AWA. Africa wins again. Catch phrase Tim coined after arriving here and it’s caught on.
Examples: You wind up in a tin shed in Jijiga (small town in Somaliland region of Ethiopia) and it turns out it’s the airport; the taxi driver didn’t mis-hear you after all. In addition to this, the airport makes you check in last, because you are a woman. AWA.
You go to the fruit stall down the road and pay 50Birr for a kg of tomatoes. You send the driver and he comes back with two kilos for 12Birr. AWA.
You move into your gorgeous new house in Addis, but soon realise that every power point in the house is not the standard European socket (which is used in Ethiopia), rather it’s some totally random one and therefore you can’t use any of your appliances. AWA.
You wake up in the morning in a top-end (for Ethiopia) B & B and despite having totally lathered yourself in 100% deet and eradicating all mosquitoes from within your mosquito net, your arm looks like this:
AWA.
You order a burger in what seems to be a reputable restaurant and it doesn’t show up. You ask why. They tell you “No problem, wait”. You wait some more. Still doesn’t show up. You ask again. Same answer. After two hours of waiting, you realise that it wont, and was never going to come, and even though “burger” is on the menu, they don’t do burgers. AWA.
You get not water in your house for days. You get a plumber. He tells you everything is fine. Still no water. In desperation, you go to the naturals springs to shower where the locals shower. I wont horrify you with details, but AWA.
You go to the Hilton, Addis Ababa for a brazillian and – actually you don’t really want to know. AWA.
You get the picture.
Today, I decided to cook dinner at home after months of eating out. We have a gorgeous kitchen but it’s not exactly well-equipped. So I spent the afternoon driving around Addis seeking out what I thought were pretty standard cooking implements, but it turns out that the people in this part of the world have no idea what I’m talking about. AWA. In the end, I decided that the easiest thing to make would be a roast: we have an oven tray and we have plates to eat off.
Shola – the market where I do most of my shopping. They usually have what I want and they don’t ferangi-fy the prices like at Mercato.
So began my search high and low over the city to find a chicken. Turns out that no one sells fresh chickens. Probably because we have regular power cuts and fresh chickens go off quickly when the fridges turn off. I didn’t want to kill and gut and pluck one myself, so the only other option was to go for a frozen one that originally came from Debre Zeit. After defrosting the bird for hours, I found various organs stuffed inside it – a little strange since they are usually already thrown out back home when you buy a chook, but here nothing goes to waste, so not totally surprising. I meticulously marinated the bird and let it sit in garlicy and Tigrean-honey goodness while I made the dessert.
Dessert was easy, I whipped up a cake in no time with the fresh mangoes and limes I got from the market yesterday. It cooked perfectly. I even used fresh yoghurt from Beral, a shop nearby which has a farm about half an hour out of Addis. Every morning they bring in fresh milk and yoghurt and usually it’s gone by noon, so you have to be in quick! The owner Birhane, is a top guy from Asmara (Eritrea) and when I met him we ate chicken and cheese (from his farm) toasties out the back. Then he invited me back for breakfast the following morning which is how I discovered the awesome honey.
At this point I should have known something would go wrong. Cake cooked fine, no power cuts, didn’t run out of water….everything was going well. Too well. I carefully picked up the oven tray on which the chicken was sitting and brought it over to the oven. I did not drop the tray. The oven was still hot from the cake. I placed the tray in the oven and *click*. I heard the tiniest of clicking sounds. Hmmm…strange, I thought. I looked at the little light and saw it had gone off. Must be the thermostat, I thought. I closed the oven door and left the chicken to get golden.
I came back twenty minutes later. I wish I didn’t come back. The oven was cold. The chicken was luke warm. I had flashbacks of the time I threw a chicken across the room in my flat in Forth Street after the oven broke and the chicken sat in optimum food-poisoning temperatures for hours. I frantically played with the dials on the oven. I yelled for Tim. I contemplated throwing the stupid fucking bird. I yelled for Tim again. Tim came running. Tim announced that the element was broken. I looked at the bird. I looked at Tim. I looked at the bird. I looked at Tim…
AWA’d by a stupid chicken.
But you’ll be happy to know that I didn’t let it beat me. So it turns out that the click was probably the oven turning off or something after the element died. Why did the element die then? Why was it fine for the cake and not the chicken? Why didn’t I cook the dam chicken first and not the cake? Why, why why….
So my gorgeous kitchen is pretty much useless. Looks great but completely impractical and unfunctionable. Nothing works. Oven is now broken and the three gas stove tops don’t work because they aren’t hooked up to gas. The single electric stove top doesn’t get hot enough to cook shit. Fridge works intermittently. Kettle doesn’t fit into wrong-sized plug sockets. Water pressure is non-existent during cooking hours (breakfast, lunch and dinner times) because that’s everyone else in the neighbourhood is using it.
Can you say AWA?
But it’s ok. Even though my arm is itchy and twice its normal size, even though the kitchen is un-use-able, even though I got AWA’d by a chicken….we have cake for dinner. And tomorrow we will eat out again.
adventuresinthehorn 