FEB-A-9
INTO
CHECKED IN TO THE IMPERIAL HOTEL,
A RAPID CITY TOUR AND VIEW OF THE
MERCADO,
AND THEN, A LONG CHECK-IN PROCESS TO
LEAVE
WITH OUR SURGICAL KIT INTACT AND WAIVING
FEES FOR
EXTENSIVE EXCESS BAGGAGE CHARGES,
ENROUTE TO HARGEISA,
February 3, 2004
It has
been a struggle, but we have come “into Africa” and have got through the
capital of a new nation to be explored more thoroughly in the third week of my
African stay, yet a brief re-grouping stop before moving on to a still newer
nation. We arrived from our interim stop
in
We are 9* above the Equator and 39* east of Greenwich, and at 7,250 feet. So Addis is cool, dry and pleasant. At that hour of the morning, it was also deserted. We got into the hotel and crawled into bed only two hours before getting up and out to see what we could of this new environment. What we saw was the largest of Africa’s outdoor markets, as we walked through the spice markets, and also went to get some CD’s of the most popular and classic of Ethiopian music to satisfy one of the requests I have for this trip. I found the people largely ignored me, though there were no other white men encountered in our tour around town. We saw lots of Soviet-era-style big blocky buildings, such as the giant Faculty of Medicine of the University of Addis Ababa, with the red star of communism hoisted an a large stele above it, but it seems that the economy of a thriving market is buoying it. There are beggars, and some approach me “Father!”, but there are also big churches with the Coptic or Eastern Ethiopian cross above them, as well as large mosques. I saw huge numbers of international aid organization headquarters, and things like “Save the Children” funds.
The people were interested in seeing us, but less interested in seeing themselves in pictures. We were advised by our taxi driver Elias “not to take pictures of poor people” but I did snap a few clandestine shots in the colorful market. A few of the clowns asked to pose with Kevin or the others. We bought spices, which were stripped out of the carryon bags of Juan as “forbidden” in the airport. Although Kevin’s spices came through the same inspector’s review, it was another reflection of the arbitrary harassment value of security inspections. Go figure.
I had written a few postcards I had made on the last limb of our long flight, and could find none on our first pass through Ethiopia. However, they do have postcard type pictures of the early churches of the kind that exist in Lelibela and other places where the churches were carved right into living rock, and a number of photos of the ancient heritage sites nearer to Gondor. I also tried for several hours to get the “email internet” connection to work, but it never did, just to announce our arrival. We had all our bags in the lobby ready to go when we could get back at noon, and prepare for our ongoing flights to Hargeysa. Now comes the drama of the day.
DESPITE OUR ARRIVING IN AN EXPENSIVE
HOTEL FOR A BRIEF FEW HOURS STAY NEAR ADDIS AIRPORT,
WE THEN “MISS SEVERAL BULLETS” BY HAVING
THREE SETS
OF HEAVY CHARGES WAIVED FOR OUR
BENEVOLENCE
We offloaded our multiple duffel bags, including the one I had retrieved from the Derwood attic, a brand new massive green duffel like the one I had carried to Malawi and left there last year and the several of them that the students had brought and stuffed with gear for our mission, and we trolleyed them up to the Air Ethiopia check-in counter. There was a group of Taiwanese who were going to go to visit Hargeisa for purposes unknown, and I got into the queue behind them selecting my check-in crew carefully. The first thing I laid on the counter was the letter from Saad Noor to help us get a break on the excess baggage we would be carrying. Then the eight bags for the four of us were weighed in and tagged for HAR. The total came to 167 kg. The agent looked up and announced that we were overweight, and would have to pay for the excess since it was a smaller aircraft, a Dutch Fokker run by Air Ethiopia, and we were allowed 20 kg luggage each, for a total of 80 kg.
