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.