Hawassa, The Wide Body of Water and Life

A mother plays with her little girl by the roadside. The beautiful baby girl sits atop her mother’s lap and attempts to tickle her. The mother plays along, pretends to lose control, and then wins over and tickles the girl. Her glassy laughter clinking through the busy streets, getting entangled in the wind from the lake and rolling away. The girl then hugs her mother and the mother embraces her back, their necks touching, their hearts’ joy audible to any observer.

I smile with pleasure, a belief that a little girl is growing up happy.  I wonder if my mother and I ever had a moment like that.

We walk on, catcallers yelling obscenities of compliments we do not understand. Beggars, often small children saying ‘you, you…’ endlessly, followed by something in Amharic or Afaan Sidama. A small boy with thinning hair throws up on the side of the road, clearly sick.

My eyes pick out everything, scan the events and relate them to what I already know, that the sufferings and the joys of life are sprinkled all across the globe, in a random street in Hawassa on a random day. None of it is structured, yet it all feels coordinated, like I could be anywhere in the world and not in Hawassa and I would see the same thing, maybe in different context, like a father teaching his son to ride a bicycle and a stranger hitting a dog with a stick and making it yelp in pain.

Our foreignness seems glaring, in the way we stroll the streets aimlessly among people who are on a mission to get home or away from it. But maybe it is all in our minds, we are aware of our own newness here and so expect everyone to feel it too. We admire everything, even the ordinary grocery stores, and the roadside vendors, selling notebooks that suddenly look different, that are so common in Nairobi. The novelty of the place makes everything a thing of wonder, a romanticization that is only possible in foreignness.

I think about, maybe I should move here, I’d be happier, do better maybe. But I also know that it is probably because I don’t know enough, haven’t been here enough. Some Americans want Europe, Europeans want some other part, Africans want abroad, and some of the west wants Africa. A shuffle in search of a better place, and sometimes we are right and a lot of times, we are terribly wrong, realize home is far much better, or manageable because we know our way around the problems we face, know enough people to call even when we don’t want to.

I wonder what I am seeking in my travels. What I want to get away from. When I moved to Songea in Tanzania, half the people I met asked me if I was a fugitive, why I would move to such a faraway place, and the other half were fascinated by my choice of location, my bravery. I didn’t feel brave, and quickly, I realized whatever I was looking for wasn’t here. It probably would have helped had I known what it is I was seeking. That was three years ago, and I am still looking for the unknowable, invisible, hopefully existent.

We board a tuk-tuk, famously referred to as bajaj in Hawassa, and head for the lake. The roads are mostly good but are filled with puddles of water and rocks in some places. Our ride cruises through with relative ease and we alight at the lakeside market. We admire the sculptures, the paintings, the glasses,and the porcelain.

“Honey…” says a man selling gourds of honey wrapped in banana barks.

“Yes darling.” I mutter. We laugh lightly. Everything feels delightful.

“Tomorrow.” We say, our communication reduced to telegram since we have been in Ethiopia.

He persists but we manage to wade him off. People surround us with different merchandise. Chewing gums. Pocket tissues. Knives. Handmade bracelets of different designs.

The next day, we buy the honey alright, and when we get back to our room and strip it of its bark outfit, we find a small jar, and a sip of honey in it. We burst out laughing. We know we would have been offended, felt ripped off had this happened in Nairobi or anywhere in Kenya. Familiar places give us permission to feel annoyed, here, we find delight in being played, or maybe it is because we are not certain about where to direct our anger.

We board a boat and go straight to up a narrow, steep set of stairs up to the top deck. The waves are strong at first rocking both the boat, and us, as if a salsa dance is being orchestrated by nature, and then abate like all waves do. The music coming from the lower deck reaches us, a Sidama song I recognize by the beat. I dance. I try to find novelty in this. I have been aboard boats on Kenyan lakes, just not ones with top decks. This is Lake Awassa but it could easily have been Nam Lolwe, or Lake Turkana, or Lake Naivasha, or Nakuru.

My boyfriend asks “how is this a lake again?” when I send him a picture of me by the lake.

“It could sure identify as an ocean if it wanted to.” I respond.

He says something along the lines of “Maybe it is content being a lake.” And we talk about other things, moving on with the swiftness of life. Nothing holds. Yet nothing leaves.

Coffees brew in every street corner. Little jikos emit the glow of coal, and jabana stands, with little coffee cups organized in the same pattern in every coffee place. The uniformity is bewildering. Every coffee order is served with a side of burning incense, and here in Hawassa, with tenadam leaves that you dip into your coffee. The smoke engulfs you alongside the aroma of coffee, and the taste of the scent of the tenadam reminds me of my father’s backyard where we have rows of the plant, that I use in my coffee when I am home in Marsabit.

‘Here in Awassa, they give you tenadam with your coffee.‘ I text my sister.

 

I have had so much coffee since I have been here, I envision my sweat, coffee-scented, black, and bitter.

It brings order, a sense of return, of routine, of a formula that is easy to commit to mind, but it also feels like a maze, like you are going in circles. The menus hold the same type of food. But we find a place that makes fast food like no other. Pizza. Fries. Burgers as tall as Everest. And unfortunately, not so good coffee, because it is machine-made. After having that many shots of brewed coffee, other coffees just don’t taste the same.

Everything tastes good, smells good, except the lakeside which wears the same damp scent of fish, rotting plants, water-remain-undrained-too-long. The roast maize by the roadside is so soft, it melts in your mouth like chocolate. The samosas have lentils in them and taste better than any fancy one you could have.

In the evenings, some women fan the jikos, either for the coffee or the roast maize, and others line the streets, selling what only men here buy, I assume. We joke about joining the market. We observe how absent women are in the public scenes. Often, all the restaurants are filled with men, even the roadside ones, while women show up to serve food or refill the coffees.

On the morning of our departure, I wake up at 3 am to catch the 5 am bus. We have been told to report at 4.30 am. The buses are punctual to a fault, pulling out of stations a minute to the time. I try to communicate with the hotel guard, that we need a tuk-tuk, or bajaj as they call it, to ge us to the bus. Bajaj. Bus. Moyale. I summarize. He runs a few sentences in Sidama language and I stare, not understanding.

Next, he repeats the same words but adds hand gestures as if it would help me understand better, but if I couldn’t understand one language, two wouldn’t help. My anxiety peeks its head. What if we don’t get there in time? There is also the issue of how differently we read time. Our ticket is written 4.30 am. We know it means in the early morning. For the man trying to help, 4.30 means just before 11 am, so he probably thinks we are being too early. But his commitment to helping us is heartwarming, humanity-restoring.

Luckily, the bus people call us. The guy we met at the booking office the previous day, who speaks English. It is the only language we can communicate in. I have been getting by on my Oromiifa but had only met one person here and she was a stranger we spent a few hours with, who helped us shop and negotiate with the vendors since she was also fluent in Amharic.

We narrate our predicament to the bus people. The bus station is not far from where we stayed. They send us a bajaj, and off we go, with our luggage, with the beautiful paintings, our sips of honey, and a lifetime of memories of this place I hope to come back to soon.

 

Ps: Hawassa known as Adare historically, is the capital of the Sidama Region in Ethiopia.