Anyone Feeling My Pain?
By Wegesha
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
“Isn’t Ethiopia a tropical country?”
“yes”
“So, how come you went from Ethiopia to Minnesota?”
“Well, my parents never really liked me. I think I was being punished.”
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 4th 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.
“yes”
“tell me, what do people think of Americans?”
“Who? Ethiopians?”
“Yeah Ethiopians, but Ethiopians also probably represent how most others feel about Americans, right?”
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
“... implicitly and sometimes explicitly, we are told the only life worth saving or protecting is an American life and using that pretext foreign governments protecting American interests are put up in place of the existing one regardless of how they were elected. If that proves difficult, killing at will has become America’s prerogative, be it at the “bay of pigs”, Grenada, when ousting Noriega or Vietnam or…”
I didn’t get a chance to finish my train of thought before I heard
“Slow down son, I am a Vietnam vet.”
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!
That is a v interesting read. You are brave to be yourself at interview, or even to say what you like.
Hope 2006 will be a good year for you.
Beth Tesfaye
From London (Comment this)
One a depressing kind of day, when I, like you keep getting hosed in interviews (i.e. if I get them), to read your refreshing and brilliant narrative, simply made my year (and the darn thing is only five days old).
Since you are a doctor to be, I am not sure whether my sides ache from my Prevac pack of medicine for or from being entertained by your stories, but it hurts. It is good hurt though. Anytime you get an interview in VA, my humble home is always open. I have a boxer dog though who might share the bed with you late at night, that is if you get in it ahead of him.
Funny thing, my Dad also took the route to early retirement in 1991 soon after EPRDF came into power. He was given an opportunity to kiss some a$$, but declined. My mother is still in the UN system, but due to retire and go back to ET in June of this year.
Keep rockin'' Doc. (Comment this)
you are smart and funny. I can imagen how much you can learn from life, if you can say this much from one interview. Keep going and let us share your experiance. (Comment this)