Film and Media

There is an old notion about creating your own luck, and another way to put it is that “the more you do, the more you do.” In my case here in the capital city of Ethiopia, each thing that we have done soon led to more opportunities, and so I want to narrate the chain of events to highlight what I perceive to be a cause-and-effect. During the first week in Finfinne/Addis, as I described in my blog back then, my colleagues and I held a public forum about the state of the film industry in Ethiopia. One of the things that I believe this led to was some conversations with some government officials a few days later, as I described in a previous blog post, but in addition to that, another thing that it led to was an invitation to me and Alessandro from the Alitinos young film-makers association to present at one of their regular meetings.

So, on Thursday, the day after Maya and I returned from our trip to Wollega, we had a nice café with Alessandro and a few members of the Alitinos group at old Taitu Hotel (where there is a lot of good modernist art on display) in the Piazza neighborhood and then walked over to the Russian Cultural Center where we gave our presentation. The questions posed to us ranged from academic curricular issues to local question about making film in Ethiopia to the globalization of the film industry, and it was an enjoyable discussion.

Following the discussion, one of the young film-makers invited me and Maya to his “studio” (basically an office in his home) on Saturday afternoon to watch his first film, have lunch, and converse with him and the president of the Alitinos group about film technique. Maya and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I have had some amazing opportunities here in Ethiopia, better than I anticipated, and I look forward to coming back again.

Meanwhile, on Friday, I arranged a brunch meeting with my friends Roba (the coordinator for activities in Ethiopia by the international environmentalist organization Slow Food) and Gammachu (a professor of forestry) so that I could introduce them to each other and begin brainstorming about a possible Sandscribe Communications documentary film on environmental issues. One question we raised was how to make an original movie about the environment. Another was how to involve ordinary people in the making the film so that it expresses their points of view and so that the stakeholders can represent themselves (which, in Ethiopia, also means getting government permission to do that.)

But I don’t want the readers of this blog to think all my time here is just about film-and-media and work. We also are tourists, and we spent Friday afternoon at the National Museum (which I’ve written about before in my other blog [here]), checking out the bones of the first human as well as some pretty amazing modern art, and we spent Saturday morning at the Red Terror Museum (which I’ve written about for the Oromo webzine Ogina [here]) where took an incredible guided tour by someone who had actually been imprisoned and tortured by the military Derg regime in the late 1970s, which was both moving and informative.

Also important on this trip is friends and family, and for fun on Saturday night, we met some friends at the Beer Garden Inn, which is the first German-style brew house to serve its own beer in Ethiopia. On Sunday, we spent the day eating far too much food with Maya’s grandparents, aunts, and uncles, and then went out with her cousin for some young-people’s time at the Yod Abyssinia Cultural Restaurant. This restaurant features live performances of traditional singing and dancing – including the traditional Ethiopian version of “twerking,” and I half-expected to see Miley Cyrus to make an appearance, hahaha. It is also one of the few restaurants that serves the traditional  home-made dhadhi (a.k..a, tej, a.k.a., honey wine or mead.) As you might guess, this place is a popular tourist spot, and half the audience were either white or Asian. The owner of the restaurant is ethnically Gurage, and the performances were quite diverse, representing the cultures of different regions of Ethiopia from western Oromia to southern Sidamo and Gurage as well as the central Shoa and northernTigray. In retrospect, I should have taken my colleagues Jennifer and Stephen to this place for dinner (as was recommended by our driver.) One funny thing is that a lot of it reminded me of the many “culture nights” put on by the Oromo Students Union at different colleges and by International Oromo Youth Association that I’ve attended in Minnesota (and that I’ve blogged about before [here]). They both blended singing and dancing with small skits. One difference is that the restaurant had musicians playing traditional instruments, not recorded or synthesized music, but the bigger difference was the location and audience – one was in Ethiopia and consisted of mostly tourists, and the other was in America and consisted almost entirely or Oromo immigrants. I began to think about this uncanny parallel between the tourist experience and the immigrant experience of traditional culture. Another surprising event was when the performers invited audience members to try to dance, and an Asian man got up on stage and impressed everyone, so later he was crowned “king” of the dance (like a homecoming king) alongside an Ethiopian woman. I noticed that he could actually speak Amharic, and I wondered how many American businessmen in Ethiopia could do that, and while wondering, I also speculated that there may be a reason behind China’s success in Africa. To be honest, I don’t know much about China (though I studied ancient Chinese philosophy and art as an undergraduate and love Chinese cinema), but there was something about the performances and skits at the Yod Abyssinia Cultural Restaurant that reminded me of Japanese skits and musical performance that I saw when I lived in Tokyo for two years. The similarities really struck me, and I see some real opening for cross-cultural connection. In some ways, the more I travel, the more I think that people are basically people, and all this talk of cultural differences and identity politics might  be missing the point. The real differences that I see are differences in wealth and power (and I see those everywhere I go), not culture. On the other hand, the cultural differences are pretty fascinating too.

