Fear Constructed

Fear is a brutal force when faced with it far from familiarity. 

Airline food. 

I do not know what that pancake looking thing is. 

Is this meat? 

I believe all of this was made for martians. 

Where are my M & Ms? 

I wonder what is on this cream colored stained carpet?

Is there something in this bed? 

Hand sanitizer please. 

This bus is dusty. How do asthmatics possibly survive?

Water got in my feet. I can hear Jenny screaming in my head. 

Will that dog attack me?

What are those men saying to me?

Should I keep my line walking ahead towards them?

Where is your hand sanitizer? Can I use it?

My whiteness I can't hide. There is no blending in here. 

What are those women staring at? 

Why are these people surrounding us?

I have taken many things for granted. Everything really.

My heart is beating fast. There are many children and they are crowding in fast. 

Who keeps grabbing me?

Hundreds of handshakes and shoulder bumps. Hundreds. 

I am sinking in mud. 

This market is killing me Smalls.

Can I pour that hand sanitizer over my feet and set them on fire please?

Comet. Hm. Would that work? 

I am holding my breath in the hospital. Yet there is no yellow fever here. 

That kid just hugged me. For a long time. 

Best and fearful feelings arise.

I love that kid. 

Hand sanitizer please!!!

I am fighting a battle against reality. I'm good at fiction. 

My body is stronger than I give it credit for. 

How high up are we going?? 

Is that little stick fence down there supposed to catch me? My god. 

That cushion she is sitting in looks 150 years old. 

Her white robe is spotless though. 

There is something red on my forehead. 

The sharpness in my chest takes my breath away. 

I am in the way to the hospital by morning. 

What will I find? 

Does this hospital have The same conditions as the last one we toured?

Clean hallways greet me. 

The doctor is in familiar crisp white. 

My ease returns. Familiarity is the most soothing feeling I have had here yet. 

I feel the singe of burning tears well up in my eyes. 

Swallow hard and get on with it.

It is only fear. 

Fear imagined, fear constructed, fear consumed.

False Events Appearing Real.

Hand sanitizer as I leave? 

Who cares. 
I have my meds.  
That was faster than any American hospital I have ever been in.
So much for fear.

As usual, no matter where I am, I am and will be ok.

It is dirty here. And beautiful, hopeful, ambitious, and real. 

Ethiopia does not hide itself. 

It is alive. 

Ethiopia has broken me. 

Thank God. 

Saw A Few Things . . .

Families. Women and children walking hand in hand with husbands.

Plastic chairs and tables in a myriad of colors

Smiling, shrieking children waving with huge smiles. 

Others stare with narrowed eyes and unfriendly glares. 

Quite probably my imagination. Or not. I shall never know.

I see a boy hop on a donkey like a pro. Rodeo Ethiopia.

Hay cylinders with pointed tops 

Skinny stick piles tied neatly together 

Houses in all stages of the mud plaster process

Piles of cows lounging on the sides of roads with spacious fields behind them as far as they eye can see. 

Deep green vegetation and the darkest black soil tilled by yoked oxen. 

Yards with laundry, chickens, and goats, porches, fires, fences, and numerous buildings connected together.

Corn. Is that corn? 

Trees super spaced out among large boulders

Crowded town sidewalks with fruit stacked in neat pyramids. 

Bustling dirt and cement sidewalks. 

Storefronts lined up all selling the same things.

Where are the gas stations? 

Cemeteries?

Crazy traffic patterns and huge potholes.

Bright blue Lada taxis stuffed to the brim with humans on the way to a million destinations. 

Mosques with minarets pointing to Paradise. 

Fabrics and babies in slings

Waves of people an friendly smiles all around

Shoe shiners with yellow buckets that remind me of lemonade containers

Tin fences, gray, silver, black, blue, yellow, and green

Walkers remote and urban

Chatting colleagues fighting jet lag

Sun, rain, sun, rain

I saw a donkey who looked like he was mediataing under a tree

Colorful arches indicate schools or government offices

Umbrellas. Hundreds of them. 

Bars and coffee houses full of socialization, mostly men

Skinny jeans, suit coats, hats and sunglasses 

Hijab

Teens that remind me of my students and make me miss my friend Jill.

White prayer caps 

Ping pong and pool tables 

TV satellites on top of rusty and clean tin roofs

Electric lines on skinny poles

Crowded buses and vendors. Teen and child entrepreneurs selling technology accessories

I saw a SIM card entered into the back of my new Nokia phone. 

300 Birr no haggling. 

Banana leaves reaching straight up for the sky. Vince tells me they are the tallest grass species.

I saw a 25-30 year old foreign service communications director at the US Embassy. The guy in Kazakhstan looked and sounded the same. 

Policy, culture, economic development, education, modernization of technology are topics of discussion.

Granite, marble, clean glass and impeccably mowed lawns of the US Embassy. 

Jenny would feel quite warm and cozy here. 

The Japanese lost this embassy land when Ethiopia gave it to the USA.

Japan cooperated with the Italians. Ethiopia didn't like that much.

Ethiopian Unity through diversity.

Dirt piles in places that surprise me

Tall mountains dotted with houses and winding steep paths straight up up up up up

This 6 hour bus ride has turned into 10. 

A white dirty land roving jeep with huge wheels and a USAID sticker on the door.

