Tuunis #2: RCD, DÉGAGE!

RCD, DÉGAGE!

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(“3” as I use it in transcriptions, represents the
tightening of the throat one hears when Kermit
The Frog speaks.)

May 4, 2011

The coming and going of guys in the room woke me. Course and quick shuffling on the dead linoleum, turning on and off the lights as they got their clothes on at 6:30a.m. and faces washed for work, off to the mdīna (“old city”) to suffer their dignity and sell cheap plastic jewelry or cigarettes all day. Brāhim with his cardboard box of trinkets, Şāliħ off to teach home design classes, I believe, and Bilēl, unemployed, still frozen on his pad on the floor. I rose at 7a.m. from the floor of the dingy apartment I shared—deciding to let my body adjust to the new schedule of this new country with a slightly later start—and am all the better for it.
I got a late start too to the interview with the semi-spokesman of the unemployed union. Sat waiting on the steps of the theatre for a half hour, dotted with red revolutionary graffiti in French and Arabic, the temporary wall around the construction project across from me splashed with the familiar slogan RCD, dégage! (“RCD, Get Out!” – RCD is the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Democratique, or Democratic Constitutional Rally, the party of Ben Ali and his cronies, said to still haunt Tunisia under different party names). Called my contact, reset our meeting, and grabbed a seat at the fancy café of Hôtel International. Belkacem was his name, came running up to my bourgeois perch under the umbrella, sweating in the 11a.m. breeze and never taking off his sunglasses. We talked about some important stuff regarding the Leftists in Tunisia, the spread of committees for the diplômés chômeurs—those with college degrees and no suitable work to speak of—since the December/January uprising, and the protests in which the unemployed have been vital in organizing. Yet, we never finished the interview, as he scurried off heavily while spitting thick Tunisian dialect into his phone, telling me we’d finish tomorrow, and I didn’t get all of what he said, because of his Arabic accent in French, and my distraction at his sunglasses and badly rotted teeth.
After that, I met my thin, humble roommate Bilēl over at Bēb Bħar, the imposing gate to the mdīna standing alone in a square filled with cafés and a dribble of tourists in awful shorts and tank-tops. We meandered over to the sūq (“market”) and bargained down a pair of fake Adidas for me to about twenty Dinar. Walked a ways, and so far no sores on the bottom of my toes. A good start for these sneakers. Then onwards through the alleys of polished stone, and hanging bras, towels, and rolls of cloth, out past an old mesjid (“mosque”), and on to the Université Neuf Avril. There, I called Nasrin, the beauty I’d met a few days before, several times in the windy courtyard of the austere college and got only the boîte vocale, to my dismay. Met a couple leaders of student groups and other activists, told ‘em my mission in French, and we met again inside the office of the recently deposed school secret police, just inside the main door to the campus.
These kids were smart, and had a lot of analysis to give—albeit full of uncertainty—in response to my questions. They interrupted each other here and there, and all pulled out cigarettes and smoked in unison like young communists in Paris. Yet, none of them could offer too many confident statements about the future when I asked, which I guess few Tunisians really can at this point. Pretty militant and full of life they were, though, which was a breath of fresh air, after so much of the political staleness in people’s minds that I encountered while living in Syria.
One of the guys in the interview could understand my questions in French, but stumbled some when speaking French (no worse than me, certainly), and so responded in Standard Arabic, most of the words of which I was understanding, but I wasn’t able to put it all together into a meaningful statement. I guess I’m still at that level in Arabic. Shucks.
At one point, the girl to my left started to speak to me about student organizing in English with a British accent, and then POOF! They were all speaking advanced-level English. But then I would say something in Standard Arabic to the guy having a little linguistic trouble, and they would all start speaking and arguing in Standard Arabic. Same for French. Incredible.
Afterwards, I watched some videos of the revolution here in the capital that they had put together, and they all jumped at the chance to give me their contact info. One brown-skinned woman (3azza was her name, I think?) said she’d accompany me to Sidi Bou Zid when I go, the place from which the Tunisian revolution spread. That’s where she’s from, she said. Nice.
Then me and Bilēl wandered out of the spot, and I felt a huge lump in my throat and chest as if I was going to cry, and I felt tired, homesick, and pessimistic about this whole journalism thing, despite the great meeting. Back through the mdīna, and me and Bilēl grabbed some sandwiches in a hole-in-the-wall near Enīs’ internet shop, and I felt just fine again after eating. But, as I sat at Enīs’ cyber café making calls to City College to check for job options (not looking so great there), calling Dick Hull about NYU financing, and writing a letter in French pleading the Université Libre de Bruxelles to still let me apply despite my missing the deadline, the enormous weight I felt before returned, and I felt like crying.
The sky became grey and flat, and I went across the street, home to the fellas’ apartment, and called Mom for a little wisdom and relief. I did get some, but couldn’t bring myself to cook any shūrbit l 3adis (“lentil soup”) for the boys, as I’d planned. They cooked instead, and we sat around watching TV and talking simple Arabic, chowing down on macaroni. The weight left me, and I slept.


May 8^th, 2011

Woke at 7am, eyes embarrassingly heavy at this hour, which is a slovenly one for my new up-and-at-‘em-at-daybreak schedule. Because of the heavy dinner last night prepared by Kefi’s wife Ħannān, had trouble getting out of bed. But, I got my shower on (I thank the universe), got my kriya on, then wolfed down a breakfast of baguettes and jam and café au lait from the low table in Kefi’s arab-style living room with cushions on the floor. It’s pretty high living in the care of this man who I only met yesterday. I’m amazed how far some money one saves while an immigrant, working as a cab driver in Philadelphia, will get one in this destitute little town of Menzil Bou Zian.
We sauntered in the sun, out through the decrepit concrete portal around Kefi’s property, and hopped in the car with smiling Fādil, Kefi’s brother—or cousin?—who really knows great sayings and expressions in English, and we sped out of Menzil Bou Zian alongside the old French train tracks. As we cruised along, Kefi, his eyes peeking out slightly from under the brim of his eternal baseball cap, told me in his high, joyful-sounding voice, about his illiterate father, who started fighting the French occupation in 1946 as a young man. He told me how many great rebels against French colonization came from this town, this area, this little peach pit at the middle of this country ripe with radicalism—yes, radicalism. It’s that popular liberating impulse that can force off the hand that squeezes the throat of a society. But, be very careful about equating “radicalism” as I use it with the blind, angry, Islamophobic word which much of the mainstream American media uses to frighten us about the world beyond our borders.
The land spreading out around our car was semi-arid, and flat, but for tiny bare mountains of brown and grey off in the distance. The sky was frighteningly clear.
We drove a long way, picking up a motley crew of simple Tunisian hitchhikers, and dropping them off along the way, and after a long stretch of kilometers along the highway, now surrounded by feeble agriculture, Fādil dropped us in the middle of Sidi Bou Zid. It’s interesting how I had a preconceived notion of Sidi Bou Zid, this small town where Muhammed Bou Azizi burned himself alive in protest, sparking a revolution, as being a place physically mangled by poverty. Yet, it looked like simply another dull town of the interior, save for the revolutionary spray paint graffiti in Arabic, French, and English on the white walls of the town.
I talked to Kefi at a café about general problems of corruption, regional favoritism of the past regimes, and the absolute lack of any industry or commerce development in the area, while I composed interview questions in French. I thought I would be pushing for interviews with local bureaucrats, but Kefi unceremoniously grabbed three young guys from the café, and we embarked upon a great trilingual discussion. In hindsight, of course I wanted to talk to the regular unemployed people of this town, not some fat administrator behind a desk.
The young men, two of them former students of tourism who commanded the basics in English, seemed on the edge of tears from frustration at the state of things, one of them looking the whole time as if he’d just been beat in a fight. They talked about the corruption that remains, the etbē3 (cronies) of the old regime who hang on in the provincial administration, the lack of any job prospects. “Anyone who can help, come! We need help… from America, OK? From anybody. I have dreams. I have no hope,” said the beaten young guy with thick beard scruff. When asked if they thought the revolution would bring something better, something that lasts, to Sidi Bou Zid, they winced like I’d just put a finger in their would. “No,” was the answer in short. “Moi, j’irai en France” (“Me, I’m going to France”) said the only one of them who had some means to escape.
Afterwards, Kefi and I checked out a local minister’s office, burned from the inside out yesterday by unknown assailants. Black wings of soot on the walls spread out from the windows. Beside us, an aging taxi driver, seemingly out of nowhere, recounted to me from his car window his days with the Tunisian secret police in the 1980’s. He had been trained by—guess who—the CIA. He showed me the lapel pin that signified his unit, given to him by America’s bravest torture trainers. He seemed to have little fear of reprisal as he spoke. Either he had resigned to the inevitability of future punishment, or his acts had already been recognized by past victims.
We took a bit of rest and fruit juice in Fādil’s tidy, gardened home just down the street. Then, headed out, we toddled down the main avenue, approaching some old cats standing out front of a dry cleaners. After intense conversation that I understood little of, they pointed us to a local police office smashed and disheveled and burned by marauding shebēb (young men). Within, the bookcases were overturned and sat in piles of ash and black water. The entrance door was dark with soot. The quietly outraged family living above the station came down and told us how they had averted an attack on their home upstairs only by firing a gun when the vandals approached. Several acts of arson and vandalism in one small town in one day. Who did this? Do they work for somebody? The beginning of a counter-revolution terrorist movement?
Then the long, hot drive along the cracked road back to Menzil Bou Zian.
After a nap and a meditation, I headed over to a sha3bi (popular/working-class) coffee shop, men and only men shriveled like prunes laid out to dry on its terrace. I drank tea and smoked a disgusting hookah that burned my throat with Kefi, Fādil, and other local fellas who sat around smiling at this foreigner who struggled like a baby with their dialect. I learned some great expressions in the Tunisian idiom, though, like “Just when 3idi is getting married, the grain goes bad,” meaning that sometimes the rarest of misfortunes will happen at the worst moments, and be ready for it. Then, I did the briefest, most concise interview hitherto with Fādil, in English. He gave me a lot more specific information about the people in the area, but in the end, he said he too was almost hopeless for real change post-revolution. “Maybe, maybe, after the elections [in July] we’ll see change,” he closed, wincing.
The sun taking its last purple-orange breathes over the dry and deserted avenue at the center of town, I walked over the barren railroad tracks behind the café, talking in French with a café waiter about racism in the U.S., the gravel crunching under our feet, and I went to the half-built house of Kefi’s brother to use internet. I spoke with Kefi’s brother—pious, curious, a bit hard-headed—and a few hijab-sporting women with light skin and piercing faces about religion, in my uncomfortable, tedious Arabic. We argued about the assassination of Bin Laden, they said he was a great leader, and I spoke to my mother about this place on the phone.