The letter from Saad Noor went around to the airport supervisor and others from Air Ethiopia, and the woman, named Lulit Tadele, offered to split the charges so that the half charge would be $8.00 US per kg—about $700. I said that we cold not absorb such a charge and that we would either have to scrub the mission or she could remove one or more of the bags to be left in Ethiopia so as to have them available to leave in our forward travel to Gondor. Another round of talks and passage of the letter was done and then I pulled out the slip of paper from my Derwood neighbors that included the two friends of theirs in Addis with the one being a Director of Ethiopian Airways. She called him, and since I had not called him in advance, and neither had the Fantas from the US, he knew nothing of the packages we were trying to transport. We were not planning to call them until two weeks later when they would have the package they wanted me to transport to Derwood of Ethiopian spices.
After an impasse, in which we stood holding up the line with the bags already tagged and loaded on the Fokker, I had learned that Jay’s cheap duffel bags he had bought at Target for about one tenth the price of our duffels contained crutches and saline for injection—a heavy cargo that was not worth $8.00 per kg—and ironically, we had got it all around to the far side of the world without surcharge thanks to the letter covering them at check in, but now we would have to either pay or jettison them at the final jump off to the “destination travel.” She came back after talking with several others and carrying my card to them, and said simply “the charges are waived.” We thanked her very much and took her card to write a letter to Ethiopian Air, and scurried on to the next stop—the airport use tax. We would now pay $20.00 US each for being in the airport and starting our trip to Hargeisa. Kevin argued that we were in transit, only attempting to clear through Addis to get to HAR and therefore the BA ticket should cover that. We went from the local officials to the Air Ethiopia again to BA and they said that would be the case, but we had arrived yesterday and had checked into a hotel, the Imperial, last night, so we were originating in Addis for a new trip. I pointed out that it was not last night, but our arrival had been this morning at 3:30 AM and we had got a ride over to a local hotel simply to take a shower. We were arriving in Addis and taking off the same day the 3rd of February, and we simply did not stay inside the airport, so that we should be considered transit. We made it through this explanation and the $80 charge was waived.
We can abbreviate that same story for another explanation in Hargeisa where we arrived to repeat the same process of a visa application on the spot in the airport, but with the letter and an explanation, we had the $80 charges waived. So, we may have spent about $300 for two hours in a hotel bed awaiting the return of hot water that had been turned off before our arrival, and we may have squeezed in a taxi ride through the capital, but we did save almost $1000 for the team with careful and respectful explanations and an official letter.
FOKKER
FLIGHT THROUGH THE “SOUTHERN CAPITAL”
OF “DIRE-DAWA”
TO ARRIVE IN HARGEISA
FOR ROYAL
RECEPTIONS, A RIDE THROUGH THE CITY,
AND CHECK-IN
INTO THE HOTEL MANSOOR
Having done a lot of explaining and trying to keep the mission afloat without paying more in surcharge for the donated equipment than the equipment was worth, I was weary, and with a bit of jet-lag, I nodded off on the flight of our Air Ethiopia flight. We flew about an hour and a half to arrive in a place along the southern border of Ethiopia with Somalia, which was described as the “second capital” of Ethiopia. There were upstart mountains around the high plateau which have a native name “women’s breasts”—hardly news to someone from America where we can boast the “Grand Tetons.” At first we were not supposed to get off the aircraft, then we were obliged to. But, we did not go into the terminal, but stodd on the tarmac, just long enough for me to hear one of the attendants in the flight deck tell the story of the second capital, whose name means the “place where medicine is growing.” I had time for only one brief photo surrepititously taken of our “Lionof Judah” symbol on theiaircraft, and took a reaing of this furtherst southtern city in Ethipia at DIRE 09* 36. 42 N, 41* 50. 33 E. The Taiwanese were all herded back into the plane, which Jay worried would not get off the ground with our heavy but unsurcharged excess baggage.
