Washing Addis off my face

After my first day at the office I ventured out to my standard supermarket. This was mostly by mistake. Having been picked up and dropped off at the office and driven around town later, I had a vague idea of where my guesthouse was, but not a hundred per cent certainty of exactly which back road/alley to turn on. The office isn’t more than 10 minutes on foot and that’s a conservative estimate and from the main road, Bole (or Africa Ave) Road, it’s easy to find both the office and the guesthouse, but on the back roads, it’s a completely different story.

This means that I’ve been walking up and down one of the most heavily trafficked roads in the city. Overrun with the blue and white taxis and minibuses from various decades and in various states of repair, Bole also plays host to a dizzying number of private vehicles, heavy trucks and the odd container trailer pushed by some young Ethiopian collecting the glass bottles from carbonated drinks for recycling. As the major artery heading out to the international airport by the same name, Bole sees its fair share of traffic. Aside from the boys running along with their glass bottle collection, the rest of the traffic emits a smoke and exhaust in an array of shades between white and black. Cars, on their own in Ethiopia (and dare I generalize in Africa) are an entirely different story, to which I'll return at a later date.

Intermittently a vehicle in serious disrepair sputters by leaving in its wake a cloud of heavy black exhaust, hanging heavily in the mountain air. Other zoom past, spewing fumes in their wake. However unpleasant, I hadn’t given the exhaust that much thought, aside from seeing it as an occasional nuisance being caught behind a offensive vehicle. Then I washed my face at night as part of my usual bedtime routine: a glob of cleaning milk massaged into my face removed with a damp cotton pad or two. That night the first two turned black, and I hadn’t even taken off my mascara. I went for a round two of cleaning milk and two more cotton pads to get it all off.

Now, when I wash away the remnants of the busy city I take mental notes, comparing the soot from one day to the one before; measuring my whereabouts by the exhaust on my face.

I was originally scheduled to catch the morning flight to Dire Dawa tomorrow morning, instead I’ll be staying in the city the whole weekend and flying out to Jijiga in the Somali region for a value chain assessment workshop for two of our development projects. Considerably smaller that Addis, I already wonder what tales my daily routine will tell at the end of the day.

It’s heading into the weekend here, which means no internet, so I’ll leave you with a few things to look at until I next find an internet connection.