Day: January 6, 2020

4 Jan. 2020 One natural consequence of being a faranji is that my phone is now peppered with Ethiopian numbers, relics of people I've met on the street. To walk around Addis is to expose yourself to the attention of an assortment of characters who occupy a hazy spectrum of friendliness and fixation on your money. And all of them want your number. Scrolling through my contacts, I see Feyisa the...

4 Jan. 2020 On his Dark Star Safari trip 20 years ago, Paul Theroux noted that Ethiopians loved to fling the epithet faranji! at him. It just means 'foreigner' or 'white person,' a term that sweeps from Ethiopia across South Asia and into Thailand, where you still hear tourists called farangs.* I can happily say that in spite of the massive changes that have rocked Ethiopia in the past two...

1 Jan. 2020 I've never been to Africa before, and I'd be dishonest if I told you that I didn't experience pre-arrival nerves, the kind that precede the just-arrived rush. Stepping off the 13-hour plane from Chicago, shuffling through the haphazard lines to obtain a visa and an Ethiopian sim card, I walked out of the airport into bright Addis Ababa sunshine and a scuffle between two taxi drivers,...