I landed there coz Mom is working as a lecturer there in Jimma University, Jimma, Ethiopia. Thats where I lived during my stay, with occational visits to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. The sad part of this story is I never even had the chance to visit the country much. I did go to the National Museum in Addis Ababa to see the so-called oldest skeleton found on Earth, nicknamed Lucy! I did roam around the capital city a bit, but it was nothing. The country has got a lot of places of historical importance dating back to biblical times and I never even got close to any of those places. Well.........I am only 23 years old, I still have the rest of my life to make it to all those places, and I am sure gonna do that!
Let me go on with my story-telling. I will tell you about Jimma coz that is the place where I truly lived and did things. Jimma is more-or-less a town, the centre-point of the region Oromia. Jimma is known for its coffee produce. It is also a very green place, trees and grass and buildings painted in green all over. Ethiopia's second-best university, Jimma University, is located here. I had the honour of working for the laboratory school of the university as a volunteer, helping in the maintanence of microscopes which are currently used for academic purposes.
My first few months of stay was limited to staying at home, walking around, exploring the place, going to the "markato" on my own, trying to speak very broken amharic and getting laughed at by every local, thanks to my language. Amharic is a nice language, its got its own script, and its really interesting to learn to talk the language. I finally was able to get sentences right towards the end of my visit. I had a great asset with me - MOM! She was born in Ethiopia, a place called Gore. She did her high school in the capital after completing junior high in India so she remembers a little bit of the language. I turn to her when I have my doubts, I turn to her for almost everything, but thats a different matter.
I got around to working in the university in April, 2005. Around the same time, I got the opportunity to serve at the Community School run by the University. I taught Integral Calculus to Grade 12 students. It was great, simply great! I never realised that I had teaching talent until then. I never wanted to be a teacher, the simple reason being having a family full of them, Mom for one, and a heck a lot of Aunts and Uncles and ofcourse, my Grandparents. I wasnt very comfortable with teaching at first, I talked too fast. The students and the other staff at the school helped me out and I really had a nice time. The students, 15 in all, got really attached to me, gave me a farewell party when I left, and still stay in touch with me. This experience is something I can never ever forget!
Working at the University was also equally fun and interesting. I had to deal with dust and dirt of more than 10 years. Thats coz nobody opened the machines. I did what I could do to help, reviving 27 off more than 50 microscopes and now they are being used by the laboratory school for academic purposes. People in Ethiopia are very friendly and they make you feel at home. At school and at the lab, I always felt comfortable working around my fellow colleagues. They made me completely at ease, nobody ordered me around and everyone pretty much let me mind my own business. My work was undisturbed. I also worked with spectrophotometers, an ELISA reader and some other instruments.
Everybody there liked me. Lets say I put a "Charm" of some sort on the people with my wand! Just kidding. People in Ethiopia appreciate it if we speak their language. Even an effort with a scramble of words is welcome among them. Its interesting to learn it, more to sing it. Music there is something that moves people. Everyone loves music. They have their own musicians, both traditional and pop. They love rap. They love Hindi cinema, expecially the ones with Shah Rukh Khan. There is a theatre, the only theatre in Jimma, where they screen Hindi movies every wednesday and friday noon. I went there once and was surprised to see people clapping hands when the hero does a nice dialogue about patriotism and waves the Indian flag! The people clapping were local Ethiopians, not Indians.
One of the few things I wish to tell you are hyenas. Whoever has lived in any part of Africa will know that it has a lot of wild species running helter-skelter. Well, in the part of Africa where I lived, hyenas were making their presence felt at night. Mom had told me about this during my arrival but I didnt realise that hyenas actually walk so close to your house on my first night there. I had just started to snore off when suddenly I heard a sound, the hyenas were taking a stroll. I didnt get used to it at first, but gradually the call of the hyenas was just lullaby to sleep. I never got to see one though, people advised it best that we dont peak out of our houses to try to look at them.
I didnt quite believe that hyenas actually came and ate horse when people started telling about finding corpses lying around in the fields one day and disappearing the next day (though I did see a flesh-stripped limb and a few vertebrae which could only belong to a horse). The idea was that the hyenas hunt down weak horses, kill them and eat them. If they cant finish off the whole horse, they leave the rest to pick up the next night. Well, it so happened that I came upon a corpse, a real one, dead one of a horse one day on the field right in front of my house. I've got the picture here-sorry its not too clear coz there were vultures around (really big ones) and I was plainly scared to go nearer. That changed my opinion of hyenas (and the poor horses).
The dog and the vulture were fighting for their share of the horse. Thats why they are staring at each other, in case you want to know. These vultures are different from the ones we normally see, they have thick skin on their necks and are strong. We usually see them only when there's been a horse hunt. In case you are wondering where the actual horse (or whatever is left of it) is, you can see its ribs sticking out a little to the right of where the dog is.