We flew another 45 minutes to another plateau, heading toward the Red Sea, and landed in the Hargeisa Airport. A big sign on the air terminal announces Hargeisa 4,390 feet, and jacaranda are in bloom in front of the terminal building, along with even more colorful blooming of a group of Somali women in flowing colorful gowns. I had walked ahead off the aircraft with my backpack on my shoulders and the camera in hand, shooting a few photos from the hip of this colorful scene as we got off the plane and onto the tarmac of the airstrip. I turned around to see Jay, Kevin and Juan coming off the ramp and onto the air strip and they were openly taking pictures of the airplane and the setting. Airports are often highly “photo sensitive areas” and this one should be especially so, given its unique history. It remains the one airport in the world in which a hostile force, flying jet fighters out of the airport of this capital city, bombed and strafed its own city, and returned to and in the same capital city airport. In the days of Siyad Barre, a dictator from southern Somalia, the less educated half of warring warlords’ clans, they were jealous and upset with the northern formerly British colony half and tried to bomb them to feel less inferior. Siyad Barre could not get the ethnic Somalis to bomb their own people in the city from which they came, so he got southern African mercenaries to do so. The Somalilanders captured one of the Mig-9’s of his air force, and in its camouflage colors it is a proudly displayed monument in the dirt roads amid hovels along the downtown city “streets.”
I was thinking these thoughts and trying to pretend oblivion to the photos taken when I heard an unusual version of my name being called: “Doctor Grin!” A man appeared who introduced himself as the Minister of Labor, and another as the Director of Hargeisa General Hospital, and another the undersecretary of Health. Before long after the handshakes and welcomes we were posing openly with our hosts under the sign in front of the Jacaranda blossoms for photos that were taken openly. We never even entered the terminal, but were seated under the trees at the tarmac as our passports were stamped with the visas which were finally given us free of charge, and the eight heavy bags were loaded into the Hargeisa General Hospital pickup truck, and we were loaded into a Toyota Land cruiser.
The vehicles here, like the buses and pickup trucks have elaborate fringed doily type covers over the front of their wing mirrors for rear view mirrors, presumably to cushion them from impact with the gravel or other vehicles or pedestrians they encounter along the dirt roads, but they make them look like lop-eared Dumbos fling through a cloud of dust on approach. Our driver was wearing a sport coat, and smiled when I thanked him for his help, but he said nothing, instead turning up a taped Somaliland song on the tape deck played loudly against a primitive drum beat as we sped through the dust roads of the capital city. It was nearly surreal, and the three senior students sat in dumfounded silence as the music rocked and we stared out the windows as we passed through dust roads of hovels covered with plastic or burlap bags, as goats and people crawled in and out of these roadside shops sand “homes.” As we would go along in this bleak landscape, tall and graceful women with billowing robes covering all but hire eyes would float through the scene. There were many patriotic signs and welcomes posted and outlines of the “wannabe nation-state” of Somaliland as we entered the valley of the bleak city from the plateau of the airport. We drove in silence of the spoken word with only the haunting sound of the Somali tape, as we turned around the areas where once there were colonial British parks—now a mass grave for the estimated 50,000 people buried there from the earlier violence. I had heard later that there was once a Globe Theatre model here and other cultural items that were classic, but they were first strafed, then bombed then mined. There are two million unknown and unexploded mines around from that era, so we are told to walk only where camels have trod earlier, or anything heavier has been before us.
We watched as we drove though a scene that was like a movie set from one of the star war series, of subsistence after some high tech devastation. There were mosques on some corners about the time of the fourth prayer call of the day, and we wended our way around places that had names like WHO substation, or other voluntary aid groups. We passed a large football (soccer) stadium and then crossed a bridge over a dry rive r bed where people were scavenging things. The thin desert scrub had caught the usual flying collection of plastic bag trash in its web, and goats scavenged in trash heaps to see what edibles the even more scavenging peoples might have left behind in their first gleanings.