Tuunis #1: Libyan Refugees In Limbo in Tunisia’s South

Libyan Refugees In Limbo in Tunisia’s South
by Sam Kimball

Dehiba, Tunisia—Salih sits in loose brown traditional qamis and sirwal in the middle of a mosque still under construction, prayer rugs covering the unfinished concrete floor. He’s surrounded by other men clad in long robes and skull caps—refugees as well, from the Libyan town of Nalut—who work on the mosque by day as volunteers, work they say, which helps them “forget the problems at home.”

Salih came to Dehiba, a desert community in the south of Tunisia on the Libyan border, on April 10^th with his family, fleeing the fighting going on around Nalut, about 70 kilometers east of Dehiba. Now, he and his family are one of 302 registered families living in the Dehiba area, though according to various reports, there are many other unregistered Libyan families here. Since they have left, the fighting has intensified in the area surrounding Nalut, as the Libyan rebels and pro-Gaddafi forces vie for control over the Nefusa mountains and the strategic border crossings, such as Wazin, in Libya just outside of Dehiba. Border crossings like Wazin have allowed the Libyan rebels to resupply and to give refuge to their families.

The conditions in which Salih and his family live in Dehiba are the norm for more than half of the two to three thousand refugees estimated to be living in Dehiba and its immediate surroundings: inhabiting a home with five other Libyan families, six children to a room, his house and others like it giving cramped shelter to between twenty and twenty five people at a time. They rely on donated food, medicine, and money from local Tunisians in Dehiba, and other nearby towns like Tataouine and Ramada.

Many of the Libyans from Nalut were employed in white-collar jobs before fleeing the fighting in their home region. Salih himself was a school administrator, and before that worked in hospital administration. The Libyan refugee community in Dehiba holds to its traditionally conservative character, where the separation of the sexes in public spaces is rigid, women spend much of the day doing domestic work, and finding a woman in the street is rare. Yet, Salih and his fellow Libyans working on the mosque report that many of the women fleeing from Nalut and surrounding cities were previously employed. Some, they claim, had degrees from higher institutes of education, and worked as teachers of English, chemistry, and biology.

Despite the purported middle class background of many of the Nalut refugees living outside the refugee camps, the financial straights grow tighter as time passes. Donations of money from local Tunisians are critical these days, as Salih reports that the refugees’ accounts in Libyan banks have been locked down. Allowances allotted to the refugee families by Libyan merchants, who make small deposits in local banks, have dwindled to one-hundred Libyan Dinar per family per month, the equivalent of about eighty-three American dollars. “No money to buy Benzine… no fuel to use to visit our relatives in Nalut. The only time we use a car is for an emergency, like bringing a woman giving birth to the hospital.”

Integrating into the local educational system, even temporarily, has proven an equal challenge. Libyan refugees in Dehiba have claimed that that their children are falling behind in their studies because there is no room left for them in Tunisian schools in small towns like Dehiba. Libyan parents also fear that even if their children find a place in local schools, because of the major differences with the Libyan educational system, their grades may not be recognized and they will be held back.

Those without a large family to care for find the conditions in Tunisia less straining. Fethi, a farmer who was working just outside Nalut who came to Tunisia over two weeks ago, and now a fighter in the Libyan rebel forces, lives with just his mother and father in a four-room house. The house, which had served as an investment property, was donated by Tunisians. He says, “The Tunisians give us houses, food, medicine. We have everything we need.”

Fethi reports that most able-bodied young men like him are still in Nalut, and spend most of their time there. He himself sometimes leaves Dehiba to return to Nalut for a couple of days at a time. In Libya, he and other young men continue to fight in the rebel forces or protect their property in their home towns.

Yet, Fethi does admit that despite the relatively comfortable conditions, his mother and father are scared by the heavy fighting over the border pass a few kilometers east of Dehiba. The explosions of the battles between pro-Qaddafi regiments and the Libyan rebels, as well as Tunisian military that guard against incursions into Tunisia, are heard from late-afternoon onwards. The flashes of rockets and machine gun fire can be seen from hilltops on a clear night.

The situation for Libyans living in the refugee camps inside the Tunisian border is different from those getting by in donated Tunisian homes just down the dusty streets of Dehiba. According to Tunisian military personnel, there are now seven refugee camps inside Tunisia. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Red Crescent, which established a camp for Libyan refugees spilling into Dehiba at the end of March, has been one of four umbrella organizations said to be officially responsible for caring for Libyan refugees in Tunisia. The others—the U.N., Tunisian Red Cross, and Tunisian Red Crescent—have had a larger presence further north, at the Ras Jdir refugee camp on the coast, which gained prominence early in the Libyan conflict as the entry point for countless thousands of migrant workers from Libya.

At Ras Jdir, reports a doctor with the UAE Red Crescent in Dehiba, refugees of Libyan nationality were better-off financially than those entering here in southern Tunisia, and were able to make a comfortable place for themselves, staying in hotels and apartments, as opposed to tents.

Here, however, 890 Libyan refugees find themselves living in khaki tents arranged in neat rows, the Tunisian and Emirati flags flying above, guarded by Tunisian military personnel with automatic rifles. Their food and medical supply in stable, provided by the UAE Red Crescent, with assistance from Médecins Sans Frontières. The camp’s staff is composed mostly of Tunisian volunteers and day workers. By the looks of it, the camp is well-maintained and secure.

Yet, the Libyans in the camps are not unconcerned. One of the main worries for Libyans in the camp is the safety of their relatives still inside Libya, including many of the fathers and husbands of the camp’s families. Depending on the security situation at the border from day to day, reports a UAE Red Crescent doctor, some families from the camp move back and forth from Dehiba and its environs to their hometowns in Libya, hoping to reoccupy their homes and reunite with family members.

The other danger for families in the camps is that of saboteurs sent into camps posing as refugees. According to a Libyan doctor and a UAE Red Crescent doctor in Dehiba, Libyans as well as some Tunisians have been paid by Qaddafi forces to start trouble in the refugee camps. This is in the hope that the Tunisian authorities will eject the refugees and stop providing asylum to Libyan rebels. “But,” says the Libyan doctor regarding the saboteurs, “the Tunisians know now what is happening. They know these people don’t represent the refugees.”

The future is uncertain for the Libyans taking refuge in this small neighbor nation. Some, like Fethi, the Libyan rebel, are nonchalant when posed with the question of when he and his family will be able to return home permanently. “Gaddafi could go tomorrow; he could go in a month. I don’t know, but I’m not worried.”

Salih, however, is more wary. He knows that he and his family must return home to Nalut before the summer months begin in a few weeks to avoid the heat in Dehiba, which will make his family’s overcrowded accommodation unbearable. He says the situation here makes him and other refugees tense and anxious. As for if his family can return to Libya for good anytime soon, he says, “We hope. But, we don’t know if we will.”

