleasant send-off from my hosts of the faculty of Gondar College of Medical Sciences, this next month to achieve the new status and title “Gondar University.”   One other mark of status in entering a new era is about to be achieved—this week Gondar achieves cell phone service.  That means that real civilization had arrived, and that no longer will anyone who has such a device be condemned to speak only to the person they are with within eye contact range, but they might each ignore the partner they are physically next to and engage instead in much more intimate conversations with someone far away, repeating over and over those very favorite greetings—“Can you hear me now? How about now?  Listen, I will try to get back to you from someplace where there is better reception!  I will try again in a few minutes.  It may take me about six attempts to complete this non-transmission of this non-message, but I am so fascinated with the convenience of this technology, that I will keep on trying to no other purpose than to occupy ourselves with our coming of age into this modern modality!”

 

            I had come down to breakfast after arising early and doing some typing of these reports, and met with both Rick Hodes and John Dunham, each of whom I might later meet in the airport (GDQ to those of us insiders! J)  Rick is going with Adam to get a flight by Rick for sure and Adam possibly on standby to Addis, where I will join Rick in going around Addis to see his environment and unique home status as a single father with ten adopted boys, each of whom could represent an atlas of pathology that has had medical rescue from the kind of affliction that would have condemned them in the setting from which they originated.  John Dunham will be going to meet his two young sons who are playing hooky from school in Addis for the day and will be touring with him to see the Fasilides Castle and the ancient church here in Gondar—the very sites I had hoped to see yesterday, arriving after they had each closed down for the day, so I could only see them from the outside.  His wife is teaching school in Addis, so she is not coming up until the following day, when they will have a short holiday here in the Highlands as a family.  I had teased him again about the unlikelihood that the two of us might be the only partisans here in the passion of the Calvin/Hope basketball game coming up, and we may be a long way from the Dutch roots of West Michigan here, but with cell phone service coming this week, and satellite broadcast within reach, and even an Internet connection allowing us the live opportunity to “be there” in person from the Highlands of Ethiopia, there may be a prize for us a world away for carrying the torch for an epi-phenomenon no one around us might be able to understand.

 

  I remember being in remote Australia when the topic of the day can be summarized in the following quote (It’s quite all right if we get nipped by the Windies as long as we beat the bloody POHMs.”  In translating this complete sentence into something earthlings who might understand Calvin/Hope rivalries but might think this statement to be Foster-induced “Auker” gibberish, it means:  “It really is not too bad to lose the Cricket test to the better West Indies team as expected, so long as we blow away the Brits.” [The earliest arrivals in the penal colonies of Australia were tattooed “Prisoners of Her Majesty.”]   I can imagine that the associates we had dinner with last night, or all of the population around us we have been serving might consider us as daft as colonial Brits hanging on to the outcome of a cricket test, or the score of the Elephant Polo match in the remote Himalayas from which I have also considered how remote that other end of the world is from the reality of the moment where I happen to be.

 

            I had two visitors who came by “to greet” as the term I remember from Nigeria—it is a “call” paid by hosts to say farewell upon departure to wish a bon voyage and a speedy return.  Drs. Mensur and Gatecha came by to say goodbye, and when the van came to pick me up it even made a special stop at the Office of the Dean at GCMS so that Iskenda, the able Administrative Assistant to the Dean, could come out to say thank you and goodbye to the Professor.  We drove on through the colorful crowds all weaving along the road as pedestrians, jostled by donkeys carrying firewood down the mountain and the counterpart donkeys bouncing up the road with sacks of Ngera meal on their backs for the curbside markets.  We passed to major sites along the way.  One is the very large and modern Dashen beer brewery.  As in Swaziland, where the brewery is the biggest industry, as in Kenya where Tusker lager is the largest product in the nation, and as in passing the huge Castel lager brewery in South Africa, the airport road is showcased by the major beverage that carries the flag.  In this instance, Dashen, the emblematic brew, is also the name of the highest peak in the Simeian Mountains along the Roof of Africa (so called, although both Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro—I should know—are higher, they are volcanic from the Rift Valley, and the Simeian Range is Africa’s highest mountain range.)

 

            The second major happening along the airport road is a huge construction project going on, which will be the new facility for the “Gondar University” (which will be its new name next month) replacing the GCMS, the adolescent name Gondar College of Medical Sciences, outgrown this year at its fiftieth anniversary.)  There are very large buildings staked out with the concrete forms already poured.  The open fields will become a centralized campus replacing some of the Italian-built barracks which have served quite capably as Nightingale wards for the patient services o the GCMS.

