I woke up early again to the banging-crashing-radio blaring-shouting-floor sweeping waking up sounds of the hotel and family. Of all the sounds it is the sweeping that I’ll associate with this place. The sweeping went on eternal, harsh straw against old wood. Endless. It never seemed to move, but stayed in one place till I imagined they would grind a hole right through the floor.

It was a cold night and a cold morning. The cold meant damp and that meant all my clothes and my towel never really dried out. There was a clammy and smelly air to everything beyond even the fact that I was making my clothes go as long as possible without washing them.

It probably wasn’t true, but the bed bug population seemed more active on cold nights. Perhaps my body heat acted like a more powerful beacon and on cold nights they zeroed in on me more easily. I wasn’t even sure they were bed bugs. I didn’t even know what a bed bug was. All I knew was I woke up each morning with large, itchy and even painful welts all over my body. That morning my instep seemed to have been the site of a bed bug banquet, perhaps the coronation of a new emperor bed bug and they had come from far and wide to celebrate, drink my ferenji blood and be merry.

I sort of had invitations to go out the previous night, but I wasn’t in the mood. Plus all these invitations were never followed up with details about when and how to meet. Even when I pressed for particulars I never got any. I didn’t want to be imperious about it and ask a dozen times and force them to state a time and place. What if the invitation had been just a polite gesture? Then I’d have forced them into doing something they didn’t really want to do. There was also a curious but I suppose understandable reluctance to knock on my door. So in the end I had to sit in the restaurant from 8:00 p.m. on just in case the invitation was genuine and they came looking for me.

There seemed to be some kind of toothache epidemic going around. First Zebachew and then Bancha (Abebe, Tadele and Sisay’s mother). She was holding her head to the side and looking very unhappy. She came up to me moaning and pointing at her jaw. I didn’t know what dental care was like in Ethiopia. I assumed it was limited in availability. I also didn’t know if the family’s finances couold cover a tooth extraction. It was a safe guess that drilling and filling a cavity would be considered an extravagance.

Whenever I thought of the family’s financial position I couldn’t help but wonder about the more well-off members. There was Tirunesh of course. She owned the entire operation, drove a car, had a separate house and dressed well. A few nights earlier I’d met one of Zebachew’s uncles, Tadesse. He said he’d been working at the Hilton’s reception desk for 25 years. He told me the rags to riches story of his life with considerable emphasis on the current riches. His daughter went to Cambridge and was now living in Canada.

Considering how woefully inadequate my knowledge of the family and how it functions was, I was hesitant to say that these richer family members were not doing all they could to help the poorer ones, but it was a question mark in my mind. Their housing and clothing aside I wondered if Bancha could approach Tirunesh for money to have her tooth looked after. They were sisters after all. I was thinking of this because Bancha was definitely appealing to me for help where her tooth is concerned. The appeal was not in words of course, but in her eyes and her hands.

I wondered if my love of gagdets while in Ethiopia was an overcompensation for the total lack of control I felt while I was there. The human angle was impossible to control in any way so I overcompensated on the physical and technical side. One day I found I was looking at a 1900 birr Sony shortwave radio. Ignore the fact that I never paid attention to the news even while in Canada. Ignore the fact that I already had more electronics than I could reasonably carry.

It goes like this. I was talking to Dawit that morning. A friend of his walks by groaning that he feels terrible. Dawit says he drank too much the night before. I’m never good at this macho small talk, but I tried and said, “That’s not good,” with what I considered to be a goodnatured laugh.

“Why do you say that?” he said angrily. “What if I tell you riding bike is no good?” He gestured contemptuously at me and my bicycle.

“Drinking, smoking, fucking,” he shouted, “that’s life.”

Then he walked away muttering, “You like fucking priest.”

That was my first human encounter of the day and the next thing I knew I had a $263 shortwave radio in my hands. Was I trying to tell myself, “Sure, you really don’t have a clue what’s going on here and you don’t belong here, but you can buy this!”?

I didn’t buy it though. I bought 5 paperback novels instead.

Tags: bike, Canada, Ethiopia, Ethiopia Bike Trip