aqumada

 

            The last couple of months redefined “hectic” for me as I traveled across the country interviewing for a job (residency). Stretching my limited funds meant willingness to take flights with one or more connections before reaching the final destination and that, of course, gave me plenty of time to ponder what has really happened to the good old days of nepotism when a cushy job never used to be more than a phone call away. Deep inside, I know nepotism is still intact and ongoing but my old man never developed a taste for kissing EPRDF’s ass and soon after they took power he joined the ranks of the unemployed while dear old mom decided to retire from the U.N. exactly when I started looking for a job. I am, therefore, shit-out-of-luck. In all fairness, I have to admit the EPRDF never really offered my old man the opportunity to kiss ass.

            So, here I am, instead of being shuttled through the bureaucratic system to be appointed a position I don’t deserve in the health ministry office of Ethiopia, I find myself languishing in airports making notes about some memorable moments from my residency interview circuit.

            The file I named “unforgettable” on my laptop received its initial entry while I was on the way to my very first interview. Tight fisted and pinching every penny, I unwillingly shelled out $40 for a Greyhound bus ticket where I was introduced to the newest trend in customer service. As our bus left the port authority terminal in NY this is how our driver announced part of the passenger etiquette “…. and, in the interest of other passengers on board please refrain from speaking too loud. If you have cell phones, make sure the setting is on “silent” or “vibrate”. If your phone doesn’t have a “silent” or a “vibrate” mode it means both you and your cell phone are cheap.” During my extended stint in the service industry, I never believed the tired catchphrase ‘the customer is always right’ to be absolutely true and on that point, the driver and I were seeing eye to eye. Somewhere in Delaware, way short of the intended destination – Virginia, the driver pulled over on the side of the highway, told us he was sick and left by ambulance. As gracious as these drivers are, he wished us good luck before he went into the ambulance and said he hoped the new driver, coming from NY, will get to us promptly. Prompt, it was not. Who cares though? I was operating on abesha time anyway and my interview did not start until the next morning.

            Despite well preparedness, interviews can be tricky. Some questions are meant to stump you while others are carefully selected to reflect one’s personality. I was no stranger to questions of this sort although it had been a while; a while being about 5 years when I was interviewing for medical school. True to my nature, I never took those weird questions seriously and answered them as such. Once, in the middle of explaining why I was pursuing the health care profession, the interviewer asked

 

 

Answers like these are either a hit or a miss and the burden of carrying the risk falls solely on the interviewee. In that particular instance it must have turned out to be a hit because I got accepted to the school. Even when I tried to answer every question with the seriousness it deserved, one of my many personalities takes over as if it wants to get me in trouble. When interviewing at a school in the mid-west, the lady interrupted me in mid-sentence and asked “What would you do if you started earning $800,000 per year?” Giving her a puzzled look I replied “Damn! Is that all you pay?”

            Five years later after those days of interviewing for med school, there is a sense of nostalgia as I find myself once again doing the same song and dance with the minor exception of interviewing this time for a paying position. And so, on my first interview, I was sailing smoothly until I came across the 4^th person to interview me, who also happened to be the chairman of the program. It was probably going to be his last question of an interview, I had assumed, had gone well until he asked if I was raised in Ethiopia.

 

 

Trying not to squander this opportunity to shine, I took a deep breath and said

 

“It would be too hard to make any sort of inference about how individual Americans are perceived by a population but as a collective mass, Americans to us represent American foreign policies and the reactions and anti-American sentiments you see are really reflections of what people feel about the foreign policies. Most of us feel America has become a nation that has replaced diplomacy with hegemony to drive its foreign policies.”  