 

            I arrived at the gate of the airport and an armed guard came to ask me for my passport.  I was not carrying it upon my person, since I had thought that I was making a domestic trip all within the confines of the Ethiopia I had entered some weeks ago.  But, he had me go back to the bag and dig out my passport, which seemed to be necessary for this internal national trip beyond the ticket I had in hand.  While going through this delay, I say an interesting sight.  A beautiful jacaranda tree in full purple bloom stood fifty meters from the gate, and in it I saw two wooden cylinders that looked like the fish traps out into Congo River tributaries.  They are highly stylized devices and really symbolize the ingenuity of a carbohydrate-deficient continent until the era of the “Columbian exchange” which brought from the New World the grains (particularly corn and wheat) the tubers (particularly the potato and cassava) the palms (particularly bananas and palm oil and nuts) and fruits (the citrus, the mango, and many others.)  These are traditional beehives.  To get a good look at them, check out the postcards I have been sending from Ethiopia with a Two Birr stamp featuring the “Traditional Beehive” that I could see first hand as I waited for this unnecessary “formality” of an internal passport check.

 

            As I rode into GDQ, I saw a large Russian tank, surmounted by a turreted fifty caliber belt-fed machine gun, overgrown in weeds with a prospect of the entire runway and taxi tarmac in front of Emperor Theodoro Airport.  It was even better camouflaged now, as it rusted quietly on the hillside, looking about as menacing and present only for historic purposes as the big hardened concrete bunkers overlooking Boston Harbor from the headlands of Nahant, a first line of defense against an invasion from Europe that never came their way.

 

 

SCHEDULE DELAYS, FOLLOWED BY MECHANICAL

FAILURE DELAYS, FOLLOWED BY A FOKKER FIFTY

FLIGHT OVER LAKE TANA AND THE BLUE NILE

 

            I may have had a somewhat longer than necessary time to make such observations in Emperor Theodoro’s Airport, since there would be two flights going to Addis, the first with an intermediate stop.  That one was delayed.  It was the one on which Rick Hodes was booked, and on which Adam was booked and bounced; Adam went back to Gondar, suggesting that I might be interested in staying at the house in Addis where he would not be this weekend, giving the keys to Rick.   Rick did board his flight, which left about twenty minutes later.   My flight ET 129 was the following one, I was strongly informed as I attempted to board the same flight, and it had not yet arrived.  The engines revved up on the first Fokker 50 and then shut down, as they discovered empty seats which they sent back to the terminal to fill.  Then the engines were shut down again as the baggage for these passengers was carried out.  The plane then rolled out to the taxiway, where it stood for some time awaiting the arrival of the flight that would be the one that would carry me out.  It landed and taxied to the spot vacated by the first plane.

 

            The takeoff time was 11:20 AM and if was now noon.  There was a rush for the door at the time it looked like some flight crew were going to walk out to the plane, and after holding the crowd as long as they could, the group ran across the tarmac to the plane.  This crowd was a veteran batch who knew that no matter what it said upon the boarding pass, this was an “open seating free for all” and they wanted to be up the ramp first.  So, I joined the run, and got there late enough to get only a rear aisle seat.

 

            They went through the drill of the pre-flight announcements, then revved up the engines and shut them back down.  This was repeated twice more.  Then came a lengthy announcement in Amharic was followed by what I can best estimate was a “précis” in English, which allowed as how there was a slight mechanical problem, and that we could remain on board until the mechanics assessed further what should or could be down about it.  You guessed the rest, since a half hour later a similar Amharic announcement was followed by the reverse flow of the earlier rush, as passengers

gathered up their belongings and went back to the gate.  I sat there for a while to see what would happen next, and an hour later after the engines were revved for the period of the delay, we were reboarded for a repeat of the same experience.  The Ethiopian Airline has to b e careful with these Fokker Fifty’s since they are no longer making airplanes.

 

OVER LAKE TANA AND THE ORIGIN OF THE BLUE NILE

 

            When we flew at last, I could look down into the deep gorges of the area and high plateaus around the deeply recessed streams that became confluent in the Blue Nile which I crossed twice.  I have wanted to explore this part of the fabled river since I had overflown the origin of the White Nile out of Lake Victoria and hoped to see the Blue Nile and the confluence eventually at the capital of Khartoum and their final mixing at Omdurman.  So, I have now photographed the Blue Nile as I had the White Nile’s origin and will await the next trip to the Horn of Africa to possibly add the Sudan to learn more about this unique key of East Africa..

