Lunch Break

The air is hot and heavy at two in the afternoon. I’m in my three-hour lunch break and walking from home to one of the restaurants we frequent a few blocks away. Kiflu, one of our guards, stands up when I walk out of our gate. I put my hand out to gesture it’s okay, and turn it into a wave. He’s sitting with the guards from the neighbour compounds under the shade of a tree.

“How are you,” they all ask.

“How are you,” asks one of the regulars at the little shop around the corner as I walk by.

“Good, how are you,” I answer. I’m not quite sure who she is, but I see her often, and last night when I was buy cookies to break a larger bill for change, she was also at the shop, and made sure I got what I wanted, a package of Bourbon cookies, communicating with the girl (probably around eight) in the shop in Amharic.

The girl and her mother live inside the shop almost kiddie-corner to my compound. It’s a small metal booth about the four feet wide and six long. A barred window that has a metal flap to close it lets you peek inside at the wares on the shelves along the back wall. They’ve got all sorts of items. Tinned tuna, soap, the glucose biscuits I eat for my mid-morning snack. The woman who said hello was buying one stick of chewing gum in the shape of Juicy Fruit. She’s not very old, maybe in her late teens or early 20s, and speaks fairly good English. She looks familiar and I can’t decide if I recognize her from a restaurant in town where she maybe works or just from the shop. Another girl bought two small paper cones with some mysterious contents. I thought about asking what was in them, but changed my mind.

There’s a random herd of goats on the road too and no herder in sight. They look well fed and the teets of the female goats are heavy with milk even though I don’t see any kids in nearby. The women sitting against the wall on the left side of the street, on the same side as the shop, make a sound that sounds like drawing out the ‘st’ of start when the goats move closer to their little patch of shade. That sends the goats my direction leaving me to devise a strategy for getting past them. I’m not sure why, but goats make me a little uncomfortable, like they’re not to be trusted. Maybe it’s because they eat tin.

Further down the wide road is Peacock Hotel. It’s across from the stadium where we go running some evening under the fluorescent field lights. There’s a football field and a 400 m track. It’s home to Dire Dawa’s premier league team. On one side of the field are the covered bleachers; on the opposing are the uncovered bleachers. A seat under the shade costs 10 birr, and something like 50 cents for the worst seats on the other side.

I pass a man carrying a random selection of goods to sell; pink and green plastic flashlights, costume-gold watches, fly swatters, sunglasses, bangles or key chains or phone toggles. They are draped over his shoulders, arms and filling his hands. I wonder how often he makes a sale, and what people buy.

There are some men shooting pool under a pavilion at Peacock and I hear them saying, “you, you,” to me. I ignore them as I walk by. Sometimes I say, “you, you,” back when people say this, but mostly only to children whose usual response is laughter. Sometimes I say, “me, me,” but I’m not sure they understand.

I cross the main road going to Harar. The street I’ve been walking on is cobblestone until it meets the divided, paved artery. On the other side it turns into dirt, but I’ve never been down it. I take a left toward the restaurant and sigh internally when I recognize a mother and her kids sitting on the sidewalk a few meters from the gate to the restaurant compound.

The mother says “Emma”, and the children jump up, running towards me, saying, “Emma, Emma, Emma.” There are four or five of them, three grab onto my arms and I lift them from my sides, shrugging my shoulders. One of the boys says, “food,” miming bringing his hand to his mouth. I shake my head. They give up quickly and I don’t say, “beqa,” which means enough, like we do when the kids begging or selling chewing gum are too persistent.

Emma is one of my colleagues who used to live her. One of the first things she said when we went to this restaurant was, “don’t tell them your name.” This particular family is almost always perched right around the compound to the restaurant at lunchtime. I haven’t decided if it’s us farenji, foreigners, they’re there for, or everyone. Emma sometimes packs up of leftovers and gives them to the family after we’ve eaten. It seems like a kind gesture, but I have mixed feelings about the practice. The children look healthy and well fed, if a little dirty. Sometimes the mom is chewing tjat, a plant that’s grown all over this region and chewed for its stimulant effects. It’s considered an illegal drug in almost every country but Ethiopia, Great Britain and The Netherlands.

I sit at a table in the courtyard, under the shade of one of the trees. I’m unbelievably hot and can feel the sweat beading between my breasts. It’s days like this that make me wonder whether my mother’s loyalty to unpadded bras might be a result of living in Nigeria for nine years. Not that it does me much good; my undergarment wardrobe is hardly heat-friendly. For a minute my mind wonders whether my favourite online store would ship to Ethiopia. Then I wonder if I dare send them with the mail. My postal experience is limited to receiving one postcard.

