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mind entropy of the ethiofrican

Hand-tied: pulse of the horn

13 June, 2008 | 7 comments | Category: peace & conflict, thinking...

* A ridiculous inflation in Ethiopia (at 87% by some accounts) that’s got the price of food costing above most people’s wages: skyrocketing escalation of insane standards of living
* Another green drought in Ethiopia with 4.5mil people needing emergency aid + hunger due to food prices in the towns (I’ve heard of govn’t job holders eating Qolo and water)! + blackouts in the cities
* Scattered explosions in Addis Ababa
* Djibouti and Eritrea about to start a war, Djibouti backed by France
* Ethiopian soldiers burning towns and villages in the Somali region
* Continued fighting in Somalia, Ethiopian soliders occupying the country

and the list goes on…

I feel completely hand-tied sometimes! Like that time there was this group activity thingie where everyone had their eyes blinded or hands tied to test drive a disability.

Sometimes I feel rage, this bubbling anger at the brutality people allow for their luxurious, ridiculous pleasures. I want to screammm, yell at them! Harass them into submission! Something!

Sometimes the corners of my eyes sparkle with unshed tears, my heart so freaking heavy and jaws clenched that it hurts below my ears… some other time I just can’t help it and I chuckle at the heartbreaking predictability and absurdness of the events in the horn!

The horn of Africa is in flames (ha!…who knew keratin could be so flammable? hu?! lol) the Horn is an incomprehensible, unfathomable mess beyond all limits I knew! It is such a hot, smoking mess that it mad sitting and contemplating it, especially chatting along with others about ‘ohhh this freaking government!!’ or some other forsaken issue we try to solve…! (more…)

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brothers who are enemies

19 May, 2008 | No comments | Category: book snip, peace & conflict

And then there are incredible stories that knock u right out of your daily conundrum!

Have you ever heard the bizarre idea about creativity being the most potent weapon individuals have against war?? I thought it was a bit too ‘happily optimistic’ at first…until closer consideration… Ever heard the saying “necessity is the mother of innovation.”? Well, Wednesday’s news made me say: “heck ya!”

The quirky reflection that came to my mind reading the news goes…

“”It is in creativity, in the fashioning of self and world, that people find their most potent weapon against war.”

…1st, meandering to a tiny bit of intro….I first stumbled upon this bizarre concept in Carolyn Nordstrom’s “A different kind of war story” on her experience in the devastating 16-year-long civil war of Mozambique. As an anthropologist, she reflects on the messy nitty-gritties of war, civil society intricacies and the trajectories of individual lives within a land that is plagued with strife and struggle, where people are migrating between refugee camps and daily fearful for their lives…

she says “……ultimately, war victims have taught me, violence is about the destruction of culture and identity in a bid to control/crush political will.” She saw human condition at its ‘lowest’, when people were helpless, vicious, greedy, desperate and deeply disturbed. According to her “It is often in what we relegate to the margins of life process and theory [violence and the unspeakable] that speaks most fundamentally about core aspects of human existence.”

i think it’s real; in times of war, strife and struggle people have very few choices. when they are caught in the most devastating corner of all, they either create ways to survive, maintain/revivie their humanities and fight back…or get sucked in to becoming helpless puppets which push the gears of a viscous ‘war [insert other term] industry’.

According to the book, some resistance tools toward survival, restoring humanity & peace include the care and love in communities, creative expression and non-violence… (more…)

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tickles of bunna nostalgia

11 April, 2008 | 5 comments | Category: i.mmigration, nostalgia.personal, prose.tales

my eyes glaze as pupils dilate basking in the otherness of my past….

the things i remember are not expected etches within my memory, they are random recollections of flickering visuals, smells, tickles and sounds…

the clatter of coffee beans nosily scattering on a metal roasting plate. incense flitter flattering the breeze, caressing curves of air wafting upward and sideways; releasing smells of home, comfort and cosiness. smells that mingle with prickly acid tastes of long grass strands spread across the floor, the musky, spiciness of incense and, soil, freshly moist feeding the grass outside the door, by the veranda.

incense rising around us frames my auntie’s face already framed by the peach-beige shawl. my mom has owned, my auntie worn this shawl during all her over-night visits to our house ever since I could remember. The luscious red rose petals appear to dance across the shawl amongst tiny brown geometric patterns adorning the length of her legs which are stretched out on the mat. she sits near the coffee mini-table with 9 tiny white cups appearing to gaze adoringly at a glorious black clay coffee-kettle.

When my auntie speaks, her mouth edges to one side; the scars across her neck create protruding fringes hidden till she arches her head up; a head with thick silky short locks usually big-curled or in curling bigodins.

i remember a conversation in this setting about a girl who lived across the driveway. She went to america to school, she was something of a legend in our neighborhood circle. A neighbor told the stories of the girl’s trials to my auntie who was sharing it with the rest of us. I could sense that we all felt butterflies of anticipation about my departure. With nerves at tickling ends, each of us wondered…could my experience be like hers?

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chili pepperzz in the land of superlatives

9 November, 2007 | 7 comments | Category: ethnicity

I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!

the red hot sizzle of chili is soo good for u, it is medicative!!! no wonder my auntie used to tell me to eat chili when i got a cold.

