24 Hours in Ethiopia

Due to Kenya's rather imaginative immigration laws, I found myself either having to leave the country at very short notice, or, in the words of the giggling Immigration Official I spoke to, "we will have to arrest you". It wasn't a very difficult decision to make. In fact, I found out, because of the regional integration process - the same one I've spent the last 9 months working on - it wasn't sufficient just to leave Kenya, but I actually had to leave East Africa. The irony was not lost on me.

So, a couple of days later I boarded an Ethiopian Airlines flight to Addis Ababa, added another stamp to my passport, and checked into a hotel, recommended by a friend as "nice, cheap, couple of 'roaches but small ones".

At first glance, Addis is much like any other major African city: big and sprawling, dirty and polluted, but with plenty of activity - minibus taxis, streetkids, hawkers (although the Ethiopian hawkers didn't quite seem to share the entrepreneurial sensibilities of their Kenyan counterparts, generally offering to shine my hiking boots, sell me books written in Amharic, or fake DVDs of Twilight. Neither strategy really working).

At second glance, however, well, I was only there for a day so I don't know. There's more noticeable poverty than in Nairobi, but it feels safer. I asked the receptionist at the hotel if it was safe to walk around at night, and she replied in bewilderment "Yes... we are a very peaceful people". There are also more diverse influences than in Nairobi, with clear aspects of Arabic, Asian and American culture:

This coffeeshop resembled a certain other multinational chain, down to every last detail - the logo, the staff uniforms and decor. The only difference being that Kaldi's serve really excellent coffee.

In fact, I think I had better coffee in these 24 hours than I can remember. There are a couple of places in Nairobi that  do an acceptable macchiato, but they're a little thin on the ground. The difference, I think, is that Kenyans don't really drink coffee. (What they do drink is 'Kenyan tea' - boiled milk which at some point in the distant past had a fleeting encounter with a tea-bag, It's an acquired taste). If you're offered coffee at a meeting, you'll get Nescafé, which seems a bit perverse for a country that grows great coffee beans. In Addis, on the other hand, you can't walk 100 metres without passing a coffeeshop with a bunch of old Ethiopian guys sitting, smoking and chatting outside. They also serve this great juice:

Layers of fruit juice and pulp - avocado, orange, mango, berries... which you have to eat with a spoon. Yum.

The highlight was probably dinner on Saturday evening - I wandered down to Habesha, the 'cultural Ethiopian' restaurant. We eat Ethiopian food quite regularly in Nairobi, but this time dinner came with added bonus of t'entertainment. It started with 4 very bored-looking musicians sitting on a stage, the main diversion being differentiating between when they were tuning up and when they were actually playing. But the next couple of hours saw a stream of singers, drummers and dancers who appeared to be suffering from some kind of synchronised epileptic fit. It was all very impressive, although you couldn't help but worry about someone breaking their neck.

24 hours later, I'm back in Nairobi, with an updated stamp in my passport, so hopefully this time they'll let me stay!

Police and Thieves in the Street

Having had breakfast with the Prime Minister last week, this week was dinner with the President. I do move in high circles. The next day, we were 'allowed' to leave at 4pm because of the work function the night before. I headed out around 4.20 to see a bunch of people running down the street and yelling, clearly upset about something. Asking the guard what was going on, he told me it was the hawkers, they were being dispersed by the police. Our office is basically on a dividing line in the city, between the part it's ok to walk in, and the part where it's really not ok. The hawkers had been chased from the cheaper, bustling, slightly more dangerous area into ours.

I shrugged and walked towards my car. At this point, the hawkers came running back up the street towards us, shouting and throwing stones and bottles, presumably towards the police but we couldn't really see them. Suddenly, a series of shots rang out to our left (I later found out they were from plain-clothes police), and everybody RAN. I think one of the golden rules of living in Africa is if everybody around you starts screaming and running in one direction, you scream and run in that direction too. So we all dived back into the building, a few more shots were fired, and eventually it all quieted down and people started to wander off. I got back in my car and drove home, telling anybody who'd listen that I'd just been 'shot at'.

The police in Kenya terrify me. They have a very rigid 'shoot first and ask questions later' policy, have basically no oversight and their only roles seem to be shooting people and extracting bribes, which they multitask with impressive dexterity. Every day, in the newspaper, there will be a story of someone shot by police "on suspicion of robbery", or a gang shot in the back as they ran away. A few weeks ago, there was a story about some policemen who were alerted to two men vandalising a telecoms tower in the middle of the night. The police arrived at the tower, saw the vandals and shot them both. A man came running over to them shouting; he was pushed down to the ground at gunpoint until he managed to inform the police that the two 'vandals' they had just killed were in fact engineers from the telecoms company fixing the tower. Oops.

They're also a pain driving round at night. I'm frequently stopped at police roadblocks while they look for any excuse to make a fuss and try to get some cash. At a recent work seminar we were informed that there are now only 5 'permanent' roadblocks left in Nairobi. The rest are impromptu. They just seem to be impromptu in the same place every day. Which means that every time I go out I have to plan my journey around where I know the roadblocks are in order to avoid them.

The roadblocks aren't just a nuisance, they also have a serious impact on the country's development. Apparently, it's quicker to ship a container from Singapore to the port of Mombasa than it is to transport the same container from Mombasa to Nairobi. The number of roadblocks is consistently cited as a main barrier to trade and growth in the region. I'll raise it with the President the next time we have dinner.

I would also appreciate it if they could stop shooting at me.