How I Met the Forenji in Apartment A2

Disclaimer: I don’t know what goes on in other people’s minds, this I will fully admit. However, as I most likely leave my apartment in Harar for at least a while, I thought it would be fun to try to imagine what my zabanya (guard) thinks of my time there. I hope you enjoy the result.

We have lots of forenji in the apartment complex that I guard. Most of them are Indian and teach at the university. I am not sure what the strange woman does. I had seen here a few times before I met her, but we had never been introduced. She was always with her father, a fat older man who also worked at the university. He lived in one of the nicer apartments, one that always had water and usually had electricity all night. I can see their kitchen from my shelter. My shelter’s a sturdy little tent/hut made of strong tree branches and old blankets. I sit there for most of the afternoon and part of the night to guard the complex.

Ask the people who live here and they will tell you that I am almost always awake because I use a good portion of my money to buy chat, which is a stimulant. I am kind to the random dogs, cats, and goats that wander around the yard and I don’t let anyone: animal or human, start a fight in the backyard while I’m here. I’m a good guard.

Anyway, one day the old man moved out and his odd daughter moved in. I kept waiting for a husband to join her, but no one ever showed up, even though the lady is almost old. She seemed to have no children either. Even stranger, she sometimes dressed like a forenji man: in pants and a t-shirt. Other times though, she’d wear dresses even more rustic than the maids’. And, get this, these rural-style dresses left parts of her shoulders bare! And sometimes she didn’t wear a scarf over them. It was so hard not to stare! Then the next day she’d be dressed like a man again, with her hair wet even. Dressed like this, she’d purposefully walk around in the sun! Gross!

So the first day this woman first goes into the apartment by herself, I realize that her father still hasn’t paid me for the crate of Pepsi I bought him at his request. It was a cold a rainy night, very odd for our desert city, and I had wrapped myself in old towels and rags to keep warm. Also, I was chewing a whole lot of chat so that I would not fall asleep and get sick from the damp or bitten by the rats that seek shelter from the rain.

I got up and hailed the woman. “Good evening.” I shouted in my language.
“Good thank you.” The woman called back clumsily . She seemed a little alarmed at my presence.

I tucked a large clump of chat behind my ear, tightened my toga of towels and started to follow her towards the steps of the complex. Since she apparently didn’t speak my language, I tried hers.

“I take you.” I said.

The woman glanced over her shoulder and seemed surprised to see me standing only a couple of steps away. “What?” She asked.

“I take you to you house.” I say, and wave my arm towards the Pepsi in my tent. I could feel the chat making my movements jerky and my eyes hurt. They were probably quite large and red. “I bring you now.”

“Uh.”, Said the woman. “No thank you.”

“I take you! I like your father! Pepsi!” I was starting to shout. What didn’t this woman understand?

The woman began to walk up the stairs very quickly. She was holding her keys in her hand now. She seemed relieved to see that the hall lights were on.

I followed her long enough to see that she was going into her apartment, shouted “BAH!”, and then went back to my hut to get the soft drinks.

As I went up the stairs I could hear her locking the door. There was no way I had done all of this work for no pay. I was getting angry. I put the crate down in the hall and then beat on the frosted part of the door with my fists. “Pepsi! Money! Open door! Open door! I give! Money give me!” I shouted.

I could see the woman’s silhouette on the other side of the door. She was yelling “Go away!”, “Stop!”, and “Another day!” in my language with a terrible accent. Finally, in English, she yelled. “I DON’T WANT YOUR PEPSI GO AWAY!” so emphatically that I gave up.

“You father Tom say Pepsi!” I shouted at her one more time. Then I picked up the soda and went back out through the cold to my hut.

Later, she would tell me that she was sorry. She told me that she didn’t know the arrangement I had with her father. She didn’t even know that I was employed to look after the apartments. Her father had paid me well so I told her it was okay.

I saw her almost daily after that. She always said hello and seemed friendly enough. One time when I fell asleep, she woke me up and asked if I was feeling alright. She named one the stray cats “Patty It’s Short for Pathetic” and helped it survive by feeding it scraps.

One evening I was sitting on the steps with my wife and son. Even though my son is only four years old, he reads better than I can. He was reading me a story and the woman stopped to listen. She told me that my son was very smart and handsome. I was so proud of my family that I nearly cried.

She’s moving out this weekend. I will miss her since she was always interesting to watch. I was angry with her at first, but forenji are so strange that I guess it’s stupid to be too frustrated with them. Her father is apparently moving back but he seems boring in comparison. He doesn’t need a scarf for his shoulders! Either way, I’ll be here, chewing my chat, and waiting to see who walks by next.

My Daily Bread

The middle-aged man behind the ticket booth looks at up at me and asks “Dabo?” I nod and he smiles.

“How much?” Asks his assistant. She’s sitting behind the cake counter and I wonder if she’s related to the ticket cashier. She’s always here, and I wonder why she isn’t in school. I wonder if she has brothers in school. I wonder if she will go home this evening and have to work for several hours.

“Three.” I say, which is what I say almost every day. The ticket man throws three black plastic tabs under his counter and hails a teenager in a block smock. The young woman hands him a thin plastic bag and he goes running out of the back of the shop to get my bread. I don’t know where the bread originally comes from.

While the boy is gone, I pay the equivalent of eleven cents for the bread. I walk away with three relatively fresh bap rolls in the bag and head back towards my office. I like the swishing sound that the bag makes as I move. Also, for whatever reason, people make less comments about me when I’m carrying bread, which is nice.

This is what I eat during the day now. I eat roll for breakfast and one for lunch. At home, I’ll eat the simple but tasty meal prepared by my housekeeper and eat the third piece of bread with a little (precious) butter. With water and vitamin pills, it’s a plenty sufficient diet.

Now that this is my regular routine. It makes me think about the words “Give us this day our daily bread.” In the Lord’s Prayer. So much of life here is, for the average Ethiopian, filled with mundane tasks.

Every morning, right after dawn, I take a bus from the city of Harar to the main campus. We go through two major towns and about eight villages. I play a sort of “Bingo” during these trips. There is almost always a woman washing clothes in a large bucket full of dirty water. There’s almost always someone using the bathroom in public. People chewing chat with their eyes closed, pregnant goats, animals that have gotten loose, people deep frying things over coal braziers, cake sellers with a food trays on their heads, kids who have invented a new game or are fighting due to sheer boredom, and a confused looking police officer,laughing women....woman with a baby on her back while carrying something else, BINGO!

This place is always moving. People spend hours doing little manual things every day. If people can’t walk on their feet here, then they walk on their knees or hands to get to the store. But, dang it, they get to the store.

It’s humbling. I feel extremely privileged and lucky to get to go sit in a relatively clean and quiet office. When my housekeeper makes shero for me (a typical dish made out of boiled lentils) I know that she spent time picking through those beans so that I wouldn’t crack a tooth on a small rock. This is a task that I find so mind-numbingly monotonous that it can only do a small amount of beans at a time before my eyes hurt and I start to feel sleepy.

When I meet women who are my age but have three babies, keep their huts and children clean, and have to do all of the cooking and washing and fetching by themselves, I am in awe. Could I do it if I had to? Could I be happy if that was what my life looked like every single day?

I eat my breakfast bread at my desk. It doesn’t have much flavor, but it’s quick and filling. And I am incredibly grateful.