My email access disappeared for a while, so this post is a bit after the fact — but not as badly as it seems.

The usual ban on driving flocks of sheep through the city streets of Addis Ababa is suspended before a few holidays each year, including the New Year on September 11, 2002 on the Julian calendar [referred to as the Ethiopia Calendar (EC) in Ethiopia and is 7 years earlier than our Gregorian Calendar]. Clusters of 20 to 50 sheep are everywhere, making traffic even worse than usual. Impromptu sheep markets have sprung up everywhere. The big feast day will be Saturday because the first day of the year is on a Friday – a normal Ethiopian Church fast day (no animal products of any kind, including dairy and eggs). Last minute buyers on Thursday have to pick from runty sheep but they can bargain for lower prices because sellers don’t want to take the sheep back to the countryside.

This week’s Fortune, a weekly newspaper, has an article that reminded me of the Second Millennium celebration two years ago – a very big deal in a country so conscious of its long history. Ethiopia’s richest man — Sheikh Mohammed Al Amoudi, born in a small town in Wollo Province to a Yemeni-Saudi father and an Ethiopian mother — is also Africa’s richest man, in the top 50 globally, according to Forbes Magazine. He is officially a Saudi citizen now, because that’s where his family ties led to his great wealth. The Sheikh, as he is often called by Ethiopians, is Ethiopia’s biggest investor and, after the government, its biggest employer.

Like rich men everywhere, the Sheikh hangs out with celebrities. In honor of the Millennium bash, he brought Beyonce to Addis for a concert at a reported cost of $1.75 million. Beyonce took the country by storm. A generation ago an American woman caused a riot by organizing a charity fashion show at Haile Selassie I University that included a coed in a miniskirt. Times have changed. Beyonce flaunted her sexy self on stage as usual and was a huge hit. The elderly President Girma Wolde Giorgis received her and was visibly bowled over by her magnetism — as a video on YouTube made evident. She was even presented to the Archbishop – utterly unthinkable not long ago. Grainy videos of Beyonce’s triumph on stage and all around town were on YouTube immediately after the events. Beyonce pronounced herself thrilled and moved by her Ethiopia experience.

But apparently not enough for a return engagement. Fortune reported that it had been definitively cancelled after weeks of negotiations. Her management refused to allow the entire concert to be shown on local TV. The Sheikh said he would not finance the event unless it was broadcast to all Ethiopians on TV, including on the huge outdoor screen in Meskal Square, which several hundred thousand could watch. Her management would only let a few songs be broadcast.
Was Beyonce a party to this or was it just a few shortsighted greedy business jerks throwing their weight around?

Addis has daily blackouts usually rotating by neighborhood every other day but it’s unpredictable. Everyone is affected  — offices, shops, restaurants, homes — costing the economy a lot. Addis now has some light industry — shoes, clothing, leather jackets, small things made of plastic and metal — that often has to close several days a week. Outages used to be announced beforehand. Now they are more unpredictable but a little less frequent. It’s just something more to work around, says my host. She’s happy in Addis, loves her work, has found a companion and treats Addis frustrations like weather — you can’t change it. About the blackouts she says, “Just remember to charge your cell phone whenever you can.”

Life without a cell phone — or mobiles, as they are called (pronounced “mo-buy-l”) — is impossible in Addis these days. Traffic makes going places harder, so you have to tell people how late you will be. The middle and working classes — who can afford mobiles  — are large enough to swamp the capacity of the system during the peak hours that coincide with peak traffic hours, so getting through by phone can take repeated dialing. Still, the system works well in some ways. You buy minutes via a card from a street vendor, 50 birr (about $4), scratch off a patch and call in the number revealed. The system recognizes the mobile from which the call was made, credits it with the money and tells you your balance. Local calls are just under one birr (around 8 cents) for 3 minutes. It’s startling to me that you can dial someone in Jimma or Gondar on your own mobile from the US. And the person you call doesn’t pay anything. The US is the only place I know of where the massive rip-off of charging both ends of a conversation happens. Why do we stand for it?

