Thanksgiving and the Great Ethiopian Run

Thanksgiving in Ethiopia

This year marked the first time I've celebrated a major holiday away from my friends and family. Sure, I've missed the 4th of July (2 times), Flag Day, and Veteran's Day, but none of these hold the significance of Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday. I like it so much for the following reasons: (1) no presents are exchanged, (2) there is no religious significance, (3) you can eat every kind of pie and cake available and have a solid, undeniable reason to do so. But this year, I was preparing myself not for the traditional Thanksgiving feast, but for a regular Ethiopian meal. Boy, was I wrong.

CHAI has about 30 employees working in Ethiopia, and these 30 employees have quite a few friends and family. All these people were invited to the CHAI house (where I first lived when I arrived, and where I now spend all day working) for a good old American meal. At our peak, we had about 50 or so people here, which felt very comforting, as our usual Thanksgiving is a pretty large family and friends affair.

The organizers purchased 3 turkeys for a very high price, and I was losing faith in our traditional meal when I found them to be kind of larger than normal chickens. However, they were turkeylicious, trytophane filled birds, and when paired with mashed potatoes, stuffing, and all the other fixings, the meal was quite satisfying. Even more satisfying was the rare taste of my favorite autumnal treat: pumpkin pie.

Here's a photo of me and Tim, who is the director for the Health Management Initiative in Ethiopia. I am literally saying cheese at the moment this photo was taken. Unfortunately, we don't have any photos that accurately capture the festive nature of the night.

The Great Ethiopian Run

What I failed to mention about Thanksgiving was that the day started with what would be my one and only piece of training for the 10k Great Ethiopian Run that took place on Sunday - a half walk, half jog for 20 minutes. I figured that this would be sufficient training for the largest road race in all of Africa (over 25,000 participants), especially in a city that's 9,000 feet above sea level and home to many of the greatest runners of all time.

Five of us (Kate, Adam, Peter, Rich, and Fekadu) got to the race feeling good - we were almost certain one of us would win, or, at the very least, place in the top 3 of our age groups. Among us, 3 of us ran about twice a month, and 2 ran about once a week. Needless to say, we were extremely well prepared. Here's a photo of us, pre-race, and a photo of the crowd. Or at least the part of the crowd that we could see; there were green shirts as far as you could see in every direction.

Despite my lack of training, I ran the entire 10k (except in the spots where the crowd was so thick that running was virtually impossible) and finished the race in just over 1 hour. I also ran the whole time not with my coworkers, but with a group of Ethiopian kids who decided to befriend me. It was a great day, and a great Ethiopian experience.

#2 backpost: Mtwara, Tanzania

The night spent back in Addis was uneventful yet profitable. We played 2 games of poker and I won both, giving me nearly US$80 to spend in Tanzania.

Here's a map of Tanzania. You can see Dar in the center of the country all the way to the east, and then Mtwara all the way in the southeastern corner. If you make the map a little bigger, you can also see Masasi, where I spent 1 night.

So early on the morning of October 27th, we took off for Dar es Salaam. We spent a day in Dar where we ran some errands and met a few people from the CHAI Tanzania office who we quickly became friends with. We spent that night and the next with our new friends, and then on the morning of the 29th we all took off (along with about 15 other CHAI employees or CHAI partners) to Mtwara, Tanzania. As I think I've written before, Mtwara is a small city in southern Tanzania, about 20km from the Mozambique border. It was developed in the 1940s (ish) by the British to be a great center of the groundnut (peanut) industry. The British built up the town and its infrastructure before finding out that groundnuts don't grow particularly well in the Mtwara soil, so the city is kind of large, but with not much going on. It's right on the Indian Ocean though, and the views are beautiful.




The purpose of our trip to Mtwara was twofold: first, to conduct assessments of the ART clinics throughout the region, and then to use those assessments to help the sites with their annual planning and budgeting. We set out for our sites in teams of about 5 people, but somehow I ended up in a car all alone with this kind of important guy in the Tanzanian HIV world. This turned out to be lucky, because we spent the whole ride to our district (Masasi) talking about how CSHOR could work throughout Tanzania. We also gave a presentation on our work during the planning and budgeting portion of the week, and it was well received.