The no machine gun sticker in the back window leads me to pause and wonder. 

I awake with a really sore neck and body. 
That pothole shook my bones really hard. 

It is pitch black outside. 

I wonder if animals are out there that will eat my face off. Probs.

We drive through cities with storefronts lit with flashing twinkle lights in purple, reds, and greens. 

Two people pass us on a motorbike. Where is that freaking town??? 

I am bangry, bus angry. 

The stars make the sky look absolutely massive. It takes my breath away.

Does the constant squeaking mean those shocks are gone on the front of this bus? 

I want to drive a motor bike. 

I am fairly certain we shall never arrive. 

I wonder what Gavin and Sean are doing and I question my job.  

I think of Billy gently running his hands through my hair on my comfy couch.  

I close my eyes overwhelmed.

Emperor Halie Selassie & The Derg

For those who are interested, I will write a bit in depth about things we learned from our days here.  If you want to view a lot of images, feel free to check them out on my Instagram:  Erin Towns

After a 13 hour flight we landed in the capital city of Addis Ababa.

We have a lot of luggage.  There are 18 people traveling with our group, many who will go on after the program is over to other areas of Ethiopia to tour and study.

It is damp here.  The first thing I smelled was rain and dirt as we walked out of the airport.  We were greeted by our new hosts with roses and handshakes and shoulder bumps which are the way people here say hello.

We headed to University College of Addis Ababa to hear about Ethiopian culture and the life of one of Ethiopia's best known leaders, Emperor Halie Selassie  We were first treated to a visit to the John F. Kennedy Library that is housed on campus.

Halie Selassie was the son of Ras Makonnen, and ruled from 1916-1974 and was believed to be a walking god in Ethiopia.  While he was very international in many ways, he was accused of many human rights violations.  In the early 1970s, Ethiopia was suffering a terrible famine which the government and landed aristocracy tried to keep very quiet resulting in the most terrible suffering for farmers and high death tolls from starvation.  To make things worse, farmers were taxed enormous amounts.

People started to rebel and people started dying.  This led to the rise of another leader, one who would be the subject of our next museum visit of the day.  The leader's name was Mengistu Haile Mariam, leader of the Derg regime that eventually became the The People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, from 1974-1991.

"As if I bore them all in one night, they slew them in a single night."

These words were spoken by the mother of four teenage children all killed on the same day by the Derg, as she officially opened the small but powerful Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum in 2010.   The rooms in the museum reveal the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie and the horrors of life under Mengistu's Derg regime.

The regime came to power promising democracy and equality for all under communist ideology and nationalization of land and economy.

Opposition to the reign of the Derg started when the Derg unleashed its "Red Terror" campaign against intellectuals and anyone who spoke out against them.

The tour was pretty intense at many points as stories and exhibitions detailed the brutal torture and execution that were part of this period of Ethiopian history.   Like many fellow Ethiopian citizens, the man giving the tour was a survivor of the Derg and told us repeatedly that it was incredibly important to never forget in order to never have something like it happen again.

He stated that he would like American teachers and students to teach and study this period of Ethiopian history in hopes that the lessons learned here could help other areas of the world to also avoid it.

Ya Know, I Just Got Back . . . Off To Ethiopia

Part of the gig on trying to implement more global education into the classroom involves traveling with students.  It forever changes them.  There is nothing more glorious than watching them explore new areas of the globe.  Teacher travel with students is full of a lot of fun, and involves an incredible amount of work and problem solving.  Our students just returned from a trip that took them by planes, trains, automobiles and ferries to France, England, Wales, and Ireland.  It was the best of times and the worst of times but at the end of it all, it was totally worth it.

 

So after a 5 day "rest," I find myself again traveling, this time for global professional development as part of a Fulbright Hays Curriculum Development Project in Ethiopia studying indigenous wisdom and culture with a team from the University of Pittsburgh.

 
Addis Ababa                                                            Sodo


Check out the project if you are interested:  Ethiopia:  Indigenous Wisdom & Culture

For my teaching peers, bookmark this map of Fulbright Hays Projects from this year.  It can provide information for projects and organizations that fund global professional development.  Fulbright-Hays programs provide grants to individuals to participate in cultural exchanges abroad.  Projects focus on curriculum development and research abroad.    Map:  IFLE Grantee Institutions

I am going to try my best to update this blog as much as possible during the trip.  My goal is to complete an ethnographic study that I can then use to design curriculum for Maine students.

Ethnography is a broad research approach/style.  It includes collecting data about culture and history using a variety of methods such as participatory observation, semi-structured interviews, and video diaries that will be combined to bring insight into Ethiopia.

Ethnography aims to get under the skin of human behavior, to better understand the world and the specifics of the cultures we live in.  I will bring back what I learn about values, attitudes and norms, motivations, and human behavior and share them with teachers and students in hopes of creating learning opportunities that examine the same in Maine, USA.

I am going to try to avoid giving you long winded discussion about what I think about this culture because frankly, it doesn't matter what I think.  What matters more is what you think about what are are seeing and what you learn.

So goodbye my friends.  We board in a few minutes from Washington DC to depart on our great adventure.

I am super tired, the jet lag I . . . . .

Who cares about jet lag really.  I can sleep when I am dead.