But a lot of calls lead to messages that state that the mobile you called is out of the service area — even if you know the person is in a café down the street. Or you are told that the line is busy or the phone is switched off, which may or may not be the case. These messages are delivered in Amharic and then British English by the same female voice that makes you feel that she would be as indifferent if you were face to face.

Addis calls itself the capital of Africa because so many international organizations are based here — the African Union, Economic Commission for Africa and a lot of others. Almost everyone has an embassy here (there’s even a sign on Bole Road for an Embassy of Palestine with an arrow pointing down a narrow lane that I haven’t yet explored), and some 250 NGOs are said to be here. Add in the tourists, consultants, businessmen, etc., and the number of people who don’t speak Amharic is large. English is the common language. There’s even an all-English FM station now, just launched, with minimal programming so far except pop music and some news.

On August 30 I returned to Ethiopia after a 2-year absence. During the trip I hope to post impressions and comments as time and internet access permit.

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An early Sunday morning flight from Dulles for the direct connection to Addis with just a refueling stop in Rome, no one allowed off, so it’s about 14 hours on the plane. I was early, so the shuttle that Dulles still uses to take you to the boarding gate was nearly empty. As the doors were about to close, seven dazzling Queens of Sheba sauntered in, followed by four slender, handsome men . . . my flight crew on ET 503. It felt like I was already there. That feeling was confirmed when it turned out that the air conditioning at EAL’s gate was out. By the time we boarded we were all soaked.

The plane broke through the heavy clouds above rainy season Addis barely 30 seconds from landing. The captain got a big round of applause.

The old terminal at Bole Airport is right next to the new one and looks like a Lego toy. The new terminal is big, but it looks like Ethiopian Airlines will soon outgrow it. There were 8 Boeings parked, one was waiting to take off and soon after we landed, another EAL flight arrived. No other airlines had flights that morning, but the place was buzzing. Waiting at immigration, the flashing lights at the luggage pickups showed that flights had just arrived from Bombay, Nairobi, Saudi Arabia and Duba , plus 5–6 domestic arrivals.

An announcement on the plane had told us to declare our foreign currency, and that we would have to prove that we had legally changed what we were not taking out. Ethiopia has a severe shortage of foreign exchange. But there were no forms for the declaration and the official who stamped my passport didn’t ask about it. I expect trouble when I leave . . .

Coming through security, I was asked if my bags had been x-rayed. I had to find the scanner myself, which was unattended, load the bags and then leave. No problem. Customs clearance was even easier. There wasn’t any.

The waiting area outside was crowded, but I was one of the lucky people whose name was on a card. The driver and I walked out into the brilliant sunshine and cool air after an early morning rain. There were heavy clouds over Entoto just north of the city, and the promised rain came a few hours later . . . not too heavy though because the rainy season is winding down. Every inch of open ground was green or covered with blossoms. Every inch of road was covered with traffic. The streets from the airport are now fully lined with cafes, shops, kiosks along the 4 kilometers of Bole Road (from Bole Airport, in the upscale part of town called Bole). But there was no order or sense to it, no planning, no zoning. And no restrictions on size or placement of billboards and signs, so they are jammed in almost too close to read. One big change — no sheep or cattle on the main road in Bole. Even 5 years ago that was still a common sight.

The air grew steadily fouler with diesel fumes as we left the airport, which is on the southern edge of Addis. The sparkling highland air is history, with only the smell of eucalyptus leaves and a hint of the smoke from dung from cooking fires. Addis (population estimate: around 5 million) is now one of the global cities where breathing feels lethal.

My host lives in Bole and works for an NGO, so the trip was a short one. At the home there was no power — a big problem in Addis. More about that another time. My host’s house has a generator for use at night.

A small cup of strong coffee and I was ready for the day.