What a shower!

by R. Padmini

It was my very first field trip in Ethiopia, ten days after being posted there, and my guide and mentor was Fikre Menkir, the project officer for the Regional Integrated Basic services [RIBS] Project. En route, we first picked up a nun working with one of the relief agencies in Awassa, nearly halfway to our destination. As we were chatting, I asked her casually whether she knew Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, and she replied, with a deprecating smile, “thinnish”. I told myself smugly, “after all she is Belgian, her English is not too good”; and thought that was that. Not in the least - I soon learnt that 'thinnish' was Amharic for ‘a little' and the laugh was on me! (And, no, 'a lot' or 'much' is not 'thickish', but 'betham').

Perhaps to initiate me into the new post, the town water supply had broken down, and for the next three days, we had to use bottled mineral water for washing our faces and brushing our teeth. On the last day of our stay there, I was itching all over, and told Fikre that I had never before passed three days without a shower. Like most Indians, I was a compulsive daily morning bather. Taking pity on me, he arranged for some hot water in our nutrition field worker's house, and I had a glorious clean feeling after that bath.

As we neared Addis, the next day, Fikre said, “We are near Sodere, a thermal spa, and you can soak in its soothing waters to your heart's content, and we will still be in Addis in good time.” Sodere has an Olympic size swimming pool, but we were not equipped for swimming. So we took turns to go into the 'Turkish Baths', as they were open to either sex by turn. After I finished, I joined Fikre at the restaurant and we were just relaxing - he with a birra [Ethiopian beer] and I with a Fanta, the least obnoxious of the popular fizzy drinks - when the Heavens opened and for the next five minutes or so, the most extraordinary things happened. From the veranda of the restaurant where we were sitting, we saw a cow, dead even by then due to the onslaught of the torrential rains, being swept by, and then a Volkswagen Buggy! I turned to Fikre and joked “ I asked for water to drink and bathe - you didn't have to arrange something so monumental!”

When the cloudburst passed, we climbed into our Land Rover, and a few assorted others did so too, begging for a ride out of the mess. But we did not get very far - the road or what we could see of it was continually crossed by roaring and gushing torrents of new rivulets, and we had to turn back. At that time, we even saw one small car trying to cross one such torrent - the driver could neither go forward nor reverse. Everyone around shouted at him to jump off and wade or swim away from the current, but he kept trying to save his car. Finally he did give up, and he at least was saved. We avoided seeing if the car also was saved, but eventually; it was teetering in the midst of the even fiercer waves when we turned back to see.

If we had a few hitchhikers earlier, it was nothing to what we had on our return - I don't think we had gone more than a kilometre from the spa resort. Only two hotel rooms were available there now, and they had to be shared - I slept that night on a bed shared with a woman and her two kids; there were more on the other bed and on the floor too. As for dinner, there was nothing left at the hotel, and we had to go to bed on empty stomachs.

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