Dimashq #11ː More of the Lebanese Beat

More of the Lebanese Beat

April 23^rd, 2011

Yesterday I awoke in the misty grey chill of Zahlé in my hotel room with two beds. No traffic noises at that early hour, just a few voices drifting through the dark green shutters from the street below. Probably some staff at the MASSIVE hospital facing the old hotel. I rose from the saggy softness of the bed, used that gloriously clean bathroom that I’ve come not to expect in the Middle East, did my meditation routine, and that was that. Downstairs in the huge parlor room that probably once welcomed family members coming from all around the provinces back in the Ottoman Empire days, before the mansion became a hotel, I unceremoniously handed over my key to Nada. She was smiling, sleepily, as we talked about where I could get breakfast and how much I should pay for transport out of Zahlé, and was speaking Arabic in a way a little less Lebanese and a little more Damasc-ish for my benefit. Yet she was nonplussed about my departure all the same. “Merci. Ma3a salēma,” and I slipped out onto the cold drizzle street on the hill.
What a barren place in this season, human-wise. I shivered in the cold wet on the street alone, growling inside when an old guy walking past said assumingly “Hello!” But, I did snap some shots of imposing old 19^th-century mansions, all grey stone, green shutters, terraces, and orange tile roofs, with that highly French look, to the point where one aesthetic is indistinguishable from the other.
Found the “bakery,” really more of a new, chi-chi café, where I was able to great workers with “Bonjour” and have it mirrored right back at me. If the French iħtilēl (occupation) of so many years ago left anything, it’s this repressed awkward distance between those who don’t know each other, and a desire to culturally one-up everybody else, for I felt little human warmth, and sensed my “coolness” decrease upon entering. Funny, though, that I had been speaking Arabic with the black-haired woman at the coffee press, but when she brought a café au lait to the table and saw me reading a book in French, she said “You’re welcome” in response to my “Merci.” What are we trying to prove here? Tasty breakfast of bread and za3tar and croissant, but too light.
And I kept walking down the light slope, making an important observation: that I felt much more at ease—mentally and physically—when actually moving along down the avenue. I think it it’s because I felt that I wouldn’t have to worry about engaging anyone in a language I might falter in, like Arabic or French (getting people to speak to me in the language I want them to always has, and does, make me really tense), and that I didn’t worry that I was somehow wasting time by sitting around somewhere. It’s all part of my difficulty being in the moment. On the way down, the signage was getting more eclectic and bold, with shop names in French like “Jean Saliba & Fils,” “Toutes Choses,” but also huge billboards of sectarian political leaders, and a big nationalist banner reading “Let’s get back to our roots, back to our values, back to LEBANON.”
Got down to the دوّار (duwwār: “roundabout”) and after talking to a shopkeeper about where to grab a servīs (public minibus), took one out to Ba3lbek. Nice and cheap. The road was straight, and we rose out of the tangle of unfinished apartment buildings at the edge of town, and through pine forest that reminded me of New England. Soon we entered the valley where Ba3lbek sits, and the fields on either side of the highway rolled away in rich black soil, up to the hilt of mountains on both sides topped with snow and mist… fancifully beautiful.
Hopped off in front of epic ruins, rising from behind fences and foliage in the distance, and dove right in—for the equally epic price of 10,000 Lebanese lira. But after dodging old guys saying “Monsieur, you need guide? Est-ce que vous voulez un guide?” And walking around the high walls, columns, and massive space a Roman courtyard, I was impressed. Huge arches, and neatly carved hollows in the walls of the Temple of Jupiter where idols must once have stood were bright despite their grayness. I toddled around fallen column heads with faces of old gods carved into them. Tour groups of French and German and Lebanese walked around the high walls guffawing at the jokes of their guides, looking afraid somehow. It appears that though the temple complex, as it stands, was originally Roman, and subsequently used by a slew of Arab chiefs as a fortress, it was likely built on top of something much older, from the Phoenicians perhaps.
The size and intricacy of these 2,000 year-old remains was more than anything I’d seen, and at the end of the ruins there was a slick museum of pictures, sculpture, and quadrilingual signage. I enjoyed checking out photographs of Ba3lbek back in the late 19^th century, when apparently the German Kaiser made a visit, because so much was different: intense “oriental” clothing of Fes caps and vests and baggy sirwāl pants, and architecture of stone arches and drainage canals and domes. None of the brand new, yet crumbling and hollow apartment buildings everywhere built on torn earth. And no tight jeans, leather jackets, and semi-mullets, as was the modern attire of the shebēb (young men) in Ba3lbek. What I dug heavily too was the shots of nomadic Turkomen tribesmen outside the town, with tents and head wraps and flutes and smiling, barefaced women. The crazy medieval-ness and naked ethnic diversity of tongues and tribes is something I miss here, something perhaps yet to be found, but something I felt, at least, that I was encountering in North Africa. Siiiigh.
After all that, I walked and I walked and finally found a kebab sandwich for 3,000 lira in a little butcher street. This is not a cheap country. There I sat out front of the butcher shop and ate my sandwich, watching men fan coals under kebab skewers with pieces of cardboard, the shitty mopeds try to pass sleek two-door coups in the little street, the huge dry carcasses swinging lightly. I spoke to a few guys who were amazed that I could speak Arabic, despite my stumbling.
Then I walked all the way up to a sweet, windy park where families picnicked, and hijab-wearing moms called out to little kids. Restaurants and cafés full of locals bustled despite the windy chill. Took a seat at a near-deserted café and attempted the poem below. Certainly not my proudest work, but there might be something worth keeping in it:





A teapot and a teaglass
A spoon and bits of sugar
That cling like sand

“Ey? Shu hiyye?”
The one woman in
Shadow-black hijab asks her son
And the grains of green
Tree leaf and seed pods like pebbles
Tap my table and
Roll down the front of my blue kenze
Slipping from the grip
Of the tree overhead
Its stiff fingers pushing
Through the café roof

The kids keep playing
In the park between me
And the crack-dry streets
And the mothers keep scolding
“Sma3ti shu ‘ilit?”

No one knows the mountains we’re in
Or this town hung on their edge
They might only say the name
If Hezbollah here starts a war
Or if the old temple here tumbles down

Today it’s just us
The argilé pipe
The sweetness of the tea
And the sun.

I walked back to the butcher street, on the way stopping at a sha3bi (popular) internet joint. There, finally, I got a little rooted in this country, in some regular Lebanese people after I stopped fighting and pretending. Upon entering, I speak to the fellas in Arabic. They smile and answer in bumpy English. I talk back in English, and they get curious. After reading some e-mails—one e-mail of which declaring my acceptance to NYU Gallatin School with a fifteen-grand scholarship—and bullshitting a bunch, I got talking to the chattering shebēb in English, then meaningful Arabic, and a bit of French. “Why are you live in Syria, no Lebanon? Life is too much better here,” one says. I found out that most of them spoke the Gaulish tongue, but a couple of them had studied English more recently at the university and felt stronger in it. Thus their initial linguistic inclinations. But it was great connecting a bit in whatever tongue. It made me feel more settled.
On that note, though, French in the Levant, it’s starting to seem, is becoming a relic, only surviving in Lebanon, it seems, because of an official status. Kicked out of Syria without mercy through the Arab nationalist program. It’s odd—I consider myself a devout anti-imperialist, but I’m fascinated by, even intellectually trapped by, the layering of some imperial language on top of another culture. I think the existence of French beside other tongues around the world is so cool, that I get wounded when I see things moving to favor English more, as might be the case here. My fellow activists are gonna kill me for such old fashioned, if-only-the-natives-spoke-French talk, but it’s a big part of how I see the world.
Anyhow, I hauled my tired body and heavy backpack towards the ruins, past the men trying to hawk me T-shirts and guidebooks, and stood on the highway shivering in the wind. I grabbed a servīs that hauled me and bunch of locals back down through the fields, a sharper green now with the darkening sky and cloud-cover, and we stopped at any and all beat, nowhere corners to pick up more passengers. Down, down to the main highway to Beirut, made a right, and we began to climb. Up through the mess of apartments and banks, up into the treeless mountains. The road was steep, and the traffic ahead stretched to infinity. Soon we ascended into the mist at the mountains’ tops. Another few minutes, and we began to descend. The mist let go of the servīs, and steep gorges fell away on either side, their slopes dotted with pimples of poorly-placed apartment buildings. Then the sun, shining in from the sea, was all red and orange, and we passed a peak astride the highway where a fancy new church jutted out into the air, like a fist. Everything folded down towards the sea, towards the last golden sun. The packed disorder of roadside buildings signaling the Beirut suburbs began. I had no idea where to find my friend Ali, living in that big bad city, but I knew he was down there.

This town again. Here we go.

Dimashq #10: "We're Not Sleeping"

"We're Not Sleeping"
I trotted down the old stone steps, the vegetable carts piled high with bright red tomatoes and the shoe repair shops to my back, and the big ugly highway splitting this part of the Old City in two, and the pink setting sun, ahead. "Ughhh, you have no idea what you're doing...." I grumbled, looking on with frustration at the procession of cars, vans, and taxis roaring up and down the highway, Syrian flags and huge posters with the stern and (dopey-looking, frankly) face of the president, and handfuls of young cheering Syrian men, hanging out the windows. They leaned on the horns, honking with the furry one might hear after a win in the World Cup. It went on like that until late in the chilly night, echoing around the paint-flaked walls.
I winced at the mad ignorance of the shebēb (“young guys”) waving Syrian flags, as if I was being cut with a bit of glass, who come out to say… what? That, “Goddamn, we’re so proud of our country for its stability and security (albeit muffling & repressive). And goodness, we’re so taken by that pride for our waTn (“motherland”) that we just had to come out into the gloriously dirty streets of our capital to share it. It’s just a coincidence that our outpouring of love comes at the moment rebellion is appearing in the country.” Is that the message? Or, is it, as my housemate said to me one night when I came home from work, weary from the horns of regime-supporting shebēb blaring on the highway beside me, that they’re just excited at the disturbances in the daily order of things and are coming out with the flags and placards as they might in a soccer match between Manchester United and Barcelona?

The question is worth asking: is this support genuine, or fabricated? And what does genuine support really mean, in this case? The question’s a fly buzzing in my skull for the rest of the five-minute walk under the highway and through the tattered Ottoman-era buildings all piled on top of one another, to my house.
As I watch intermittent reports on Al Jazeera on TV the next morning, switching between righteousness-ripe pro-reform protests in cities like Homs and Hama and Dar’a, and video clips of big crowds of flag-waving “We Love Asad” demonstrators, the question comes up again.
I think back to the party we had in our house last week, where I stood in the back nook of our florescent-lit kitchen, surrounded by a motley assortment of European college kids, and beside my friend Firas (see my post The Druze of Sweida from last November) and had my first meaningful political conversion in Syria about Syrian politics. It was as refreshing as a glass of milk after some cookies. Firas brought up the point that a lot of the seeming support for the ruling regime here comes from people’s assumption that any kind of disturbance in the political order threatens the thing they’ve been “trained”, as Firas put it, to value most: stability. Or, as least that’s what it’s called. What it means is a no-questions-asked one party government, supported by a deep network of secret police with nearly unlimited power due to special “State of Emergency” laws that have been in effect since 1963, which, I believe, is when the Baath party assumed power in Syria. Yet, because of the super-nationalistic rhetoric spewed in schools, something I can confirm from my days as a university student here, as well as all other major institutions, and no discourse in the public sphere to counter it, people begin to fear and, even worse, resent those who dare ask for greater freedom and opportunity in their country. That was me and Firas’ combined analysis of the state of regime support. Where we differ, though, is when Firas

