The Four Musketeers on safari, Ethiopia
For a fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, it is probably sacrilege to steal a chapter title from Tolkein, but I honestly couldn’t think of a more fitting header for this last post about my fellowship. Fans of the trilogy know that the Many Meetings chapter covers the part of the story just after the fellowship has endured an arduous, stressful, and sometimes dangerous several month journey and arrived in the safe haven of Rivendell, with much rejoicing as old friends and family reunite to tell stories of the events of the recent past while also partaking in formal councils and meetings to plan for the days ahead. For the characters in the book, it is a time to take a long rest to recover from the physical and emotional “bruises” endured along the trail, looking back on how far they have come and re-energizing before moving on with whatever lay ahead. As the calendar page flipped to February in Addis Ababa, for the first time in my five months in Ethiopia I could see the end of my assignment and my days of rest and joyful reunions in sight.
After spending several months working to help improve operations at the Carter Center in Ethiopia, my first focus as my fellowship’s end drew nearer was making sure to “finish with finesse” and properly wrap up my ongoing projects so that they would progress after my departure. To that end, my colleagues and I made final plans to enable the pilot of our Zithromax(R) dosing stickers, printed some research on inflation and exchange rates to aid in the office’s budget preparation, installed IT systems to help prevent viruses and enable file sharing, and printed the final MALTRA report to properly document our unprecedented achievements in the malaria and trachoma control programs. My boss and new lifelong friend, Dr. Teshome Gebre, took Lorena and me out to a wonderful dinner at The Showroom in Mexico Square and the office threw us a farewell celebration and unexpectedly gave both Lorena and me traditional cotton Ethiopian gowns, blankets, and tablecloths! It is strange how quickly an office can become like a home away from home, and it was certainly so with my experience at The Carter Center Ethiopia. I will truly miss working with the team there, who are perhaps the most talented, passionately dedicated people I have ever known.
My in-country assignment came to a close after the first week in February, and Lorena and I celebrated by welcoming our great friends TJ and Nuz to Addis for our planned vacation into the Rift Valley. Living in San Diego, we have become accustomed to entertaining visitors, but have never witnessed the shock on the faces of travelers like we did when our friends arrived in Addis! Quickly we realized that many of the things Lo and I had become accustomed to – open sewers, car-sized potholes, sheep/goats/donkeys/cows in the streets, begging children, 40-year-old cars and trucks, smog so thick you can’t see more than a mile – were as shocking to TJ and Nuz as they were to us when we first arrived. In a way, we had become “Habeshas” ourselves, moving through the streets and taking a “ho hum” attitude to sights to which we had once recoiled in surprise. After some quick tours of our neighborhood, some local food (kitfo, or raw spiced ground beef), and some shopping trips to Piassa, we were off on our safari into the Rift. Thankfully, our driver Bereket (from Duka Travel, great honest tour operators if you’re looking) was experienced and safe and never made us recoil in horror on the roads!
For three nights we returned to Awash Falls National Park in the Afar Region of the Rift Valley, enjoying the sights and sounds of the river’s waterfalls, the baboons and vervet monkeys that roamed the trees in the lodge, the five-meter crocodiles in the river below, as well as the many lesser kudu, gazelles, oryx, jackals, and uncountable birds we saw on our game drives. We hiked to the top of the Fantale Volcano, seeing smoke rise from its dormant dome as we stared down into its crater. The highlight of the Awash trip was our visit to the “hyena cave”, where these canines have taken up residence in a nook of the several mile volcanic crack in the earth running from Fantale crater to the lake and where, at nightfall, you can watch them emerge from their daytime dens and begin their nighttime hunt. On our trip, we saw chaos erupt when a hyena took aim at a passing herd of hundreds of sheep and goats, thwarted at the last moment by a shepherd and his loud shouts and the whacks of his cane.
Leaving Awash, we began the 11-hour drive to Arba Minch and the Netch Sar National Park. From our room at Swaynes Lodge, we could take a few short steps to stand on the cliff face marking the edge of the Rift Valley and look down over a large forested plain with the sediment filled Lake Abaya to our left and the clear, croc and hippo infested Lake Chamo on our right. Again, baboons frolicked everywhere we looked, whether wandering through the lodge or walking through the town itself. The trip to Arba Minch was highlighted by a morning game drive into Nech Sar (meaning white grass), braving unthinkable offroading to see the hundreds of Zebra and Greater Kudu. Later that day, we took a panga boat on Lake Chamo, passing several hippos lounging in the reeds to reach the famed “Crocodile Market”, a mud flat with hundreds of crocodiles and shore birds. Some of the crocs topped 20 feet, and the guides had no problem poking them with boat oars to create a photo opportunity for a large swirling splash!
