Converstions with an Ethiopian Living in Seattle

Today, I was lucky enough to meet a relative of my friend Belay.  Abera was pre-introduced to me by Belay over a lunch meeting concerning a reading program I will be doing at his school this year.

“You’re from Washington State, right?” he asked, sipping his Mirinda when all work talk was finished.

“Yes,” I said, then quickly added, “Not to be confused with Washington DC.  They’re on opposite sides of the country.”

Belay, who’s quick on the uptake and highly educated, smiled. “Of course,” he said. “What city?”

“Seattle,” I replied.

He smirked in that smug way a student does when he gets the right answer. “I knew it,” he said, and proceeded to tell me about his brother Abera, who was really his mother’s brother, but they were close enough in age that their relationship was more that of brothers than uncle and nephew.  Ethiopians have a habit of calling almost anyone in their family brother or sister, regardless of the actual blood relation.

Abera happened to be visiting Hossana from, of all places, Seattle, where he has made his home just off of Aurora for the last five years.  I met with him briefly yesterday, when he joined Belay for dinner and I headed home.  But I sat down and had lunch with both of them today, a lunch that lasted four hours full of fascinating conversation.

It was strange speaking to an Ethiopian about Seattle neighborhoods.  He asked where I lived, and I said Green Lake, and tentatively asked, “Do you know it?” His response was to laugh and tell me about his place just off of Aurora.  Of course he knew Green Lake.  He lived there.  So I got more specific.  “Off Phiney Ridge.  That’s where.” He nodded.  He knew exactly the neighborhood.

Belay asked if there was anywhere in Seattle to get Ethiopian food.  I began talking about Habesha restaurant which was, as I described it, “Down town near the pink elephant, I forget which street.”

But Abera was on the ball. “It’s on Olive,” he told me, and I smiled, impressed he knew downtown better than I did.  But then he added, “But it’s closed now.  Gambling problem.”

“Oh no!” I said. “Where will I go for Ethiopian now?”

“There is a place,” he explained, “Lucy’s Restaurant.  On Aurora and 100^th.  It is the best.  I invite you when you come home, and we will go.”  Because despite living in America for five years, Abera was still one hundred percent Ethiopian and proud, and he spoke like it, too.

“Did you know,” Abera told me seriously, “that there are fifty-four thousand Ethiopians living in Seattle?”

“I knew there was a large community, but I didn’t know it was that large,” I confessed. “How do you know that number?”

“There’s a community center of Rainier Avenue,” he told me. “They keep track of the population.  It is growing.”

So I decided to ask Abera something that has been plaguing me ever since I realized that there are some pleasures in Ethiopia that I’d have to give up when I moved back home.  I prefaced the question by explaining that it was very serious, and I was very concerned about it, and I hoped that he, as an Ethiopian who knew Seattle well, could answer it for me.  So his face grew very serious and he nodded, ready to take on this responsibility of finding an answer to my question.

“So here it goes,” I said, holding my breath. “Is it possible to get shakala tibs anywhere in Seattle?”

Shakala tibs, for those not familiar with Ethiopian cuisine, is a meat dish that is served on a small, coal-burning stove with the meat still cooking and mixed with peppers, onions and spices.  The only equivalent I can help you think of is steak fajitas, but at the same time it’s completely different but just as delicious.

He burst out laughing. “This is your question?”

“Yes!  It’s very serious, I love shakala tibs and I don’t think Habesha had it on the menu!”

Still laughing, he nodded. “There is a place.  Best place in all of Seattle.  I will show you.  I invite you.”

I breathed a huge sigh of relief.  Shakala tibs was the one thing I was going to have a hard time giving up.  To hear that it was available in my home town reassured me greatly.  So I asked him if a few other things were available.

“Can you get k’olo?”

“Yes.”

“How about shiro?”

“Yes, but shiro and berberi are both expensive in Seattle.”

“Berberi?!  I can get berberi?”

“Of course!”

He stopped my questioning by telling me that practically anything that I could get in Ethiopia, I could find in Seattle.  Every time I used an Amharic word, he laughed, loving every minute of it.  He loved that he had found a white woman from Seattle who knew enough about his country and culture that she could use its words correctly and name cultural practices like they were her own.

“In Ethiopian culture, it is common to feed your friend,” Abera explained, in the tones I’m sure he used when he was trying to explain it to local Seattleites.  “We take some food, and we put it in our friend’s mouth to show that we care and we love each other.”