"Long live the leader" beside my doorway. says, “But Bashar is not a bad guy. Actually, I kind of like him.”
Sure, I don’t think he’s got evil coursing through his veins by any measure, but he’s the face of the scummy cabal that runs this place, and it’s his responsibility to avoid the intimidation or killing of protesters if he’s not crazy about shooting at his own people. So I spare him no critique.
Something that entered the margins of the conversion, rolling off the tongue of a pretty Tunisian-German girl in front of me, who lives with a Christian Syrian family in the Old City, is the enduring political and social conservativism of the Syrian Christians. She talked about how her family basically interviews her about each person she’s going to bring to the house to find out whether they’re Christian or not. I believe she also mentioned that they were very anxious about any change in the regime that could occur in Syria, fearing it might usher in a government that oppresses them, the minority. I think this is a fear that’s been cultivated since the days of the French protectorate in Syria (1919ish-1946), the French having done a swell job of dividing-and-ruling along religious lines, which is still the cause of violence in Lebanon. It may have roots further back into Ottoman times, but I don’t know much about that. Just an informed guess.
But this question of genuine support is partly answered by a little anecdote another friend shines on me when I step in the door one day.
He says that, regarding the recent pro-regime demonstrations, a woman in his class at the university here in Damascus has a Syrian boyfriend. That boyfriend of hers was recently summoned to university on a Friday (normally the first day of the weekend around these parts), being told that there was an extremely important exam that day that he had to take or he would fail his course. Upon arriving at the university, he found it closed, with the doors locked. Yet, he and a number of others were collected (by who, it is not clear) and tossed into a bus that took them to a nearby pro-regime demonstration. They were sternly commanded to go out and participate in the Syrian flag fest. If that anecdote is at all typical of the current situation, we see that the apparent love of esh sha3b es sūri (“the Syrian people”) for its government is just a little inflated.
And the process of political awakening that is going on among former regime supporters, or at least those who accepted it, is an interesting one. Like my friend Fehemi, for example, whose face began to crumple with disappointment, and hints of anger crossed his brow, during our language exchange the other night. I always took him for a socially conservative guy, and this attitude popped
Church & mosque minaret in Sha3alaan, Damascus
up with strength during one language exchange a couple weeks back. With the first wave of violent repression of the protests in Dar’a, he had told me that he just wished the protesters would calm down, and that he was worried that because of the clan system widespread down in Dar’a, clans would come out and take revenge on those who killed their kinsmen. His disappointment with the ruling regime only came as a disappointment with the regime’s stupidity for violently repressing the protests, not because it was unjust and despicable to do so, but because it might spark further protests in other parts of Syria. Now, during our conversation in English, he let me know that his support built from fear was disappearing. He said “I feel like I can’t trust the President any more. I used to like him.” I pressed him a little on that last comment, and he said “I only ‘liked’ him because I knew there could be worse people in his place, like his Father Hafiz al Asad. But now, because of his lies, like saying he would remove the Emergency Laws, and because he kills his own people, I am disappointed.” I asked him if he felt angry. “Yes, I am angry. They made me believe something, but now I see that they, how do you say?” “Tricked?” I said. “Yes, they tricked me.”

Dimashq #9: The Pace of Things

The Pace of Things

“Why I am I in this grim, grimy place?” I have to ask. The rain drops are coming down in a pitiful drizzle in the darkness of the avenue, tumbling off the bus windows after a moment of stability, as if they’re trying to hold on but can’t. It’s a wintry, disappointing dark outside, one that I was hoping to avoid upon my return to Syria, my head filled with visions of rich Levantine spring warmth. The man to my left in a tight black jacket and light beard steps out into the darkness as the bus slows and the back door opens. He yells to the driver in rough Arabic to stop at the roundabout up ahead, “'cuz the young guy going there doesn’t know.” It’s true. I’m way outside my narrow Damascus world out here in Duma.
My muscles are tensing involuntarily. I take a deep breathe and focus for a moment on my center, but a minute later my shoulders are back up at my ears and my jaw is tight like I’m about to take a blow. Another deep breathe, and I continue to wonder deeply why I put myself in such uncomfortable situations, or if I’m really doing anything at all that warrants such anxiety. Maybe I’m just “a sensitive guy”, as my old flatmate Anton brilliantly put it once, back in the early days of my stay in this locked-away Middle-Eastern land.
“belediya!” the driver yells. I hop off, and another kind fella (one of thousands of people I have come across in my life who help me across the bridge when I’m feeling feeble) guides me one block over to the courthouse. I give a ring to Ayham, my soon-to-be employer, exchange a dozen how-are-you’s that are never actually answered, and a minute later he swoops in like a smiling eagle to spirit me over to the ma3hed (“institute”). “ena ktīr ēsif” (“I’m so sorry”) comes constantly to my lips for… not seeing Ayham sooner after I came down from an enormous 30-hour voyage through three continents, for not knowing how exactly to get out to Duma, for… Nothing really worth apologizing for at all. I tell the light-faced, French-looking Ayham about my journey to Damascus, and the situation in my new house, and just before we step in the pretty door of the ma3hed, he turns and says with a little smile “3arabitak minīħa!” (“Your Arabic is good!”). O, right… THAT’S why I‘m in this place.
Within the quiet, florescent-lit, marble interior of the spot, we sit on leather chairs, he on the boss side of the desk, me on the employee side, and he gets going speaking to me about the teaching system here at the ma3hed. Every teacher works a dewra (“cycle”), and each dewra has so-and-so number of jelsa’s (“sessions”). It’s complex, and I’m not getting it all. Not so much for the speed at which he’s speaking, but just because I was never good at putting together multi-piece instructions like the ones he’s giving me now. “OK, these are not classes, they’re ‘sessions’, and I’ll be focusing on teaching the students English pronunciation and idiomatic expression” is about all I get from the bombs of instructions being dropped on me in Arabic.
I sit in my cushy leather chair for what seems like an ever-expanding drop of time, reviewing blankly the material within the WorldView English textbooks that Ayham gives me. Ayham puts my schedule together at his computer. I’m still tense as ever, and have no idea what I’m seeking as I flip through pages and pages of dialogues about travel and business and explanations of grammatical concepts in the textbooks. People come in and out of the office, like one thicker-boned guy with dark features, looking more Iraqi to me than the typical Damascene, who moves in and out, and every time says, “Nice to meet you, Mister Sam.” Ayham, after innumerable clicks and inspections of books around his computer, prints my schedule and hands it to me delicately, as though it were a page of the Qor’an. A few words between me and Ayham confirming my work slots over the next few days, I pack my things tidily into my backpack, and Ayham hurls me a smiling “Goodnaaayt Sam!” I don’t want to forget the secretary, Bēsel, who sits patiently in his sweater vest at his desk even at this late evening hour. I look his way and as humbly as possible, say “inshālla raħ shūfak ba3d tlēt iyēm?” (“God willing I’ll see you in three days?”). He looks me right in the eye and says with force “bi’izin illēh” (With the permission of God”). Yea boy, I’m sure such a serious affair as my coming out to work at your institute requires the full permission of God. We’ll see.

Since then, I’ve returned to the institute, trembling with nerves less and less every time, in the early morning when only old men in checkered red head wraps roam the streets, and in the evening with the commuters headed out of Damascus. I’ve begun to organize lesson plans for my very humble contribution to the English “sessions”. I’ve learned new grammatical vocabulary in Arabic that helps me explain concepts to the beginning English students, with thin mustaches of beginning puberty, or wrapped tight in sparkly hijabs. After my first session in the evening alongside Nāsir, a proud English teacher from Iraq who wears corduroy jackets and looks like he hails from the intelligentsia of 1960’s Baghdad, the fine fella of big words and dark skin gave me a box of sweets. He explained to me in his crystal-clear Iraqi Arabic that they are sweets made with a nut grown and harvested only in the north of Iraq, in the mountains, where it’s cool enough. He said they are sweets given only to close friends. After a heap of compliments in English about my “new Methods” and “experience” as an English teacher (not all completely deserved, I think), he handed over the load of sweets, and I felt rejuvenated having met such a big-hearted person in this new place. “Yes, Mister Sam, we are very happy to have someone of your level here.” Well, Nāsir, glad to be here too.

Dimashq #8: the HORN of AFRICA

the HORN of AFRICA

The route back home to the United States is ruggedly paved and leads across the barbed eastern tip of Africa. Ethiopia and Somaliland are the stepping stones.