The courtyard and restaurant are empty, except one table and it looks like they’ve already paid their bill. Had I come an hour earlier, it would have been packed with the lunch crowd. The waiter finally notices me, as I refuse to clap to get his attention, as is the practice here, and goes to get me a menu. I order a fruit punch without looking at it, it’s the reason I came here.

“One,” he asks.
“One,” I say. I’ve been known to eat two in one sitting, I suppose. Sometimes when we come here for lunch I have a fruit punch while the others have their mains, and then I have another when they have their dessert. The heat does something to the appetite and the sometimes the standard spaghetti and tomato sauce or omelette with no peppers I order at our two usual lunch places, just seems to be too much. The fruit punch comes in a glass bowl on a saucer with a lime and spoon lying on the side. The punch is a fruit salad with mango, papaya, banana, and a few other kinds of fruit. It’s a combination of sliced fruit and some that have the consistency of puree.

While I eat my fruit punch some of the waiters sit at a table on the porch and eat their lunch. They all seem to have changed from their black pants and white shirts to their regular clothes. Unusually I don’t have to ask for my bill, my waiter brings it to me after about 10 minutes.

“Sister,” he says as he hands it to me. I have a 10 birr note in my hand already, and he takes it immediately and returns with change, a 5 birr note — 38 cents or so for one of my favourite dishes. As I leave they start stacking the plastic lawn chairs from the courtyard table. I’m not sure if it’s because it might rain this afternoon, of if it’s a regular practice between their lunch and dinner rushes.

The family is gone when I come out of the gate. I suppose it’s not just farenji they’re after for the lunch rush, but they certainly are more aggressive to us. I cross the Harar road again and take the next street down from the one I came on. The office building is located between the two about four blocks down so I choose to walk back a different way than coming.

I don’t really have to turn to follow the dirt road towards the office as it’s diagonally from the restaurant gate. On the corner of the Harar road and the one I’m heading down is a group of people sitting and lying on a mat, tjat branches spread in front of them.

“I love you so much,” one of the men says to me as I disappear around the corner. I keep walking. Further down the street there’s a group of three boys talking to each other over a fence.

“How are you,” one of them asks as I walk past. I turn my head to look at them

“Fine,” I say. “How are you?”

They look surprised and answer, “Fine.” I smile.

The wide dirt road is speckled with small booths like the ones my neighbours live in and other small stalls that function as both shops and homes to many people. Lined against the walls of the compounds on either side of the street, they seek the shade of orange maringa and fuchsia jacaranda trees. They’re all tended by women, just like at my local.

I quite like the woman and her daughters that live in the one by my house. She’s a slight woman, always smiling. She’s rigged up an old piece of cloth along the side of her booth, using a few wooden posts and the corners of the booth. She has a little metal “stove” that’s the standard cooking appliance here. The design varies but usually there’s a depression on the top for coal. The few metal pans or kettle they use to cook the food are placed directly on top.

Under her tarp, our lady serves local men tjai (tea), buna (coffee), fool (a spicy dish made with lentils), and dinitsh (a dish made with peeled, boiled potatoes in cubes along with chopped fresh tomatoes, onions and spicy green peppers).

She has two daughters, I think; both go to school. Sometimes the younger one tends the shop with the mother sits on a stool on the side with her other daughters, doing what looks like a homework check. The youngest daughter who was tending the shop yesterday is quite good at English, and every time she makes change, she says, “the answer is” and then how ever much change I get, as she hands it me. Yesterday the answer was 42.

Further down dirt road, there’s a tall, thin Somali man wearing a ragged and dirty button-up shirt and the wrap-around “skirt” that men wear. It’s rolled up and I can see his skinny legs and knobby joints. He looks old with whitish hair and a weathered face. He stops and puts his hand out and says something in Somali. I shake my head and keep walking.

I turn the corner to the street our office building is on. It’s paved in the white, greyish, black-blue cobblestones that are a reminder of the Italian occupation under Mussolini. I also live on this street, one block up.

Our office is made up of two compounds. It was just one, but recently we took over the compound next door on the corner, because space was getting a little tight in the original four-floor house-come-office building. Gizaw, one of the office guards is standing outside. He takes his hat off and greets me as I walk through the golden doorway in the gate and into the compound, paved in reddish-stamped concrete tiles.

I’m back at work 2:25 pm, 35 minutes before we reconvene for office hours at 3 pm. Our two kitchen ladies at laying on the sections of green Harari sofa that are in the two office buildings, resting. The air is still hot and heavy, but the sky has turned from blue to grey. I turn on the lights and set the fan to four. I get a glass of water and sit at my desk.