House and SPA farewell #1

So…the internet clearly got offended by my attitude towards it last week. It punished me by being not just slow but non-existent almost the entire week at ATA. It finally came back on Friday, which simply meant there was so much to catch up on that I needed to work this Saturday. I kid you not: 5 minutes after getting into the office, it broke again. Needless to say, everyone who has emailed me or commented or my blog or tried to get in touch with me recently is going to have to forgive the tardiness of my responses. I’m writing this on Saturday, March 30, but goodness only knows when I’ll be able to post it (update: though the internet keeps flipping off and on, I think this might get out today).

In other news, I found a house…actually an apartment. Three other SPA’s started around the same time as me, and I got suckered into moving into a super nice apartment (not what I wanted) that is unfurnished (also not what I wanted). As the consummate frugal person (a nice way of putting it) in the SPA community, it offends me a little how much we’re paying for this place. On the positive side, there are 4 different levels of room in the apartment, so I could quickly claim the smallest (or thereby cheapest) option.

My roommates are Hayoung (she worked for McKinsey in South Korea), Stephane (he worked for McKinsey in Belgium maybe but he’s from Luxemburg…I don’t know…something like that), and Fabio (he worked for Bain in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Four roommates, four different continents (living together on a fifth continent).

Hayoung and Stephane moved in last Sunday, I moved in on Monday, and Fabio didn’t arrive until this week (and then immediately had to go out into the field), so he’ll move in during the next couple days.

In an interesting development, Hayoung and Stephane have apparently started dating (though they haven’t told me, it seems pretty obvious), which is kind of a strange dynamic in the apartment.

We’re on the 2^nd floor (3^rd floor in America) of a 5 story apartment building where each apartment takes up one floor with the ground floor available for office space. We are the first tenants in the building, so things are currently pretty quiet.

Enough chatting, let’s see some pictures…

The building (we're the floor just above the tree on the right).

The outside courtyard (grass is at a crazy premium around here so you'll notice the lack of it).

Dining room (taken from the connected living room).

Living room (taken from the connected dining room). Notice the doors to the balcony.

Kitchen (with Stephane and Hayoung).

More kitchen (sorry, I wouldn't be posting so many, but I'm trying to play to my audience...I'm looking at you Dad).

Hallway between living room and bedrooms.

Bathroom to be shared by Stephane, Fabio, and me. Hayoung has her own bathroom in the master bedroom. The shower is crazy nice. It has all kinds of different spigots and shower heads to shoot water at you (though we're figuring out a leak problem at the moment). There are two sinks - one in the bathroom itself and one just outside in the hall, which is convenient when 3 people are sharing a bathroom.

My room packed and as unpacked as it has gotten so far.

My cabinets (Addis equivalent of a closet), which are in the hall just outside my room.

View outside my bedroom windows. The big buildings on the right of the first picture are Getu Commercial (one of the landmarks close to us).

The view from the balcony off of the living room (apologies for the weird lighting in one of the pictures).

When my family lived in Houston, we used to joke that if you changed the hymn from "A Might Fortress is Our God" to "A Mighty Fortress is Our Home," it would describe the house we lived in. I think I may have beat that house now as the apartment building not only has a giant cinder block wall around it but also has not 1, not 2, but 3 gates.

Most SPAs come to ATA for 6-12 months, so I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that I’m already seeing people leaving. Sarah Platts had been at ATA for 14 months. She started working on EthioSIS (Ethiopia’s project to do detailed soil mapping of the entire country), then Household Irrigation, and then the CEO office. The CEO office and Special Projects sit together on the 9^th floor, so she sat just a couple seats to my right. In fact, funnily enough, I have Sarah Hewitt (the SPA from the Gender team) sitting two seats to my left, so for a while I was surrounded by the ATA’s Sarahs. Anyway, for some reason I feel the need to commemorate each SPA who leaves, so you may have several of these over the coming months. Sarah Platts was at Deloitte before ATA and did some cool work with them over in Afghanistan. She is now traveling SE Asia for 3 months before going to hang out on her parents’ ranch in Wyoming while she looks for a job (potentially in fashion, Venture Capital, or some kind of start-up).

Below are pictures of the farewell ATA held for Sarah in Riva’s (the restaurant on the 2^nd floor of our building). I would have put up the pictures with her looking the right way but the flash reflected in such a way as to look super creepy. Sarah's obviously in the blue dress. In the first picture, you can see Khalid (our CEO) in the tie and Jeffrey (our Senior Director of Systems Programs) beside him (he's the super tall guy). In the second picture, you can see Mirafe in the suit over towards the far right. He's the Chief of Staff to the CEO and was involved with some work I did at McKinsey last year. Stay tuned as I think we'll have another farewell next week.

The awesomeness that was March 14-17 - Part 2

Breaking this into two parts because the internet over here is currently trying to destroy me.

Saturday night was the charity dinner thrown in celebration of St. Patty’s Day. Scott was very happy that we managed to find him a good St. Patty’s Day party. The party was a who’s who of Addis foreigners and rich locals. I even ran into the ATA’s USAID contact there. Given we didn’t know Natasha was coming until a couple days before, we weren’t able to get her a ticket (it sold out quickly). However, she hung around outside and eventually got connected with someone trying to sell an extra ticket (I think she may have gotten the only one someone tried to sell at the event).

I’d been told that the major reason to go is because you get a good steak dinner and as much Guinness as you can drink (they import it specifically for the event) for only ~$75. Despite neither of those things appealing to me at all, it was still a lot of fun. They had an Irish dancing competition that Amandla and Scott participated in, and Amandla won! She got a 6,000 birr (~$333) gift certificate to a local art gallery. Then, they had an Ethiopian dancing competition that Natasha and Scott did. First prize for that competition was a 3,000 birr gift certificate to the same place. Turns out if you throw the ball, you can make the prize for your nation's dance higher :)

Here's everyone sitting at their tables around the dance floor.