December 21^st, 2010

Manama, Bahrain—So, the madness meter is climbing steadily. Yesterday I rushed out of Shēm (Damascus) more or less on time for my rendezvous with the plane, at the airport, though the flight bounced a little bit early for want of passengers. Arrived in Bahrain (the Kingdom of) two and a half hours later, and stood around on line, after security check, behind a mass of impatient Indians, some in khaki suits, some in kufi caps and elegant scarves, speaking in all kinds of tongues and tones to a local Arab speaking sternly to them in top English. Such language skills come, I suppose, with educational resources, which Bahrain has, and a history of British dominance, which Bahrain has (an English “protectorate” until the 1950’s, I believe). Wondered what the hell I was waiting for, tried to skip through customs, and then ended up paying fifty American bucks to some big-eyed customs chump with a slight afro who spoke really harsh Arabic, just to leave the airport.
The shiny sliding doors parted, I walked across the manicured highway, grass, and sidewalks, past a park flanked by a lagoon where upper-strata local women power walked in long black hijabs, mounted and crossed a fancy footbridge reminiscent of new-millennium architecture you might see in London, and through a bundle of awful, tasteless mansions set behind a noise barrier from the highway, where south Asian servants moved quietly to and fro’, and all reminded me of a retirement community in southern California.
O, I walked, lost, along the raging highway of tidy and drab buildings that reminded me of corporate offices in Connecticut in the falling sunlight, and then thankfully made a turn off onto a small street that lead me through a slightly beat-er quarter. All the signs bilingual in English/Arabic, TONS of خياطة (“tailoring”) shops with colorful hijab dresses for women in the windows, eye-catching yet sure not to let anything show, you get me? A good number of Indians of very dark hues walked the main avenue, highly uninterested in my presence, compared to Syria. Hundreds of years as a trading center in the Persian Gulf will, I suppose, make the populace a bit bored with foreigners, since, after all, who is a foreigner and who is a local anyhow? The occasional Arab in red and white checkered head dress and long white gēlabeya walked down the street, past a construction site with a bunch of south Asian workers, rubble, and no safety precautions. Finally, after much lonely walking, and sitting by a rocky flat spot where kids played soccer, I found a spartan kebab shop where Pakistani and Indian and Iranian fellas worked the kitchen and the coals, all of whom had either no or dubious Arabic and English. One man from some deep valley in Pakistan looked at me, perplexed, as I made fingers for the number of kebabs I wanted, and his Indic skin glowed darkly under his apron, reflecting the red glow of the embers over which he cooked the skewers of meat.
I got some kebab and water in me for a few hundred rupees (I thought only Aladdin used such currency), grabbed a plastic chair in front of the shop, and just huuuung out, taking pictures of wary Arab men and women in old-timey garb who made impatient to-go orders at the kebab joint. I took a chance and walked over to a barber shop, and got a careful, sharp, hair follicle-searching shave from what I thought was a Sudanese guy, but who turned out to be a black-skinned Indian. Strange, in this neighborhood I was meeting Indians who, aside from not speaking Arabic, didn’t have too much English, which I have never before witnessed in my short life.
At a billiards/internet spot, a popular combo in this bizarre no-country, I called my family and read a bit about the history of Bahrain, and made the loooong boring walk for kilometers, along clean highways, over car barriers and lane dividers, slowly along a tired bridge over a dark and quiet canal where hollow fishing boats bobbed by the edge, towards the high, sparkling buildings I had seen in the distance. I kept walking, and the fucking motor-artery highway was hostile to life and fenced off from the actual city around it, surrounded by fence and bilingual neon signs advertising hotels and name brands. So, I crossed the highway and hopped a fence, and snaked onto a main drag in town, with lights and people and soulless shops.
After asking around at a corner shop for a place to get some tea, where I caught sight of a black Arab in head dress and robe who looked kind of like Chris Rock standing around thinly and proudly, I took a seat at the Indian joint for a cup of tea and some fun or relaxation or whatever was on the menu, but goddamn talk about lonely sadness: every man in there sat, bent over his own individual table, scraping food from one plate with one hand. No one spoke, and a bad Indian romance singer crooned away on the television. The place had to be abandoned, and quickly.
Walking back along the neon street, I asked two South Asian cats, all brown skin and baseball caps, if the café they were sitting in front of had a bathroom, they said yes, and lo! ‘Twas such a glorious bathroom with a clean, joyous western toilet. Relieved, and whistling to myself with delight, I took a seat in the joint, mostly filled with faces dark as only one can find south of the Sahara. Mostly Ethiopians, some Sudanese, and a few local gulf Arabs in gēlabeya robes, who blasted each other in their respective tongues, and I ordered a tea and shisha from the thin Ethiopian maîtresse in blue headband, who sat and joked and talked with her countrymen, smoking shisha and playing dominoes, her hands all over their shoulders and heads when they cracked a good gag, which was noteworthy in this country that, despite its history of global connectedness and “liberalism”, still kept men and women apart in some not-so-subtle-ways. I spied a khalīji (Gulf Arab) in traditional dress come inside, greet a group of black Sudanese fellows warmly with handshakes and cheek kisses, and sit down to converse and debate with them, hands twisting in the air at the important points. I have never witnessed such comradery between light-skinned and black Arabs (or black people, in general) in my time in the Arab world. Never such excited mixing. “This is my spot. I’m coming back here someday,” I thunk to myself with pleasure. What can I say? I dig diversity.
Other khalījis in gēlabeyas entered the scene, greeted each Ethiopian and deep dark Sudanese guy individually with soul-hugs and pounds and brotherly calls. Like a corner in Harlem on a summer night, in a sense. African women with processed hair came up and down the creaky stairs in the back, some older dames bringing down broad plates of Ethiopian injera and t’ibs, and some younger women—a little overweight—talking gregariously and moving drunkenly and wearing too much make-up. Prostitute. The word flits through my mind like a bat in a cage. And the occasional man, making his way, seriously & slowly, down the creaking stairs, from his raunchy rendezvous on the second floor. The Sudanese up and left, the Ethiopians cheered loudly at the soccer match on TV, those unique plosive consonants firing from their mouths, and a couple of the working girls sat playing arcade games like little kids.
My brain raced on caffeine and shisha, and I fantasized about every exciting possibility for my future, wondering now if I needed to move to Ethiopia to find that special soul-seed that we all seek… or to Bahrain. I had so many thoughts about how to take up residence across the street so that I could live out my days chilling at this colorful joint, or who I would marry when I became a champion journalist in Ethiopia, or if I needed ever return to America again—so removed from the here-now moment that I actually felt ill, my whole being trembling with insane excitement and lack of nutrition.
I loved the café, but my ass going numb from lack of movement, and the young south Asian guy of sad features getting tired of replacing the coals on my shisha pipe, I bounced. After some internetting at a dim cyber café where low-faced Indian men would only speak to me in English, I taxied out to the airport with a dark-skinned driver who spoke Arabic as though he had peanut butter in his mouth. I stood in the neon glow of high-end duty-free shops and took pictures, and blasted off from earth at 4:15 a.m.

December 23^rd, 2010

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—“What a fucking fool,” I grumbled to myself, enraged at the crazy bully of a tall thin man on the sidewalk who’d yelled me off the street for taking pictures of passersby. “It is bad. It is immoral!” he yelled like a fanatic with halting English, with an Accounting textbook ragged in one hand. Fuck him. My anger stemmed most from the fact that, confused, shocked, and unaware of the cultural boundaries in this new land, I had acquiesced to his insane bullying, looking like a wimp in front of all those people who gathered to watch the faranji (foreigner) be punished.

I mumbled away angrily to myself as my Dad does sometimes, and my spirits were only lifted a bit after I walked and walked, and met the crowds of modern, beautiful, and tolerant in the seedy Piazza square in Addis, as I passed a huge line of youthful and hip Ethiopians waiting out front of a movie theatre. The building may have been old enough to have been crafted by an Italian hand during their brief occupation of the east African kingdom in the 1930s. Then, BAM. Struck like a brick with the glad faces of two young men.
“What’s up man?! You speak English?”
“Uhhh, yes.”
“Hey cool. Where you from?”
“United States.”
“Wow. I love the U.S. That’s going to be my country, man!”
That was Isaac, with the glad smile and proud afro. He wasn’t the first young guy with impeccable English I’d met in the square, or the first Ethiopian with such “love” for the US, and I’d only been in town for 36 hours. His talent for English was accompanied, he said, by fluency in Amharic, Tigrinya, and Afar. “Damn, I got to get to work if I want to catch up,” I thought. Aderfis, who spoke English a bit like Will Smith, stood by his side and blasted away in my native tongue. I was impressed: they made no offers of drugs or girls right off, which put me at ease. We slowly knocked our legs down the slope, away from Piazza, towards my hotel, Baro. These fellas were students, and they were smart, talking about the run-down Italian arches and terraces around us and commenting on the few Amharic words I had learned since my hasty arrival. No ass-kissing, and decent conversation. I was being drawn in. I told the fellas I had to drop by my sleeping spot to pick up my sweater and get some meditation done.