 

 To shut the hell up when I have said enough is an art I haven’t yet mastered so I kept going

 

 

I didn’t get a chance to finish my train of thought before I heard

 

 

I took a couple of deep breaths and started thinking how I could backpedal out of the trap I had gotten myself into. There was no way out! Please, allow me to paint the picture much more clearly. Here is an immigrant who claims to be an intellectual negro who goes to a blood-red Republican state in search of a job and gets the audacity to badmouth American foreign policy but also questions (more like denounces) the holiness of the actions taken against the Vietcong to the most unbiased person: a Vietnam veteran who has become chairman of the department at the particular institution to which I am applying for a residency. BACKPEDALING!?!? No, there wasn’t going to be any backpedaling out of this one except for the backpedaling back to NY.

            As I leaned back on my seat in the Greyhound bus thinking about “Murphy’s Law”, the driver started the passenger etiquette announcement “…those of you sitting in the rear of the bus please sit back, relax, take your shoes off and enjoy the ride. Those of you sitting upfront, please sit back, relax and keep your shoes on, so I can enjoy the ride.”  Oh, how good it feels to be in a familiar territory again!

Overheardinnewyork is a site where people post what they overheard in New York City. What a brilliant idea! There are great one-liners as well as some funny conversations. Here are some examples…

 

 

Puerto Rico chick: He likes that—what do you call it? That the black people make...that "tooka tooka tooka"...?

 

--South Bronx

 

 

 

 

 

Columbia student #1: Would you like a free cookie from the Columbia anti-Socialist club?  

Columbia student #2: Shouldn't that be "earn a  cookie"?

 

 

I know that Ethiopians can be extremely funny. Let us start sharing the funny stuff we overheard/encountered. It could be stories or one-liners. If your story is in Amharic, feel free to write using Latin alphabets…we will try to convert the texts into Ge-ez and post them back up.

 

I will start:

Indianapolis

BBC Focus on Africa magazine featured an article about Ethiopian (and other African) bloggers that was written by Meskel Square’s Andrew Heavens. Andrew attributes the growth in the number of African bloggers to the spread of the internet infrastructure and the recent upheaval in the Ethiopian political scene.

 

Andrew writes:

 

Another reason why I believe that we are noticing an explosion in the blog scene is due to the informal nature of blogs. Deadlines, fixed formats, high cost of publishing and nuances of maintaining websites etc would have discouraged many bloggers from sharing their thoughts and experiences.

 

The number of Ethiopian related blog sites, as Anderew pointed out, has been growing at a healthy rate. Thanks to such a medium, we have the privilege of reading the knowledgeable political analysis of Ethiopundit, the extremely funny writings and opinions of Wonqette, a variety of wonderful articles and pictures of Andrew, the instigative articles on Ethiopian women by our own Wegesha etc. I hope many more articulate Ethiopian and friends of Ethiopia get on the band wagon and share their invaluable experiences with us. I also hope to see more Ethiopian bloggers from the mother land start blogging (if interested, please email us at yekolotemari AT gmail DOT com).

 

P.S.

We have not heard from tsegasaurus of Satisfy My Soul [EGO] in a while. If you are reading, even MJ had come back from retirement.

Comedian Kibebew Geda’s recent release, Wardya, has some of the funniest Ethiopian comedy skits I have ever seen. Kibebew, who is a household name in Ethiopia, has the uncanny ability to transform himself into the characters he portrays. His attention to detail makes the characters extremely believable. At times, the characters he portrays left me with the feeling that I had run into someone from my past. The way the characters wipe their faces, carry their stick, drink their  "Tela" etc make you realize that such nuances are as important as the accent or the clothing in the making of a character. Not only these skits are funny but they have, what I believe to be, intentionally constructed political and social messages.