ARRIVAL AT HOTEL MANSOOR AND CHECK-IN:
AN ALMOST LUXUROIUS GUARDED COMPOUND
WITH CLEAN BIG ROOMS, FACILITIES, WARM
HOSPITALITY, AND A FUNCTIONING INTERNET!
We were met by each member of the hotel staff, and a number of officials who continued to arrive during the evening to meet us. We had hardly arrived as the sun had just turned over the horizon, when we decided the ideal thing for us to do would be to run, and all four of us gathered in the lobby with shorts and tee shirts in the ideal cool of the evening to go out for a run. One of the hotel staff came forward in black pants leather shoes and white shirt and tie, having been identified as a “sports man” and he would go with us, to have us turn when we were supposed to. We waited until he could change into a running outfit, and then he set out with us. “Do not enter into the mountains at the end of the road for security sake.” We ran off as the darkness covered the sandy roads and rutted areas and we even gathered up the usual contingent of African children who would run alongside us for a short distance laughing at the crazy white men who would waste energy this way. Our guide runner turned around soon and we returned to the hotel, to turn in for a shower and the usual arrival ceremonies of my own—like fixing a GPS mark at HARG= 09* 34. 35 N, 44* 01. 50 E. There is a pleasant cool desert evening temperature, and the people seem very friendly, and almost overjoyed that we are here.
AN EVENING OF SOCIAL CALLS ON US AT A DINNER
RECEPTION, AS A COUPLE FROM THE DC AREA IN A BRITISH NGO MEETS WITH US,
FOLLOWED BY THE MINISTER OF HEALTH, THEN THE WHO REPRESENTAIVE, AND EACH HOTEL
OFFICAIL TRYING TO MAKE OUR STAY MORE WELCOME AND CONVENIENT
A couple who have worked here as volunteers for a British NGO called International Development Foundation are being moved out since the prior killing of a British couple of aid workers much to their disappointment after ten years of living with and working with the Somalis. They really like the people and other aspects of the work here, and pointed out that the areas of danger amid the geographic regions of the Sool where warlords are still struggling is not something that would influence them, but hey must do what the UN and their agency recommends.
The minister of Health came by in the “afternoon dress” he explained as not the evening dress he would have worn if he were going to receive us formally. It is a native Somali costume which is a fringed skirt like bottom and a flowing top. He outlined a plan to have us go to every region and for me to give lectures as well as the clinical help—about three trips worth of activity. We were then joined by Dr. Walkut, a Pakistani educated doctor with the Liverpool DTMH who is the Director of all WHO activities here. He joined us for dinner and had a number of people whom he would like us to meet since he will be leaving this week for leave in UK. But each of these folk gave us a lot of information about the area, including a complete run down on the most serious killer here—malaria, which is not really seasonal but year round.
I talked with each of the representatives, and then went to bed drowsy with a bit of the jet lag, and although asleep at 10:30 PM on my re-set watch, I awakened at 2:30 AM and typed up a very good account of what had happened so far. I am sorry to report to you, that this abbreviated account is the second time, since I had cautiously had the Office 2000 MicroSoft program re-installed before this trip to prevent the annoying crashes that require everything to be rebooted and corrected. Well, that whole system of glitches has returned with a vengeance, but now with the additional problem that it froze up the cursor and I could do nothing including most especially save what I had typed much of the night. So, pulling the plug and starting over, you are getting some of the outline of events so far as we have arrived at our “destination travel” and we will fill in some of the interesting detail as we go, since now it is finally “dawn’s early light” and I have been functioning as the “Curser” of this machine, rather then its own “Cursor” which has not been functioning at all. It is hard enough to keep an account going by snatching an electrical charge where ever this “Juice Junkie” can find it and wire it in through the nest of four adapters in sequence, but then to have the totally unreliable laptop freeze up and lose all of that which has been painstakingly recorded is enough to get me back into the ballpoint pen era of the Writer in Residence—here in the Somaliland Desert as we begin the experience of another medical missions into Terra Incognita!