Here's the Irish dance competition, which Amandla won.

Here's a low quality picture of the band, who were flown in just for the event and sat at our table. Very cool Irish guys. The guy in the pink/red shirt was demonstrating Ethiopian dance before the competition began.

Here are some of my favorite pictures: Scott and Natasha doing the Ethiopian dance competition. From the blurriness of his hands in some of the pictures, you can tell Scott really got into it.

Here are my friends Amandla and Scott. Turns out sixth time's the charm. It's possible Amandla only knew I was trying to get her in the picture in the last 3 ;)

Sunday after Church, I started walking with Natasha and Scott to a party some SPAs were throwing for Sid’s car. Sid started as an SPA about 18 months ago (employee #16; current employee count of about 160), and somehow he inherited this really old VW Bug a while back. Most cars in Addis are really old due to the taxes here (a story for another time), and this Bug is no different. It was turning 41 (they just picked a random day to celebrate). They call it Britney because every time you think it’s died, it comes back (just like Britney Spears career). However, we got caught in some crazy rain and took shelter under an awning outside some closed stores. Turns out the short rainy season is here!

Anyway, that’s a decent recollection of the weekend. Amandla/Natasha left early Monday morning (back to the McKinsey grind), and Scott went to visit Lalibela (famous for its monolithic rock-cut churches) on Monday-Tuesday. Scott, Nadia, and I had one last dinner together at Facefood (also a story for another time) on Wednesday before Scott flew out Thursday morning.

Next time on the blog: Will Charles ever find a place to live? Is it possible he already has, is moving in today, but is saving that as a future blog topic? Find out next time…

The awesomeness that was March 14-17 - Part 1

So…I promised pictures of the amazing weekend. I feel I have to oblige, but I warn you that I’m still waiting on the pictures from a few of my friends who were here, which means (1) you have to put up with the lower quality photos I took and (2) you’ll have to suffer through more pictures once I get them.

As I mentioned, Thursday night was the “Pi Party” in celebration of March 14. Other people made pizza (I ate bread), and we watched the animated shorts that were nominated at the most recent Academy Awards. One of the consultant’s at ATA is Barry Levine. He was a childhood friend of Khalid Bomba (the CEO of ATA) and is a professional actor. It’s pretty cool, you can find him on IMDB “Barry Alan Levine.” He’s got 31 actor credits (not including commercials).

He came over with a team to make a documentary about ATA, and then stayed on when it became clear that the project would be benefitted with someone here full-time. He films major meetings / makes short videos about the ATA, works on documents for the government and the public, does some English translating for the Communications Team, and is redesigning the website. Anyway, he brought all the shorts, and they were a lot of fun to watch. The winner (a Disney one about a guy making paper airplanes) was good, but I really liked the one about Adam and the dog. It was probably my favorite, though the one where they made salsa out of non-food items had some cool graphics. Have I talked enough about them to make you want to watch them just to know what I’m talking about? Yes? Good, mission accomplished. Somehow I took no pictures on Thursday, so on to Friday!

Friday was slightly surreal. Addis has a decent number of diaspora (native Ethiopians who are or have studied or worked abroad). Angeles is a diaspora who spent some time over in the states and is very well connected with the ATA ex-pat crowd. I hear he even dated one of the previous SPAs (Senior Program Associate, aka my title). It was Angeles’ 31^st birthday, and he somehow arranged to have his party in the American Embassy compound at the Marine House. It was an interesting experience to walk up to the heavily guarded US Embassy (with its high walls and barbed wire) and tell security “I’m here for the party.” “Oh, it’s right over there. Let me show you.” Security did make my buddy Scott drink some of his water to prove it wasn’t something dangerous before they let us in, though.

The Marine House (or at least the part of it we saw) is just a nice bar with outside seating, a pool table inside, and Marines serving the drinks. It’s while we were at the party that Amandla and Natasha tracked us down. Somehow I also didn’t get any pictures of the party, so…I know, I know, I’m failing on the “showing you pictures” front.

After the party, everyone went to Jolly (http://jollyaddis.com/), which is a bar/restaurant/club. If you’ve ever been in a W Hotel, that’s what Jolly reminds me of – super ritzy (at least for Addis) but dim and with a lot of neon. Here I actually managed to get pictures (1 for 3 so far; a .333 average in baseball would make me an All-Star).

I kid you not. The bar has a weird rendition of the Last Supper.

Saturday, we met up for lunch at the Hilton (where Amandla/Natasha were staying). The hotel felt very fancy (even though people discount it because the Sheraton and Radisson Blu are outrageously nice), and we ate by the pool. Then, Natasha, Scott, and I went hiking up in the Entoto Mountains. It was nice to get outside of the smog of the city. It is beautiful up there. We did get caught in the rain, which I hadn’t prepared anyone for because it hadn’t rained since I got here until this weekend (weekend of March 14-17). This storm was a bit nuts as it even hailed pretty hard for a while.

Here are the shops at market where the taxi dropped us and we started walking.

Here we are walking up the road. Scott's in the white shirt. Natasha's in the grayish brown shirt. In the second picture, you can see a woman carrying wood down the mountain. We passed a lot of them. It looks like painful, back-breaking work.

Here's the crazy hail!

Here's Scott/Natasha after being rained on. Don't worry, I'm pretty sure there's an embarrassing picture of me in my $1 poncho from Walmart (looks like a large, clear trash bag) coming from either Scott or Natasha in revenge.

The next set of the pictures are why people climb up here. In several of them, you can see Addis Ababa below (frequently hidden in the haze).

A moment of silence for the dead minibus we saw.