That I did, after donning my turtle neck that makes me look French, and falling deep within myself for a vast 20 minutes. Met Isaac in his hipster scarf and his silent, dreadlocked chum Iskander, out in the dark dark lane of street lamps and wandering humans, and within minutes we were drifting up a quiet alley in Piazza, Isaac always talking and Iskander always quiet, like he was wise… or ashamed. We passed shacks and flickering storefronts in the active darkness, all age and decrepitude around us, and though for a moment I felt as though maybe I was hip and cool and in, accepted by the respectful-looking youth around me with my two local guardians at either side, I understood that they were simply my escorts of the moment. I was speaking English, I was (and, for better or worse, remain) white, and I would be paying—for what, I didn’t yet know—so Isaac and Iskander had my back, and all other dirt-poor youngsters around us knew better than to try to grab my attention, or a free meal. Maybe tomorrow night.
A sudden left turn, and a duck of the head, and we were in a little den, with concrete floor and thin, pink wood walls. A dirty mattress, empty plastic bags, and chat (known in Arabic as qat, a stimulant plant containing cathine and cathinone which is grown, harvested, and consumed regularly in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia) stems littered that floor. The spot was sketchy as hell… as what I imagined drug dens in the Vietnam War looked like. “Uhhh, not enough places to sit.” No matter. Isaac grabs the empty water jug with chat stems all over it, tosses them off, and pats the top. “Sit.” And they take their places on the mattress and another water jug.
A hand fiddled with the lock on the little door in the wall, a voice yelled through it, Isaac yelled back in bursting Amharic, and in a couple of minutes big bundles of dark green chat, plastic bags wrapped like diapers around the leaves at the upper stretches of the stems, and bottles of Coke and water, were thrust familiarly through the little door and we got to work. Isaac and I pushed the tender little leaves in clumps into the side of our mouths, me nervously asking “Is it going to make me crazy? Can I swallow the stuff?” Don’t swallow the leaves, but the juice is fine. Iskander only nodded and took little baby bits into his mouth. And we sat, and we chewed, and the air was chill and I was hungry, until the appetite-killing effects of the chat took quiet hold.
And we talked. Or Isaac and I did, though I often tried to nod the conversation toward Iskander, as though it was a lost child looking for directions. Isaac and I went on about the Nile river and the ancient bridge it formed between Egypt and the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia included, and then on to the state of Ethiopian immigrants in Egypt. Iskander interjected incredibly intellectual-sounding things, saying quietly “Yea, there’s a kind of cultural and historical proximity between all these nations.” Next came the politics of Ethiopia, and the gap-toothed young Isaac smiled when he spoke of the current Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, praising him coolly for his instatement of the ethnic federalism system, wherein different ethnic groups raise, control, and spend money on their own ethnic homelands, and gave him props on ushering in the first multiparty state in living memory in Ethiopia. We locked ideological swords though, when I asked “Well if things are moving up so quickly, why is there such stunning poverty everywhere around us in this country?”
“Well, it’s not really poverty. The farmers out in the lowlands, you know, they grow enough crops to help them survive for the year, and then they just relax the rest of the time. Even if they don’t get good prices on their crops, they find a way to survive. They always find a way.”
That sounded like a pretty mean existence to me. Did he really think this was not poverty?
We popped in little buds and leaves til we both looked like Babe Ruth chewing tobacco, Iskander bowed to us and left his dirty cot to go “study for tomorrow’s exam,” and I started to feel pretty chummy about Isaac and his comforting afro. But then that phantom voice barked the price of our water, Coke, and kilo of chat: sost meto amsa birr (350 birr). Isaac dropped his eyes and waited expectantly for me to snatch the money from my wallet with glee. Tired of “the leave-the-bill-to-the-faranji” strategy, I snapped and told the feigning-shame youth that I had no idea it was going to be so expensive, and that that was just about all the notes I had in my wallet. I couldn’t pay for the world. “I’m sorry man. I’ll pay for the Cokes.” Nice. 50 birr. Thanks. And we pushed back out into the roil of the living dark outside.
The lanes and bending streets were quieter in the official sense, but teaming with nocturnal life of young Christian girls in niiice hairdos of little braids and violent curls, tight blouses and light Ethiopic skin smooth and contracting in the mountain night cold. Some linked arms with thin friends, probably Muslims, heads wrapped in colored cloth, all of them deeply sexy. We sauntered to my hotel, me continuing my complaining, limping from the cash wound from the chat, mouth dry and sticky as I whined, again a mark of the chat wad I’d been chewing. Isaac stood, patient and at-home, in the rubble outside under streetlights, as I ran into my humble hotel for more dough.
Then off to Bakal, past all the hustlers creeping corners like hyenas, all the scared thin prostitutes, all the bars banging with the keyboard beats of Ethiopian pop, the cheaper bars sparkling outside with the likes of Christmas lights draped around their fronts, Amharinya letters cut like secrets above the doorway, and I didn’t know where the elderliness of Italian-occupation architecture ended and the raggedness of poverty architecture began.
A pat-down from the guard at the door of Bakal, up the stairs rising from a courtyard outside, and into the joint. Nice. I liked it immediately: women with wild hair and hip hop-hip outfits pushed through the crowds, well-to-do cats in sweaters danced in a completely manageable way that I felt I could imitate, and some good ol’ reggae music bumped from the DJ nook. “This, I can handle,” I thought. Isaac and I took a seat in a corner up front, ordered beers, and I just watched the young men sing along in English to Bob Marley tunes, and the women—almost certainly all of them working that night—shaking slightly, subtle with the lack of makeup mask (compared to the horrendous overuse of makeup I became habituated to seeing on the faces of young women in Syria). Within minutes hookers emerged from the mass of bodies, and stood around our tiny little table topped with cigarettes and beer bottles, and one lady who looked like she was from an MTV music video—with thick cornrow braids and face little and intense as a panther, body exposed and madly attractive like an hourglass—was pulling on my hand and giving me puppy eyes. That was weeks ago, and I waved her away like a naughty child, though looking at faded memories now, she seems so hot I wish I could go back to her.
I sipped my beer, asked Isaac why he cared if I got a girl or not when he kept looking my way when the hookers were around and inquiring as much, and got to dancing. Maaany hookers approached me, though with reserve, after I had waved away several at the table. Funny thing though, how one’s social tendencies will cling even when one is on the other side of the globe: though these women were down, presumably, for whatever I wanted as long as I paid, I still found it oppressively difficult to reach out and grab one that interested me, which was almost every damsel in there, but for the really skinny ones. Isaac danced with a few, his scarf dangling and his toe tips twisting on the floor simply, pulling the ladies up to my proximity, but he never put us together under the dim white glow of the place, and I sure wasn’t going to make that leap. Some anxiety deep within me.
Long story short: I did plenty more dancing, reliving my life story and always afraid to reach out and grasp the woman coming right my way, until after a chat with Isaac in the horrendous white-tile bathroom, and as I was getting ready to split, Isaac reeled in Salom. Now, again, I’m dusting off the dark photographs in my mind at this point, but retrospect and desire show this woman as painfully hot, to me. Black stripe tattoos like tiger-claw gashes decorated her milk-coffee arms, sweet fake hair braided all kinds of ways, her eyes were like big watery glass orbs of child softness, she was taller than I, leaving lots of her to handle, and her breasts and ass were wildly tangible. Almost unbelievable. In the end, after dancing within her curves, I knew I needed to have all of Salom’s outer. So, we snuggled in a booth, and she and Isaac rapped at each other in Amharic while the nails of one of her hands clicked on the table top and the others scratched the palm of my hand lightly. Look back and forth between this beauty on my arm and pensive Isaac just past her. She blasted things at Isaac, said subtle things to me in English that I didn’t understand at all, and I wanted to get her somewhere quiet that I could command. Then she asked an energetic question, ending with “…OK?!” Sure, I said. And she walked off into the body mass on the dance floor.
“What?! Where’s she going?”
“Man, she said she was going with someone else who offered a hundred dollars.”
“A hundred bucks?! What about eighty?”
Defeat.
We moved back along the wide avenues of Piazza, in the cold and quiet dark. Just a silent prostitute in the far dark, then a young guy hustler crossing the street, yelling to Isaac. Yes, fine. Awo gwadeynya, salāmno! he shouted back like the mafia king of a neighborhood. But, he whined a high tenor saxophone tone when I wouldn’t pull money from a cash machine to go out for beers and hookers at another seedy joint just up the breakdown street. He complained in the streetlight darkness, though I told him my funds were low. He promised a hundred birr in payment the next day, but I knew that was as false as the interest of a young prostitute in a loud bar. I laid awake in bed for a long time that night, staring up at the moon shadows on the ceiling in my room, a current still running through me.

December 30^th, 2010

Harar, Ethiopia—Up and at ‘em early this day. I pushed out the gate leading out of the courtyard of my home, the house of Umma (“Mother”), the elderly, quiet, milk-coffee colored stroke victim who is still holding feeble watch over her grandchildren and who speaks beautiful, vaguely familiar Harari (Sam, amān taķi?: “Sam, you are well?”) to me as I pass her chair in the corner, and who nods her silk-clad head in understanding at my Arabic. The stone-walled alleys outside the gate were full of life in the early-morning sun, with tall women in multicolored wraps moving to and from the sūq (market), but where wretched men still slept, wrapped in overgrown hair and battered sport jackets, on the alleys’ edges under the piercing sunlight.
I waltzed through the sūq, known around here actually as the “Muslim sūq”, because, I suppose, most of the merchants and customers are Muslim, and it sits beneath the largest mosque in Harar. Past the tents supported by bent sticks where women sat selling bright fabrics, wrapped in them themselves, cobblestoned streets behind the tents, lined by the intricate homes of Indian merchants of old off to the left, the hill leading up to the main square and church at the center of the old town, up ahead.
Over to the internet spot to check for info about phantom travel partner Lan, the Asian woman from Vancouver. Nothing. What an epic failure. I was expecting to have a partner on this journey, but now all I’m getting is distracted messages on the net saying, “Wow, Harar is really crazy!” and e-mail silence in response to my queries about when we’ll finally link up. But I did meet world-educated, son-of-diplomat Markovius, we talked politics, he giving me that defeated attitude about the inevitability of oppression that I’ve seen among those who have grown up within the higher workings of the machine itself and are left hopeless by its seeming omnipresence. I gave a nod, a handshake, and a little indemne? salāmno? (”How are you? All’s well?) to Mark’s buddy Testi (“happy”). With one simple inquiry about where I could get something in this town to dampen by growing odor, Testi was out showing me around another, Christian, sūq, tiny cobblestone streets covered over with a shell of fabric, for deodorant and Amharic church music. With a little negotiating, I managed to grab a wad of writing implements and pads to give to the local children who had none, whom I was sure would line the path to come.
Back at the beyt (“house”) I watched Turkish soap operas dubbed into Syrian Arabic on the couch with Fahmi, super-cool Inās, and Huba. Inās was wrapped in the white hijab she wears to work, speaking to me in cool, reserved English, and me and Huba chatted in Arabic that she learned from these very soap operas. I took a few photos, and we look like a family.
Then me, Fahmi, and Hamdi mounted another ooold blue Peugeot with sweet Arabic-speaking driver Mansūr. Good man. I commented on a trinket hanging in the car inscribed with Qor’anic verse, and soon we were off in a slow, deliberate, very amicable conversation in Arabic. What a treat—I can talk to the driver this time! Up, up, past the extraneous buildings and huts, and the big church trailing off from the center of Harar. We slowed, put the engine in low gear, and Mansūr turned off the bending highway, and into the dirt road hills of orange and dark green, terraced farm plots in the distance all around, past children who dropped their bundles of firewood or walking staffs and began chasing the car when they saw me, yelling Faranjo! (“foreigner!”) with enormous smiles on their faces. We slowed down to a creep many times, in order to ford dry stream beds that ran across the soil road, a few giant baobab-like trees oozing past us.
We reached the Argobba village on the summit of a mountain after passing a new government school and some agricultural projects. I stepped from the classy Peugeot and like sharks to blood, children came in from all directions. What a look they had! Roundish black faces with big white teeth, and hair pulled into tiny braids that fell flat around their foreheads. It didn’t take a minute until we met the village chief, a woman with mad smile and scratchy voice in brilliant orange headdress, who was aged only 42, but who looked 80. An almost Arabian look to her crinkled light-hued face.
Along a path up to another adjacent summit, and in moments we were walking slowly among square stone houses, all grey and silent, the kids with braided hair following close, wondering. Hamdi lead the way, moving slowly around the jaggy, rocky path, spitting casual things at the village chief in both Harari and Oromo tongues with ease (no one yet, it seems, speaks Amharic—the official language of Ethiopia—in this village. The Argobba are a Muslim ethnic group who once had their own Argobba language, a Semitic language related to Amharic, which is very near extinction these days, as a result of their switching to neighboring languages for economic reasons, for they have been known as astute traders. They are also highly culturally independent, and I’ve read that they’ve also been known not to send their children to school for fear of influence from the non-Muslim world. Wild shit, I say). We reached a clearing, the stone houses poised on crags behind us, and we looked at the valley below, standing beside thorn-bush chicken coups where the birds squawked loudly, and little, serious children tended them. We watched a solemn woman, young and intensely beautiful, soft cleavage showing above her dress line in her dark home sit and weave a traditional basket with yellow, blue, and red threads over woven straw. We sat, and watched, and the woman said unhappy-looking things to Hamdi in Harari, and he told me she was saying that if I was so interested in these baskets, why didn’t I buy one? “Well, I will, just not right now.” How does one express this to her without sounding like a complete cheapskate? Up to the little stone mosque, where I greeted the imam with little skull cap on in Arabic, and he responded, reverent, for I spoke the holy tongue of his faith. Finally, Hamdi took pictures with me and the mob of children in front of mosque, and after the photo they all demanded “baķşīş! baķşīş!” (“Tip! Tip!”) Nope. Sorry kids.
Then we sat in woman-chief’s house and ate spiced injera and drank tea that I swear added length to my life. As I have seen before in isolated little villages like this, the adults were extremely patient, and well comfortable with silence while sitting among others. The village queen sat with headdress off, grinning and smoking a cigarrette, and saying little. The same for an old man with a sharp outfit and large growth on his forehead who made powdered chat with a mortar and pestle. I asked questions about the village and its history that Fahmi and Hamdi translated, but really ha to restrain my energetic tongue in order to enjoy the comfortable silences. Glory.
We mounted the Peugeot, where Mansūr still waited like a timid, patient prince, and we bumped and slammed back down the dirt path, me high on chat and speaking enthusiastically to quiet Mansūr in Arabic, and more thin kids chasing the car as we passed.
Back at house, I met Mina outside the courtyard gate, who was cooking and selling some friend dough balls right there on the step with her sisters, and I showed pictures of the exotic Argobba village. It was on quick, as I made baby-ish jokes in English and Amharic, with Mina’s hand on my knee and a smile bigger than the night sky above. After perhaps 15 minutes, she was on her feet, and inviting me out, casually, for a maşwār (“promenade/stroll”). We went on a slow walk through the crumbling walls of the ancient city, she whispering Ķ’as beĶ’as (“little by little”) as I stumbled over the little steps descending the dark lanes. The night shone blue/blackly above as we pushed outside Harar walls. With tame hyenas in the fields out to our right, and thick ramparts to our left, Mina was looking like a ghost in her full-length hijab, and spoke like one too with her very limited English. After much delay and roundaboutness on her part, I was finally able to place us on a huge stone bench outside the ramparts, I kissed her beneath the clear stars. Breaking from habit, I felt real cool and calm, and she liked it.
It was only half an hour, a little making up excuses to her ancient father and sneaking out of her home, and we were out on the streets of the new city outside the walls with Fahmi, looking for a hotel. Fahmi—nervous on chat high—led us down cobblestone streets, near-empty dance bars on one side, aluminum sheeting and vines on the other, and me and Mina got a room behind a wicked loud bar, with Fahmi’s nervous help. After silly price haggling with grimy hotel owner, round faced, balding, and grinning arrogantly, I acquiesced: 150 birr.
Lights out, Mina slipped her veil dress off like a sock in the dark. We had sex immediately. Her thin form didn’t quite fit my taste, nor did her small breasts, but her intensity and desire like a crazed and curious scientist, did. Eminem’s newest hit, and Ethiopian dance music pounded from the bar by our room, and a Las Vegas-style electric star twinkled through the window as we mated, with heat and loudness. After all the intense maneuvering of the evening, I was already spent, and tried to wrap up the banging and the gripping and raspy noise making with haste. “Wow she’s skinny,” I thought. We pulled a white mosquito net over us, and she orgasmed with aggression. I burst on her stomach. Sleep.