“Of course,” I said, as he wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know.  “I get gorsha’d all the time.”

“Gorsha!” he repeated, his eyes and smile wide.  “Gorsha, she knows gorsha!” he told Belay, as if Belay should be surprised as well.

“She lives here,” Belay reminded him, an amused look on his face. “She knows everything about Ethiopian culture.”

“She does,” Abera agreed approvingly.

I think he was as surprised and interested to meet me as I was to meet him.  It was strange and reassuring to speak with an Ethiopian who is not only familiar with American culture, but also my home town.  Our conversation revolved around cultural differences, and despite having lived there for five years, there were some things about American and Seattle culture he didn’t understand.

“When you smile in Ethiopia,” he explained, “it means that it is OK to talk and be friendly.  But people, they smile all the time in America and when I try and talk to them the smile goes away and they are unfriendly.  Why is this?”

I laughed because I knew the exact attitude that he was talking about, the American polite-but-not-too-friendly approach to everyday interactions with strangers.  This segued nicely into a conversation about the infamous Seattle Freeze, and once I described the phenomenon to him, his jaw dropped.

“Yes!” he cried. “Yes, I see this all the time!”

“It’s not just you,” I assured him. “It’s confusing for other Americans, too.  We like sending mixed messages.”

We talked about the concept of “personal space,” and how deeply Americans love theirs, whereas the concept is nonexistent in Ethiopia.  We talked about how Ethiopia is a collective culture, all about the group, and everyone is family, and we share everything – whereas America is an individualistic culture, and you earn what you have, and you win or lose on your own merit.  We talked about the pros and cons of each.  We talked about how America is over polite – saying “excuse me” and “sorry, sorry!” for simply touching someone on the bus, whereas Ethiopia is not polite at all.  They seemed to like my metaphor of America being too much sugar in coffee, whereas Ethiopia had none.

“Which is better, do you think?” Abera asked.

“Well, I don’t think either is better,” I said.

“I think they are examples of two extremes,” Belay said wisely.  “I think it’s better to be in the middle.”

“What he said,” I said.

We talked about how the West could do well to learn a little bit from Non-Western cultures as much as if not more so than the other way around.  We talked about Westernization in general, Malala and her message of education, education as universal value versus a Western value.  We talked about American churches and Ethiopian churches, and their differences and similarities.  We talked about poverty, and the definition of poverty, both in an Ethiopian context and an American context.

“You know those homeless people on the side of the road?” I asked Abera, who just rocked his head back and forth in a deep nod.

“Homeless, what does this mean, homeless?” Belay asked.

“It is someone who does not have a house to live in, so they sleep outside,” I explained. “Many are also very poor.  People like to tell them to get a job, but they don’t understand how difficult that is if you have no phone or address.  A bit like the beggars on the streets, here in Hossana.”

Belay looked shocked. “But this is not common in America, surely.  It is a rare thing, yes?”

“Actually, it’s more common than Americans like to admit,” I said, looking to Abera for confirmation who continued his deep nod of understanding.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Very common.”

“This sounds to me like the government should take care of these people,” Belay said.

I smiled.  Out of the mouths of non-Americans… “Well, there are homeless shelters and soup kitchens.  Buildings that the government sets up to give somewhere for the homeless to sleep and get some food.  But shelters get crowded.  Soup runs out.  Some volunteers and good people do other things to help.  Most pretend that they don’t exist.”

I very quickly discovered that one reason Abera was so good at naming all the streets in Seattle was because he was part of the popular town car and taxi industry.  He had two town cars as well as a cab that he drove all over the city to make the big bucks.  So he shared with me some insight not just what it was like to be Ethiopian in the strange American culture, but also what it was like to be a cab driver.

“In Ethiopia, we like to talk,” he said, “and taxi drivers, many of us like to talk, too.  But the customers, sometimes they don’t like to talk.  So you have to be careful.  Sometimes if you ask one question, they get angry.  ‘Why are you asking me?’ they say. ‘This is not your job, you just drive me where I want to go!’  ‘OK!’ I say.  I do not mean to upset them.”

And then, the conversation took a turn.

“Do you see drunk people, here in Hossana?”

“Yes,” I said, a little uneasily. “They come out at night.”

“Of course!  Only at night,” he said with a laugh. “What do you think of them?  What do you do?”

“I don’t go out at night, for one.”

He laughed again. “Which is worse, drunk people in America, or drunk people in Ethiopia?”

