Some Ethiopian Women, Part II

 

Ha! You knew this one had to be coming…It is true, Ethiopian women are beautiful—everyone will admit to that. It must be their skin color. And lots of them have really nice teeth—white and straight. Which is always a surprise. I mean not to be rude or disparaging—this is just an observation I believe Americans in particular with our love for nice teeth are more apt to make—but the women (and men for that matter) in general here have straighter and whiter teeth than any other peoples I've run across in Europe. 

 

I've had a few run-ins with native women around here. (I've already mentioned the supermarket worker, whom I haven't seen since…) And these run-ins seem to elicit my cultural naiveté. I went to a big Ethiopian religious celebration in January called Timket, which celebrates Christ's baptism.  (Can't remember if I blogged about this.) Any way it's a huge festival held at an enormous open field in the center of Addis. The main attraction at this festival for us foreigners were the baptismal water canons.  There's a picture of this on my Facebook page—"Timket" album. Anyway, people crowd around a fenced-in area from where priests spray—drench—individuals in the crowd with water. It was quite a site. Anyway, I was taking loads of pictures and found a girl who was soaking wet, and wanted a pic. So I asked if it'd be O.K. She smiled and posed. I took the pic, showed it to her (customary) and said thanks. I started walking away and could sense that she was following me. (By then I'd noticed that she was probably unemployed and very poor.) I looked around and saw some younger middle class (you really can tell the social classes by looking at clothes) girls giggling. I suddenly realized that my new friend was ready to get married. The problem was (well, beside the fact that I'm not looking to date anyone) that language barrier, so I couldn't shed her. She stayed glued to my hip for about a half hour. I was about to start running until I saw a friend of mine who speaks Amharic. He basically asked her what she was doing. And I don't know what they talked about for 5 minutes, but at the end he told me she wanted to shake my hand. Relieved, I did and said melkam k'an (have a good day.)

 

Lesson learned.

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