January 3^rd, 2011

Berbera, Somaliland—I slept in, waking with sore rib muscles from the violent puke spasms from the food poisoning I had yesterday, grace of an unhygienic dish of pasta with meat that I wolfed down with my hands at a roadside joint. The mid-morning sun, gladly, saturated my room, a welcome addition after my terrifying encounter with illness in the unsettling dark last night in this nowhere ancient Turkish port on the edge of the Gulf of Aden, not to mention, THE UNIVERSE.
After freshening up in a cold shower with actual water pressure, washing the dust that accumulated in my hair from the whipping winds of the arid country around me, I felt like a spring flower. A peek in my window and a couple knocks at the door, and quiet, handsome, Abdelqadir, my babysitter in this town, came in, I hit him with a slow fiicantahay? ("Are you fine?"), and in his messy Yemeni Arabic, he convinced me to come see the sights with him in his car. He took me out in that hot car of his with tinted windows up. A guy I didn’t know sat in the co-pilot’s seat. Found out he was the brother of the mayor, and was told he works with Human Rights Watch. After looking at this grungy, distracted being, I thought, snobbishly, “to a minimal capacity, I‘m sure.”
So, I asked for a seat at a café and a legit breakfast, for time to find my balance in this place and get some writing done, and instead? Why, we pulled over at a wreck of a shop that sold soap and batteries and car parts and minimal food, and bought some packs of vanilla wafers and milk. I didn’t want to be a high maintenance brat, but I needed to get some nutrition and some settledness in me, and this was not doing in. The tension and impatience built inside me as we cruised around the dusty, ruined town of white, rubbly buildings no longer inhabited (destroyed, I believe, in Somalia’s civil war of twenty years past) with the brother of the mayor, who shook his bud (a short, shaped stick that Somali men of status carry. It doesn’t seem to mean much specific, but I betcha it evolved from herding staffs that the Somalis used, given their long history as nomadic herder folk) as he yelled out to people who sat in the shade chewing khād (Somali pronunciation for the qat/chat abovementioned) from the car, his 3umāmed (a traditional Somali scarf) dull against his nylon jacket. No fuckin’ café, as I desired. Instead, Abdulqadir drove me past old ruined buildings with tin and shingle roofs with little spires along the spine of the long building. Beautiful and dilapidated and mysterious. Turkish? British? I couldn’t tell, because of Abdulqadir’s wandering, hesitating, truly unknowing Arabic, though he did claim it was once a church. Not so sure. Abdelqadir pointed out majestic rubble and told me to take pictures, but through the window and from far away.
He zipped us to a near-deserted gas station, offered to drive me out to a cement factory when I asked to see “real” culture of Berbera, made me pay a whopping surprise $13 for his fuel, and fed up and sick of this good-intentioned idiot, I had the fella drop me off at a fly-filled restaurant. See ya at sunset, dude.
Sat in the thatch-roofed joint where men chewed khād and a woman with beautiful, stark face, and rotten teeth (like almost everyone here. Amazing: as soon as I crossed the border from Ethiopia, a lot of people were suddenly sporting little brown holes like bullet-marks in their teeth) in multicolored hijab made classic Somali sweet tea with milk. Flies overwhelmed me, I spoke to a young polygamist businessman who traded livestock to Yemen out of the Berbera port, I ate my vanilla wafers and wrote ‘til I couldn’t anymore. Then I emerged from the fly-shack and walked onto a street with infinite stalls, looking for the sūq. Asking some spaced-out fellas for directions, broken-toothed Abderrahman, apparently also a friend of my friend Abdullahi back in Hargeisa, intercepted me. He said he had been looking for me, in an almost Chinese accent, denounced Abdelqadir for just trying to make money off me, and escorted me in the opposite direction. He always had a harsh look of worry, resembling anger, on his creased face with teeth chipped and cracked into semi-fangs. Took me to some office where men sat in piles on the floor chewing khād. Pointless. Little did I know this is the harshest-faced angel I was yet to meet in all my travels.
He showed me what I thought I wanted, by long, tiring walking through wind-scoured white desert town to a hospital. Ancient, colonial—with words in British spelling, or misspelled, in terrible condition, yet gorgeous for the trees that grew up in the empty spaces between sections of the building, and in use by a few quietly moaning men in beds with primitive braces on various parts of their bodies in dark room. They wouldn’t let me take a picture, and the women managing the bland white hospital in their unrevealing monocolor hijabs, looked uncomfortable baffled at my presence there.

So we fled gently through more emptiness and apocalyptic buildings over to the white and green Turkish mosque, the minaret standing as the highest structure in this city. Across from it, what Abderrahman claimed was an old British government building. Arches and wood veranda on second floor, the roof like the top of a castle keep. It reminded me of the old French architecture down in New Orleans. Barbed wire. Hijab-wearing women and young men in baseball caps living within. Sand-colored walls and doors with “stop” written beside them. This was interesting, if desolate, and waaaay better than driving every place in a car with a confused, somewhat simple guy. Plus, this building was an epic bit of architecture that I was getting up close and personal with, though that was not the case for its inhabitants. We walked out through the shacks of port-workers, built from sticks and brush and rusted metal, to a market where I bought sweet 3umāmed and a mediocre bud for $7 from man dealing piles of disorganized everything.
Later, as the sun fell and the red light of shop fronts began to glow and the people began to look ghostly in their loose fabdics in the purple light, me and Abderrahman grabbed decent food at a proper restaurant with a solid roof, and walls, and a tree going up through center of the ceiling. Abderrahman and I washed out hands (a requirment before every meal in this region which I really respect), and settled down to plates of clean ground meat and bread, Merrily, I met a smart, worldly chap of shaved head, clean teeth, and arrogant smile. His name was Solomon: a Somali educated in Canada. We spoke of Somali clan structure, Somali food, and illness, and of whether I was truly being tailed by the CIA in this off the record country, as my parents fretfully claimed. The cat’s got a business in Dubai, so he’s been around the world a bit. Abderrahman was quiet during our conversation, but for questions in Somali that Solomon spit at him. We washed hands, wandered the camel-filled streets, strode back to the hotel where I watched a black & white French film on the roof with a bunch of good-natured khād-chewers, and sweet, sweet sleep.