“Um…” I began, not sure where he was going with this.

He saved me from having to answer.  “As a taxi driver, Friday and Saturday nights are the craziest.  I see a lot of drunk people at night.  There are many kinds.  There is the drunk who falls asleep in the back seat.  There is the drunk who will not give me the address because he ‘knows where he is going,’ and wants to direct me even though he barely knows where he is.  There is even the ones who throw up in my car.  But even these are not so bad as others.”

He proceeded to tell me about something that I knew happened once in a while to cab drivers, but I had no idea was so common.  He talked about drunks, and even sober people who were just jerks and belligerent, who would refuse to pay because they claimed not to have any money.  He explained how dispatch always advises them not to escalate the situation.  If someone doesn’t want to pay, let them go, because you never know what could happen if you push the issue.  He told me a story about his friend, who drove one fare home.  The guy got out of the cab, pulled a gun, and held it to the driver’s throat before saying that he didn’t have any money to pay him and to just be cool with it.  The driver obviously let it go, said it was no problem.

“Why?!” Abera asked me, as if I had the answer. “If you can’t pay, fine, say that, we won’t do anything, you do not need to bring the gun out first!”

He talked about his own fare, a well-dressed middle-aged sober individual who seemed respectable and mild mannered enough.  When he dropped the fare off at his apartment, the man said that his money was upstairs and that he would be two minutes, and to trust him, he’d be right back.  He showed Abera his wallet to prove he had no money.  And so Abera let him go, even though he knew he wasn’t coming back.  And he waited.  Five minutes.  Ten minutes.  Fifteen.  Finally, he called his dispatch and asked for advice, and was told what they always say.  “Sixty dollars isn’t worth it.  You don’t know what he’s capable of.  Just go get a new fare.”

“You should have taken his wallet,” I said. “Make sure he comes back.  We call that collateral.”

“I should have,” Abera agreed. “Maybe next time.”

“If that happens to me, I always leave something behind, so they know I must come back,” I explained.  I told him about how one time I realized I’d forgotten my wallet at home after eating at a café.  I handed the waitress my phone and insisted I’d be back to claim it.

“And hey, if I was lying and never came back,” I said, “she could have always sold my phone instead.”

Abera’s tales nurtured in me a newfound sympathy for cab drivers and all the stuff that they have to go through.  I didn’t realize that people who refused to pay were, more often than not, just let off the hook with a free ride.  It made me want to ask my next cab driver if he’d been stiffed for a fare that day, and if he had, to cover whatever the charges were on behalf of my fellow (yet horrible) human beings.

A lot of cab drivers need that money probably more than you do.  If you call for a cab, you’re asking for a service that’s not free.  Please don’t take advantage of cab drivers.  They have a dangerous job, and they earned their pay, so give it to them and respect them.  I won’t even say anything about tipping, just give them what is owed.

Like most in the business, Abera doesn’t want to be a cab driver his whole life.  He’s working on gaining his citizenship, and wants to eventually enroll at the University of Washington to change his career path.  He has two bachelors from the University of Addis Ababa, but that’s pretty much meaningless in the States, so he wants one from my alma mater.

“Is a good school,” he said, when I told him I was a graduate.  “I hope I can go there one day.”

Abera offered to help me reintegrate back into American society when I go home in a year.  He promised to introduce me to his friends and the Ethiopian community there with which he is involved.  He told me he would show me the very best places in town to get Ethiopian food, and that we can definitely get some shakala tibs.

It was refreshing to meet an Ethiopian who got what life was like in the United States.  One who had lived there long enough to understand that it wasn’t all sunshine and roses, who can appreciate both the good and bad things about it, but also keep his unique national identity.  I have lived in Hossana for a year, and yet I have met no one prouder to be Ethiopian than Abera.  He said he liked to brag about it when he talked about Ethiopia to Americans.  How ancient his country is, how historical, how diverse and beautiful.  I told him that he should be proud, and I was glad he appreciated it so much.  “There is no other country like Ethiopia,” he told me, and I agreed wholeheartedly.  His pride stirred my pride, too.  I’m proud of Ethiopia, I’m proud to live here and call it home for a part of my life.  I felt as blessed to meet someone who knew both cultures so well, and I’m pretty sure he felt the same about me.

After all, it’s not often that he gets to talk to a white American girl in Amharic.  And it’s not often I get to talk to an Ethiopian about the Seattle Freeze.