Mekelle - the Tokyo of Ethiopia

Well, I didn’t post last week as I went to Mekelle for the weekend. Mekelle is a city about 400km north of Dessie. It is the prime minister’s home town so a lot of money has been spent on it and to my mind it looked more European than anywhere else in Ethiopia but then after six months here my judgement may be slightly warped, but they don’t allow farm animals in the city so that is probably what makes it feel more normal, even in Addis Ababa there are sheep and goats in the city centre. Mekelle also has palm trees lining the streets and footpaths!! It is no wonder that Ethiopians joke it is Tokyo!

We had a great weekend, I managed to get a lift in a four wheel drive that was going from here and for the small inconvenience of allowing the driver chat me up for the whole journey I got to sit in the front, worth it for the comfort though I had to enlist help shaking him off when we got to Mekelle. Also he allowed me to keep my window open which is unheard of in Ethiopia, I think it may be a criminal offence to open a window in a moving vehicle but every time he shut the window I stopped smiling so he allowed me to keep it open.

I left Dessie at 5:30am and was in Mekelle by 1:30pm, just in time for lunch. There I met with a whole load of other volunteers from Addis, Mekelle, Abi Adi and Dilla. Including Susan the other Irish volunteer, so we just had a great weekend taking it easy visiting the cafes by day and the pubs by night (they actually have pubs in Mekelle! and a night club!!!!!). It was a very relaxing weekend, but I was staying in a not very nice hotel but it was clean on the last night I moved to a seemingly nicer hotel, where I was attacked by cockroaches there were loads of them, I killed eight of them but they kept coming so I went and stayed with Susan. Susan came back to Dessie for a few days with me, so we headed to the bus station to get the bus, no one wanted to know when we said Dessie all they cared about was who was going to Addis Ababa. There were hoards of people queuing up and a man was beating them back from the gates with a stick, I asked another man was there a bus to Dessie, and he took us past the stick beating man and into the bus station, where another person put us on a bus for Dessie a good half an hour before they let the crowd in and good job because the crowd all ran and pushed onto the bus and it was full in two seconds, sometimes I don’t mind the preferential treatment. It isn’t like other African countries as Ethiopia wasn’t colonised so there is no anti-white feeling and they are just really nice to you because you are a guest, the sad thing is they always say “but if I were a guest in your country it would be the same” somehow I don’t think so.

Back in Dessie I finally bit the bullet and went to the doctor after a bit of an on going stomach complaint. The trip to the doctor was a memorable one but one I don’t think I will share with the world it was all embarrassing enough at the time without repeating it, but things are done very differently here and I was just very very glad it wasn’t the young doctor who I had to see. I think the doctor was afraid of misdiagnosing the foreigner so diagnosed many things and put me on a clatter of tablets, I have been asleep for practically three days and when awake feel slightly out of it, but the stomach problem has improved so should be right as rain again next week.

Due to all the sleeping I didn’t go to work too much this week, but people have been really good calling me to see if I am ok and offering to come visit etc. We got a delivery of new books this week and next week will have a meeting with the supervisors and a teaching resources preparation workshop so the second semester will be kicking off and hopefully we will be a little busier in work.

This week Susan was here and one day we were discussing how if Irish people meet each other abroad you generally say hello etc and how other nationalities don’t seem to do this, that night coincidently we met a man in the local shop who was travelling around Ethiopia and he was from Killarney. I think he was as shocked as we were to meet someone from home but we had a good chat, it was very surreal.