January 4^th, 2011
Berbera, Somaliland—Woke to pinkish light of dawn over Berbera port. In the crisp cool of morning, after hanging out front of the hotel on some ratty seats made of refuse, staring across the street to the low wall surrounding the port facilities, I met Abderrahman and his tall, non-anglophone buddy Ahmed, with those tall, stretched-out proportions and sharp facial features are typical of some Somalis.
After breakfast at the same kegitimate restaurant where Abderrahman and I dined last night, and tired of sitting on a building’s stoop waiting for a minibus to spirit me back to the Somaliland capital, Hargeisa, I found the old Berbera soul I was looking for all along!
All it took was setting out on my own through the center of the old-soul buildings, where I briefly met a man who approached me on the street (“What are you doing here? How are you liking Somaliland? Are you married?”), and after learning that I wished to work in the region as a journalist, told me he worked with The Nation magazine. Hoofs beat on the dusty-sand street behind me, and I turned to watch a camel gallop Laurence-of-Arabia-style down the middle of the street. Then I crept into a wide lane, unpaved, bordered by a long building on each side—now houses where a few quiet men and a woman in hijab shuttled in and out through a little doorway—where green and sky-blue trimmed all surfaces, and I spied a high old square building with smashed windows whose black and white arched windowsills signified an Ottoman Turkish design.
Finally, after a few pictures of an imposing Turkish mosque, and after enough creeping through the lanes between the low homes, I caught sight of one young lass with wild hair peeking at me from behind her green door. After much sorrowful pleading to a crowd of boys who’d wandered up to beg the girl in Somali if she would allow me to take a picture of her by the doorway, she conceeded, and the outcome was beautiful. On the slow walk back to the stoop, I met a thin Indian man named Yusuf from Kenya with a friendly frown and dehydrated features who took a minute out from his labors to tell me his story. He’d been in Somalia for years, having made his way farther and farther north over time, and was hoping to get to the Dubai promised land for work. I think he said he originally went to Mogadishu to find work, but obviously, the job market in the city declined after an immense civil war centered there.Met with Abderrahman, and after a walk to a bank where I changed fifty American dollars for thick stacks of Somaliland Shillings (an immensely valueless currency) that I had to carry in my backpack, he squeezed me into a minibus next to a sweet woman with bad teeth who spoke good English. A gave her some pencils and humble notebooks for her child, and distributed the rest to the kids in the minibus, who rolled the pencils in the tips of their tiny fingers in silent joy. Discomfort, and dry riverbeds passing through dark semi-desert bush, and sudden little mountains rising up out of the flat monotony, most of the way to Hargeisa. Passengers dismounted at each police checkpoint, and walked off to little metal shacks in the brush and nowhere dust.
In Hargeisa, Abdullahi, the nervous king among mere peons who took me under his unemployed wing just because I’d met his nephew in Ethiopia, picked me up at a roiling corner of earth and raw buildings, and we sat at a little booth by the main street, chewing khād with the fellas. A white guy appeared out of nowhere (the second one I’ve glimpsed in this country!), passed by quickly and only said, muffled, “Hi how are ya?” and, walking quickly, disappeared. Could be CIA, from what I’ve heard. Wish I had stopped him to ask what he was all about. Then an immigration officer in baseball cap and intimidating SUV stopped near us. He shouted earnest questions from the far side of his ride (it’s so silly: the Somalilanders’ cars still have the driver’s wheel on the right side, but they drive on the right side of the road too, creating an unusual arrangement of person-position vs. road). I asked him, after all his bossy prying, if he was police, he got defensive, and he said in the best English I had heard in this former British protectorate, that Somaliland “would be fucked” if anything were to happen to me. Understood.
Then, as the sun fell, all pink on the unpaved streets and the wild crisscross of power cables of the city, I wanted to walk around, into the thickly crowded side streets off of the main drag between the big square boring buildings, maybe buy some Somali music, actually SEE the rest of mad downtown Hargeisa. Abdullahi let me walk about three blocks, staying close by my side amid the crowds, his forceful under bite jutting further with tension, as I took pictures of a half-destroyed building shining
brightly among all the new constructions. But after I few raises of my lens to the old relic, he nearly exploded with nervousness and put us on a bus back home to his brother Nimcaan’s house in the colorful twilight. I glimpsed another old building half-destroyed by the attacks of Siad Barre, which stood with some grandeur, I played with played with the kids, Muhammed and Simatar and two other adorablelittle humans literally formed from a blend of sugar, spice, and everything nice, ate shoro (a soup mixture with some kind of oat or grain meal in it) on the bare floor of the kitchen with Nimcaan’s conservative and silent wife and the children, and slept in my bare, cold room.










January 7^th, 2010 (Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas/ganna)

Harar, Ethiopia—O woe is me! Why must I forever rise so early, when only ghosts wake?
4a.m. hit me in the face like a bear paw and I did my morning meditation routine like a soldier in the freezing dark. But as I pulled on my turtleneck sweater and tried to mosey out the courtyard door on my way to the church, round 5a.m., I found the metal door was still locked. Slept for 45 minutes till I could get Ramadan, the handsome 20 year-old grandchild of Umma with Micheal Jackson jerry curls, who seems to be the doorman of the house, to open it up.
Strode hastily up the hill from the muslim sūq (“market”) towards the beita krestian (“church”), a weak band of light gold and orange light on the horizon navy black horizon. I tiptoed up the miniscule steps, through the portal with a house cross glowering down, and entered the house of worship meekly, not knowing if my infidel presence would be accepted. But none of the devote women of pronounce cheekbones wrapped in bright white who prayed and incanted old verses in Gi’iz (a language related to Amharic, long dead, that is the official liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, akin to Latin and its status in the Catholic church) took heed. I sat on the steps of the circular church structure, taking pictures of older women in white linen cross themselves on the steps and prostrate, praying in clumps of people, before the big doors. Got some great shots of the cross with growing glow of dawn light behind it, and of some men praying in gold light with palms up, towards the divine. One old man in a white skull cap with a sacred book in his hands, beside a wise-looking tree. Snapped a shot of a serious high priest in white robe with red trim calmly consoling woman on the entrance steps who cried in bursting Amharic. Satisfied.
Back home. Could barely sleep anymore and sat around Umma’s den with Inās and Huda, who I’m coming to love and respect more and more. We sucked pomegranate seeds from the mushy peel, brushed the refuse into neat piles in the courtyard, and munched fried bread and sipped tea, and the simplicity was glorious. After, one of the servant women, also named Huda, cooked coffee beans on a roaster over coals and prepared us each several thick cups of Harari coffee, and I enjoyed the simple chatter in tongues I knew little of, and the silence, and slowly I headed out to the internet spot in the new city. I was greeted with a handshake and smile by well-breasted Nebila in sharp-looking skirt, still with her hair wrapped up in a loose scarf. On the way out, I tried to set up a post-work rendezvous with Nebila in Arabic, but I couldn’t tell whether she didn’t understand, or I was being too forward, but nothing happened. Showing spiritual progress, I let go of the matter. Spoke to Markovius, and he hinted that his dad might be interested in hooking me up with the State Department (not at all my cup of tea) and that there might be a place for me in his local agricultural organization he works with. Sweet.
After a lunch of rice and sauce from common plate with the family, I wandered Harar rapidly with Hamdi and Fahmi, buying a ma3wūs (a typical Somali wrapped skirt that many Somali nomad men wear) from a frustrated merchant who I batter bargained with in Arabic, and searching high and low for a Bible written in Gi’iz. I huffed and I puffed, but could find nothing below 700 birr (about $43), so I settled for a 200 birr Gi’iz scroll written on animal skin. I bought the thing from a cocky fat guy, with a room full of relics and trinkets in his home off of a degenerating brown alley, who lived half the year in Toronto. His goatee was immaculately shaped, and he left his shirt open, letting his belly the shape of a pregnant woman’s project, and he rubbed it thoughtfully. The guy called Hamdi’s accent “nigger accent” when Hamdi spoke in English. My, what a sign of sophistication, O Western friend. NOT. What a fool. The world will teach him.
Back up through the narrow sunset alleyways of the Old City with Fahmi and Hamdi, and I marveled at the Romanesque arches, all cracked and fading, of the palace that the Italians built for a former Sultan of Harar, to boost up regional regional sectarianism in Ethiopia that would help them divide and rule. Chilled a bit at home, meditated, and took pictures of the Amhara servant woman Huda frying dough balls on the steps. Met the boys and begrudgingly took them out to dinner at crowded Fresh Touch, the tacky/snazzy spot on the main ave in the new city of Harar, with waiters in vests, full of Ethiopians celebrating Ganna (Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas) by drinking a lot of booze.
We then walked over to Rowda’s house, for I wished to say goodbye. Fahmi called, knocked at her door, but she was not there. Hamdi said, “Maybe she go with her boyfriend.” What does he know? I was annoyed, but acknowledged that such inconsistency is the nature of such flash-in-the-pan travel romances.
Not an hour later, Ramadan, with his eternally sad eyes and rock star jerry curls, called me downstairs and said someone was waiting for me at the gate. Rowda sat simply upon the steps in full hijab. She’d been out with a girlfriend chewing chat, she said. Lots of interminably slow basic things about my leaving were said, we stroked each other’s fingers, kissed in the dark alley, and she made me understand that she’d write me letters in Amharic that I could have my Ethiopian friends translate. We parted softly.
Her gorgeous younger sister called later, put Rowda on, and she said she loved me. I thanked her, but didn’t feel bad for not replying in kind. We got a 48-hour history, girl. Watched some movie with Ramadan and Huda and Inās and a few hangers-on I didn’t know, all wrapped in sweatshirts and being deeply with one another in a way I’ve not see in a long time, they gave me a bracelet to remember them by, I packed my bags, and finally, sleep.


January 9^th, 2011 (The day of return)

Cairo, Egypt—Feeling a little saddened at the moment, and finding myself cursing in embarrassed anger with a silent tongue. I was just seated, quite peacefully and contentedly, in the warm, greyish مُصلّى (muŞalla, “prayer room”) in Cairo airport, meditating.

I am beginning to move deeper inwards, and then the voice of an uptight little man pierced my peace: “Excuse me? Excuse me? Excuuuse me?” He said it many times before I gave in, and opened my eyes. “Do you speak English?” “Yes.” “Where are you from?” “Uuuuh, America.” “Are you Muslim?” “No, but I respect Islam,” I said with hesitation, surprised. He had glasses, and a struggling little beard, and for some reason I think that he was not Egyptian. Maybe south Asia. “Well, this place is only for Muslims.” “O, well, uh, I see.” Struck with sadness and subtly shocked. I put my things back on, he returned to lie on the floor and stare up at the ceiling in pious glory, and I walked slowly out.

Not another soul in there seemed to mind my presence. They knew that I was looking for a moment of peace just like them. But not that man. H0w pitiful & little-minded he was. How sad. But, after all my curses, it's just hit me: no harm should or shall come to him! He must live, and learn to tolerate. So, I wish him peace, and understanding.






3:25p.m. – America.

The adventure begins anew.