 

In Wardya, Kibebew plays such characters as a Gurage Shop Keeper who is puzzled by his pregnant wife’s unusual requests, a man from the country side who is trying to make a living as a “woyala”, a Tigre sentry who goes beyond the call of duty to protect his boss’s interest, a man dreaming of winning the diversity lottery requesting his confession priest to pray for him etc. There is also a skit that compares the treatment of women in Ethiopia to that of western women. With no exceptions, I found all the skits to be hilarious. I thought that the skit about the Tigre sentry was not only intended to be funny but was also a metaphor to the way many Ethiopians feel about the current government [right or wrong]. Those who had watched the skit can perhaps comment on this. The one about the treatment of women makes you realize that we are a long way from achieving gender equality. My favorite character was a man from a country side working as a ‘woyala’. The man who was hired as a result of his relation to the owner of the ‘weyeyet’ drives the driver crazy due to his lack of understanding of his duties. The musical way he was calling out for customers, in particular, was extremely funny. The story of the guy who went to his confession priest to request a prayer to win the DV lottery has a striking resemblance to a poem that I had posted previously, yeneta. 

 

Kibebew is the funniest comedian I have seen since Dereje and Habte! You will not be disappointed purchasing Wardya.

 

Here is a discussion on Wardya on the ESAI forum...

 

           

            About two weeks ago I posted an article I had written about “Abesha Women” knowing all too well their wrath would get me sooner or later. Despite insistence from some folks for me to come out of hiding and respond to some of the comments written in reaction to the article, I purposely stayed away from writing a response. This is not a response. It is a true story of poetic justice (sort of) that will satisfy abesha women who were upset by that article.

            Last week, when the cold front was just sweeping across the north east, lady luck smiled favorably on me and I had to fly out to Los Angeles to interview for a job (residency). Having done six similar interviews in the three weeks prior to my LA trip, and having gone through a few curve-ball questions unscathed, a false sense of confidence was starting to set in as I made my way to the UCLA medical center. The day long interview process started at 8am, shortly after I had received my itinerary for the day. I was to be interviewed by 7 different teams comprising a total of 25 people.

            Around noon, I left a team of physicians and proceeded to another room where another team of physicians had been waiting for me to arrive. Fast paced, I headed to the one empty chair in the room that unmistakably was designated for me. Cool like a cucumber and ready to answer their questions, I was only inches away from the chair when one of the physicians came from behind his desk and with stretched arms greeted me by saying “selam, tadias.” Caught off guard, I just stood there with a bewildered look on my face, frantically trying to remember the names of physicians I had seen on my interview itinerary. Disappointed at my own futile attempt, I shook his stretched out hand and asked if he is from the land of Punt (Ethiopia). “No”, he said and added “but my wife is” while pointing to a framed picture of him and his wife placed on the book shelf. That broke the ice and set the light mood in the interview room.

            I was about half way done interviewing with this particular team of physicians when one of them asked me what I like to do outside of academia. I started listing some things that interest me and as if out of habit, I said, “I also like to write whenever I get the time for it.”  Naturally, the follow up question came from the inquisitive physicians who wanted to know what types of articles I write. I have never been sure how to describe my articles because they tend to be about whatever tickles my curiosity. And that is exactly what I told them save for the part where I told them they could see samples on this blog. No sooner after that came out of my mouth did I start counting the minutes when I will be done with the interview so I can go online and delete that “Abesha Women” article. Who knew Dr. H (full name withheld to protect the innocent), who is a dead ringer for an Ethiopian and married to an Abesha woman, would start checking the blog while I was still in the room. Although, in the interest of time, he stopped short of scrolling down to the “Abesha Women” article, I don’t know what has happened since I left the room. Lord, have mercy! Isn’t karma a bitch?!

Ethiopia has successfully defended its CECAFA title with a 1-0 win against Rwanda. This is the fourth time Ethiopia has become a regional champion. Most remember the first title Ethiopia won in 1987 by narrowly beating Zimbabwe. Although the tournament has become less prestigious since then [as the result of the withdrawal of such teams as Zimbabwe, Zambia, and, Malawi from the regional tournament], this win signifies a new height for the Ethiopian national team which has managed to win its second major tournament outside of Addis. I hope to see the success to continue and see Ethiopia back in nation’s cup.