Not only am i’m an addict of hot sizzle chili, i’m also a lover of all foods *spicy*…so when BBC bust it out that scientists “can harness the heat in chili peppers and adapt it to combat inflammation in arthritis.”

i was all like ‘woaaaaahhh hot tamale’! or rather ‘abet Qaria’!

i’m the little girl who used to concoct pastes of berbere & butter, berbere & water to be eaten with injera for breakfast, lunch or afternoon snack. i would spread dollops of it on injera being heated on a mitad clay plate which seeps the moisure from spongy pores transforming injera to crunch-ilicious Qategna… *|mouth watering|*… i was one to mix lemon squeeze with berebere that goes on top of rice with salsa, i would chop up green chili to make some ‘pasta saltata’, add more hot hot mitmita to kitfo …i’m still that little girl…

…with one difference! Now, when someone obliquely & proudly (!??) proclaims the unmatched heat & spiciness of Ethiopian cuisines, my eyebrow pricks up into an arc…

i’ve come across chili in varieties… Ghanaian Sheto sauce with fish, shrimp in the marinade is extremely potent, while the Thai method of splashing pickled, ground or oiled chili mixed with seeds is nothing short of flaming tearjerker if overdone ever so slightly! other… indians, turks, mexicans… use chili across their cuisines in various forms…while some, exhibit exceptional cultural idiosyncrasies like some crazy naija people who carry emergency packets of ‘peppe’ everywhere! or the Filipinos & Koreans eating chilli leaves? *|yet another priceless eyebrow raising moment!|*

stereotypically… ethiopians believe their tongues withhold the very feistiest of many a pepper & their cuisine uses it! …which should not be much of a surprise given they readily embrace many a superlative about ethiopia/ians… ethiopians the most beautiful people of the world, with the most fertile and green landscapes on earth, the fiercest warriors that defied all colonial rule, the fastest of people, living in the ‘origin of civilization and humankind’, the home of selected people by God to protect the arc of the covenant… yadi ya…content ubernationalism makes gorgeous-est and spice-desensitized-tongued Ethiopians ssssssssssssssmooookiiiinnnn’ …

….chili pepperzz FYI

“The Naga Jolokia (Bhut Jolokia, Ghost Chili, Ghost Pepper, Naga Morich) is a chili pepper that grows in northeastern India (Assam, Nagaland, and Manipur) and Bangladesh. It was confirmed by Guinness World Records to be the hottest chili in the world…”

chili peppers are implicated with many health benefits! …and disbenefits… *|blink|*

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iQaQa: tales of playing life in thingthing

16 October, 2007 | 2 comments | Category: nostalgia.personal

there was a refined science and an art to evaluating the right proportions of water and soil…red or black, or ashawa sand…to make the purrrfect pot, food, house, miniature person :) … a little world of iQaQa!

I remember playing this game in two settings:

ahnd. the main gates were fuchsia pink, with peeling paint along the top edges. we lived across the sandy driveway from each other. Three of the SaId family children: the eldest boy, the eldest girl, the youngest and I, grandma’s girl. Chronologically, I fit between the two girls.

the consistency was fiiiine! fine sand which rises in sheets from underneath the ’save the children’ land cruiser usually parked next to the veranda where the gatekeeper situates his-self under the shade and cockily challenges all willing to a mean game of draughts.

the scorching heat of the sun and humidity prick the air leaving wavy optical illusions and refractions tangled with the dusty sand puffing upwards all day. but we always hid, we would go behind the old Italian building housing the venerated top floor office. we would go where the adults did not come, by the garden and store rooms. we frolicked well-lit grounds quaintly accented with insect infested dark corners while ever-flowing tap water trickled into these bountiful lands …casting pipes of soft gooey sand along the edges of the plants. If only grandma knew how we messed with those peoples’ gardens!

‘there are so many big trees!!’ Don’t you ask me what big meant! Ask me ‘when is Big’? and I might try to recall how tall I was at 7 years old….or not! … I wasn’t short! I did like wearing puffy colorful skirts tho!… :)

trees were the kind unique to that area of the world. ones with “monkey money” (yeTota frank) with entourages of small plants with “trumpet flower” (TirumBa AbeBa) & “bird’s seed Qolo” (yeWef Qolo)…my favorite, the ‘bogambil’, made for a mean hoooot pink stew concocted in a mud pot which had been very crispy-crunchy well done under the hot horn of African sun.

lema. there was a lot of short and stout greenery 515kms away, many about my height. and large chipped rocks lining the ground. it was rainy and muddy, gloomy clouds suspended over the wet season blues… moisture, nagging muggyness. the corrugated narrow metal doors were open, for what reason I don’t know. there was my cousin, the neighbors’ kids and I. the youngest one, a chubby little pumbkin with twinkily eyes was my favorite. such a cutttiie! they lived across the rocks…it seemed.

we messed with water. messy could make Coca cola, (aheeem! ambition and imagination allowed us to fathom even the most infamous/intricate billion dollar cola assembly line, kemir!!) :) … and soups and sauces, salaTa…and many more dishes and beverages… there were different shapes and sizes of tin cans, the yellow ethfruit salsa can and rectangular green olive oil can, the small one with the cartoon yeast dude on it!… and we went water-fetching behind the house… through the narrow path into spooksville, a space I later grew too big to fit in.

I enjoyed snipping all sorts of leaves and flower petals, mashing up different colors and concoctions. soiling my soft palms, tinging them with acidy tart smells/tastes. We served on different plates, qorkies (bottle caps…whatever are they called in english!?)… and with different utensils; invisible ones work especially well when we make the sound-effects “Aam-Aaaaam-Aam” and “fpfffffuuuuut!”

:)

I remember the fascination with which every day passed, the immense amount of concentration and energy with which we jumped! jumped! Jumped! songs and chants, daily chores, timhirtibet-timhirtibet, mushira-mushira, …we were playing life! oh! joy-joy, funny how somethings, like playing life, are universal!

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