Our final leg of the safari took us eight hours north to Bishangari Eco Lodge on the shores of Lake Langano, where we had drinks in a treehouse bar surrounding a massive ficas, drank $1,500/lb coffee, and shared good spirits and great food in toasting our last full night in Ethiopia. After returning to the city, we finished packing, gave away some last clothes and food to some local “friends” we had made on the streets during our six months (I gave away my hiking boots after four years of use on four continents, hoping that they, like the autos of Addis, will find many years of additional use!), and headed to dinner with our friends the Maxeys and new friends Bereket and Tedy (our taxi driver these many months). Boarding the van to go to the airport was surreal. We had waited so long for “our turn” to board that same van, watching uncountable adopting families leave our Guest House for home and feeling like our time would never come. Finally, mercifully, we were heading home.
Flash forward 24 hours and there we were, sitting in the living room of the home outside of Boston where I grew up. After six months in Africa, with the sounds of donkeys braying mixed with Amharic music outside our windows, it was beyond surreal to be watching HDTV in the relative quiet of our home. For the next few days, it seemed a never ending string of reunions and feasts with family and friends, mixing jet lag with excitement and the stomach pains of the “reverse adjustment” back to foods like turkey and brisket and ribs and chinese food and….well, you get the point!
The trip home was coordinated to allow me to attend the Carter Center’s annual trachoma review meeting in Atlanta, which was a smash success. I was heartened to meet several people from the Carter Center HQ who had read some of my IT proposals (Google Enterprise, digital surveys, etc.) and were considering pilot implementations as I had not realized they had been received so well. We heard about the great work so many countries are doing with trachoma control – in Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, Niger and more – as well as results from the latest research being conducted in academia and NGOs that will impact trachoma control strategies. For me, it was a privilege to be in attendance, and a great way to formally wrap up my fellowship at one of the world’s most outstanding organizations.
And then, finally, six months to the day from leaving San Diego, my flight touched down at Lindbergh Field. While we were greeted by cold rain, it didn’t dampen the mood of the many reunions with friends, family, and coworkers that took place over the following days. Whether having breakfast with family or barbecues with our friends, or even putting my boat (acquired while in Ethiopia) in the water, gradually it felt like we were returning to normal again. Well, I guess I’d have to say “the new normal”, because in a way, everything has changed. That’s the thing about returning home, about a place that is constant, is that it makes it obvious when you come back just how much you are changed by what you went through. An experience like the Global Health Fellows for some is life changing, and for others like me it is at the very least “life amplifying”, in that it may not fundamentally change who you are and what matters to you, but it will turn up the volume on those things and make you realize just how much these things give your life meaning. In that way, by what you saw and what you accomplished, you do come back a different person than when you left, a better person for what you went through. And, thanks to the work you did while you were gone, you’ve helped in some small way to make the lives of others better and more hopeful.
Thinking back on my six months in Ethiopia, I feel so lucky to have been afforded the opportunity to see what it is truly like to live in such an impoverished, yet burgeoning, city. It was undoubtedly the hardest thing I have ever done, testing me (and Lo) on a daily basis and doing its best to wear us down with its “death by a thousand cuts” repertoire of pollution and dysentery and poverty and lack of “fun” diversions that we’re accustomed to in the developed world. Despite all of these challenges, however, I got to know a city full of people who smiled despite their challenges, who find a reason to be optimistic about their future whether or not common sense tells them they should be. I saw a city on the grow, with construction in all directions, with exponential improvement in services like electricity and internet and a government with grand development plans to help its citizens move out of poverty once and for all. The future for Ethiopia truly is very bright, and thanks to the hard work of the Federal Ministry of Heatlth, the Carter Center, the Lions Club, Pfizer, ITI and many more, the people of Ethiopia will be able to see that future with their own eyes and help shape it for generations to come. To have played some small part in that story is one of the great experiences of my life.
In a way, I suppose that’s what being a Global Health Fellow is all about.
For now, the symptoms are gone and Addis Belly has not returned. Fingers crossed that it may remain so!