The outcome of this whole thing was that there's a chance that once we complete our work with all of the clinics we're engaged with in Ethiopia, we might move our base of operations to Tanzania and see if we can work there.



On our 1 day off of work, a few of us went to this tiny town about 11km from Mtwara, where there was a beautiful hotel that was formerly a fort. Adam and I decided to check out the town, and he thought it would be fun to take one of the fishing boats (a dugout canoe) out for a spin. While we tried to negotiate a price, pretty much everyone in the town gathered around to watch. Eventually, this guy agreed to have us pay about $2 to take his boat out. I don't know if you've ever been in a dugout canoe, but they are not sturdy. While the whole town watched, I got in the boat. Then when Adam started to get in, the boat flipped over, much to the delight of the local kids. This happened twice before we finally got in a boat and took off. Unfortunately, the fun wore off after about 10 minutes, and we returned the boat. It was $2 well spent, and my first time swimming in the Indian Ocean.

Since then, we've been back in Addis working in 2 clinics here. We're planning on going a few hours south the week of the 27th to a town called Hosanna, and then there's a chance we might go to China in early December, but that's very TBD.

#1 backpost: Nekemte

I realized that I haven't really been keeping up with this, and my 3 loyal readers must be really upset. I'm going to catch us up to speed on the past couple of weeks, which were marked by week #1 in Nekemte, Ethiopia, and week #2 back in Mtwara, Tanzania.

We went to Nekemte to work in their hospital's HIV clinic, where CHAI already has 2 hopital management fellows and 2 clinical mentors. There are so many people there because the hospital is a total mess, far worse than any other clinic I've been in so far. Nekemte is about 300 km west of Addis, which equalled an 8 hour drive through lush valleys and farmland. I even took a photo! The yellow is meskal, which is a popular flower in Ethiopia, used for decoration and celebration.

So we did an analysis of the hospital's clinic and made some recommendations to them for how they could continue to enroll patients in the clinic without adding more staff. We're pretty much becoming full throttle consultants, which is okay, but I think in the next phase of our work we're going to take our findings from clinics around Ethiopia and work with the Ministry of Health to make broader changes throughout the country.

A non-work related highlight of the trip to Nekemte was talking with a lot of kids in town. Although it's the biggest city in western Ethiopia, Nekemte is pretty small. It has 2 main roads that intersect, and everything is pretty much within a 5 minute walk. The first night we were in town, we noticed a sign saying that there was bingo in the center of town at a park every night, so of course the next night, we were there right at 6pm to start playing. Unfortunately, the announcer announced the numbers at lightning speed and in Amharic, so we couldn't follow too well. Fortunately, there was a big group of teenage kids who was more than willing to help us play. We didn't win, but we found out that in Ethiopia people think that bingo is an acronym which stands for Best International Numbers Game Organization.

Later that night, we were walking home from dinner when 2 kids came up to us and engaged us in the standard Ethiopia kid/white foreigner chat, which went like this:

kid: Hello! How are you?

me: I'm fine, how are you?

kid: I am fine, what is your name?
me: My name is Kate, what's your name?

kid: My name is China.

me: No it's not, what's your real name?

kid: My name is China!

kid's friend: His name IS China.

me: Why is his name China?

kid's friend: Look at his face!

[I looked. He looked like a regular looking Ethiopian kid.]

Eventually, China told us he wanted some food, and we found him endearing, so we said we would buy him something from one of the sellers on the street. We found one, and China picked up a package of cookies, then put it down and told us that he actually wanted a real meal, not just cookies. Well, you can't deny that it's a better investment, so we bought him tibs, which is basically little chunks of meat eaten with injera, and we went on our way.

The next night, we ran into China again, and Adam decided that we should buy him some pants and shoes, since he was shoeless and wearing some big sweatpants cut at the knees and tied with a rope. We ended up buying him a whole outfit of pants, a t shirt, and a jacket, then some rubber shoes. We left Nekemte feeling like we helped one kid on a very micro level and started the process of improving the hospital's system of providing ART on a more macro level.

After returning to Addis for about 10 hours, we were off again for Tanzania.