As you might guess from how this blog post has no focus or theme, our trip is winding down, and I’m a bit ready for home.  After a weekend of food and fun, I got sick and spent Monday in bed. Maya took care of me, and then, at my urging, went shopping with her aunt at the Shiro Meda market. Today we plan to have dinner with a couple of friends (and we might even remember that it’s New Year’s Eve, though we might not, so far away are we from “Western” life right now), and tomorrow I plan to meet with a couple of local NGOs to see about possible volunteer opportunities for my students, and then we board our flight back to New York. This is my last blog post from Finfinne, but I hope to compose a more reflective and theoretical post once I am home in Brooklyn.

My wife Maya and I just returned from a three-day trip to the Wollega district of Ethiopia, a few hundred kilometers straight west of the capital city. Now that I’m back in Addis Ababa/Finfinne and have a bit of time to spend at an internet café, this blog post will be devoted to that trip. Unfortunately, unlike last week when I blogged three times while staying at the Bole Ambassador hotel, this week I haven’t been able to blog much or even check e-mail because I don’t have access to the internet. The official college business part of my trip ended Saturday morning when we met with the Gudina Tumsa Foundation — about which I have already written at length on my other blog [here] after my last visit to Ethiopia in 2010 — and there we saw the Sandscribe Communications office. After that brief visit, Maya and I moved from the hotel to the house of a relative, and on Sunday, we spent the day at a family gathering, stuffing ourselves with doro wat, kitfo, anchote, rafu, and other stews on top of the budeena (a.k.a., injira, the traditional Ethiopian pancake-like bread), and catching up with relatives of Maya’s whom neither of us had ever met before. Luckily, during this family gathering we were able to recruit someone to join us on our trip, Juwar, born and raised in Addis but has lived in Maryland, not far from Maya’s family.

So, early Monday morning, just as the sun began to rise, the five of us set out for Wollega. Our group was me, Maya, Maya’s youngest aunt Lensa, our new friend Juwar, and our trusty driver and all-around righteous dude Tesfa. I’m afraid the trip had a mix of different purposes, a little mixing of business, pleasure, and family, so there isn’t much coherence, and it may not seem like it has much to do with film and media at first, but bear with me, and hopefully you’ll see. And when I say “see,” you’ll have to rely on my descriptions and theorizations, because I haven’t had time to process all the photos and transfer them to a USB jump-drive to bring to the internet cafe where I am now.

For those of you who don’t know Ethiopia’s geography, the drive into Wollega is extraordinarily beautiful. The elevation is between 7000 and 8000 feet (which is about 2000 to 3000 feet higher than the Appalachian mountains in America.) One goes up and down mountains and valleys, crosses over small rivers, and drives past what essentially is hundreds of kilometers of farmland. Even during the dry cold season after the crops have already been harvested (i.e., now in December), it is still lush, and when one looks down from the mountain onto the valley spread out below, it looks like a patchwork of different colors with fields of a variety of crops such as tef (the nutritious grain used to make budeena), corn, chickpeas, and pasture for cattle. We drove past groves of mango, banana, avocado, papaya, and other trees such as the tall and straight poplar tree, and small towns of small houses made of mud or clay walls and either thatch or corrugated tin roofs. Juwar remarked that it reminded him of the Shire from J.R.R. Tokien’s novels The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Our ultimate destination was the coffee farm owned by Maya’s grandfather in the town of Bodji, and upon arrival at their stately home, we compared it to Eden. The home itself almost feels like a nineteenth-century American farm with a well for water, a woodshed out back, a beautiful garden, and a patio where we all rested after our journey and had coffee and a dish called irridibu, which is freshly made budeena basted with spiced butter. Nothing tastes better than fresh, home-made bread out in the country. We also noted the ironic juxtaposition of essentially old, traditional forms of life and the new forms. Throughout the region, one sees mud huts with satellite dishes, people driving carts pulled by donkeys while talking on their cell phones, streams of children walking miles to a school where they study an academic curriculum that comes from who-knows-where, and young boys herding cattle down a major highway recently build by the Chinese government. Indeed, this road had only been completed a couples months before we arrived, which made our trip significantly easier and faster, for otherwise we would have needed an SUV to manage tedious unpaved roads. Such a mixture of old and new, local and foreign, is precisely the sort of paradox of globalization that I taught last spring in a special course that utilized various internet technologies to connect American and Ethiopian students.