 

THE REMARKABLE AND TOUCHING EVENING AT HOME

WITH RICK HODES AND FAMILY

           

            As I had been delayed by the mechanical failure and Rick had taken off for a flight that stopped in Dhar Aduaud on the way to Addis, he was so kind as to wait for me in Addis airport, where he began working on his Apple laptop, emailing to me the articles I had requested and making a disc he had promised of a number of his clinical picture.  He and I will be doing a lot of swapping of articles, pictures and students, I am sure.  His house is a waypoint for a number of folk who wind up on the couch, since he is a single father with about twelve kids!  Four of these are officially adopted in order to get them in under his health insurance for their operations which I had seen in the timeframe of before and after pictures following treatment for Pott’s disease of the spine, heart valve abnormalities from rheumatic fever and one with polio and another with a different kind of spinal abnormality.  The kids are all remarkably normal in their very sociable and personable interactions.  One, who is the only one without a physical abnormality, had been abandoned by the father after the mother’s death and picked up off the street.  He is very affectionate and had latched on to me and taken me on a tour of their borrowed house.  We had a chance to get to know each other a bit, and a number of my students show had passed through or are still coming back, along with the visit by Alan, Linda and Adam Goldstein has me taking back letters for several of their friends.  I will try to host Rick when he comes to Washing in the next months. 

 

            One of the kids, Addisu (“the new one” who had had spinal surgery in Dallas like his “brother “Dejama”) called the friend of my Derwood neighbors and offered to make the connection for the suitcase they had asked if I could carry back as personal luggage.  I talked with them and they had said if I were there in Addis longer we would obviously have to have dinner together, but they arranged that Mokenene who is a Director of Ethiopian Airways, would drop over the following day.  What he dropped over with was startling, a suitcase that weighs about three times what the rest of my baggage weighs, and he explained that was only after he had taken out the heavy stuff!  But, he also handed me his card with a note to the British Air supervisor at the check in counter for the London flight whose name is Yeshi, and said she would clear the luggage for me and that is how it worked out indeed.

 

            As I waited at the house, the kids gathered from their different school assignments and came together for the Friday evening Jewish Sabbath service.  We all got in a circle and sang “If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning…” and we also exchanged greetings as we might at a Seder.  He blessed each of his sons with a reading of the passage and then with hand on head gave them the blessing and a “Shalom!”  I took photos of this very comfortable and cohesive group at home and a drop in visitor named Shlomo, (Hebrew for "Solomon,") an AIDS doctor from Hadassah in Israel who just flew in for a meeting.  It was interesting that each of us could wear yarmulkes but Rick and a couple of the kids had worn turban hats that had been bought from some nomads as they had to be de-loused (remember he knows a fair amount about relapsing fever and other louse borne abnormalities endemic here!

 

            I moved over to that house they used to house all the ten kids at that time, where Adam the student who will be working through this year as a volunteer, and I immediately added a couple of names of others who might be interested.  Since he is stranded in Gondar, he volunteered the house which would otherwise stand empty, and we moved the pickup truck of Rick's over there since the ground at their other borrowed house is being torn up for a septic system leak, and no vehicle should be left unattended on the street.  Before I was carried over a few blocks to the other house, one of the kids would be sent out every few minutes to check on the car.  I noticed that the chores were distributed in a loose organization of their duties and that each did them cheerfully and willingly.  When asked if theirs was a “family” one of the kids responded “Well, I guess so!”  Then when asked if it was a happy family, he added: ”Yes, but there is only one problem;” long pause…”we fart a lot!”  This is exactly the kind of adolescent comment that would come from a very normal group of growing boys in a comfortable group discussing their lives—in Maryland or Addis.  If that is the major problem, they are a rather happy group.

 

            It is remarkable that a number of my friends who have admired or envied what I do have said that what I have pursued is unique.  Then I point to Paul Farmer or Rick Hodes, or the sisters of Charity, and ask just how unique can so many people be?  I hope there is that in all of us, and that each of us might cultivate it.  There are ten or twelve adopted boys in Addis Ababa who are also on their way toward helping people.

 

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