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 100th. 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.