Our first destination on Monday was the city of Nekemte, where after driving for many hours across gorgeous landscape, I met with the president of Wollega University, a new regional state university created just six years ago. The school is rapidly expanding as part of the federal government’s commitment to regional development and national integration. My guess is that the Chinese investment in the roads helps somewhat, but I also notice that the Ministry of Education seems to deliberately send students to campuses in other regions, which I assume is intended to contribute to national integration. Wollega University also recruits faculty from other countries, especially India, for medical sciences and information science & technology. They also have exchange programs with schools in Italy, Netherlands, and Norway, and they are in the midst of talks with the U.S. embassy about possible connections with American schools since they want American faculty to participate in their English language and literature program. At the same time, they are creating a folklore department to study local cultures and have plans for fostering local arts and media (including film.) Of course, media and folklore go together, since the documentation of folklore is essentially oral and visual, i.e., documentary film. I could not help but notice that the work of so-called “development” and “globalization” always seems to be followed by a renewed interest in preserving local culture, and I think this paradox needs to be theorized more deeply by Ethiopian scholars, government officials, artists, and film-makers. The key word that I’ve been hearing for the past week and a half is “development,” but the problem that I also see with the “development” ideology is that it is as much ideological as it is practical, sometimes blind to the very economic opportunities it is supposedly meant to foster as well as to the cultural dynamics that should be obvious, but aren’t.

After this short visit of an hour, I then visited the Mekane Yesus church compound in Nekemte, where Maya and I met with Fenan, the country coordinator for Resources for the Enrichment of African Lives (REAL) – the organization that we had briefly met in Addis last week and that our documentarian Jennifer had briefly filmed. REAL’s mission is to help teenage girls who have lost their parents so that they can go to college and become leaders. Fenan was once one of the students herself and now mentors others. That was Monday, and we had been up since 5:00 a.m., driven 325 km, and met with two organizations, so I was ready for a couple beers and some shekla (a delicious food which is basically spicy meat served in stoneware pot in which it is still being cooked by coals underneath.)

The next day (Tuesday) was to be devoted to family. We woke up very early for our long trip ahead, but soon after we woke up, the electricity went out in the whole neighborhood, and we found ourselves in pitch darkness, so Maya had to shower by the light of her cell phone. We then drove to the small city of Gimbi where we had breakfast, and then continued on to the country town of Bodji. I have already described how beautiful this terrain is and the lovely house of Maya’s family. After some visiting with relatives, we drove a couple miles to where the coffee farm is and hiked around the tef field and coffee plants. Next, we visited the Bodji Deremedji primary and secondary school that Juwar’s grandfather had built, and Juwar talked to administrators about his grandfather’s legacy. Coincidentally, Maya’s mother, uncles, and aunts had all attended that school, and so for Lensa it was a bit of a walk down memory lane. We then drove back to Gimbi and relaxed at the hotel, where unfortunately Maya caught a bug in her stomach resulting in necessary religious devotions to the porcelain god. Wednesday morning, we woke up bright and early, drove to Nekemte where we had breakfast. I had chechebsa, which is made from a fried doughy bread called keeta mixed with the spiced butter, along with scrambled eggs and honey. In some ways, Ethiopia really is the land of milk and honey. In other ways, it is a land of staggering poverty. In a society whose culture is essentially based on farming, those who have no land will struggle to survive. The question of land is central, I believe. For the five of us travelers, it was painful to see some of our own relatives unable to make ends meet at the same time that other relatives appear quite prosperous. After breakfast, we went to the Wollega Museum where I learned that the Oromo culture in Wollega values farming and land and that, traditionally, skilled professionals such as blacksmiths were somewhat isolated from the rest of the community. This cultural bias has changed since the People’s Revolution in 1974 that began to democratize the country, but I wonder if it persists in some less visible ways. I also learned that there is significant diversity in Wollega, both Christians and Muslims, and not just Oromos, but also communities that have migrated from the very environmentally different Gambella region as well as the Jebelawi community from Assosa. Now that the southern Sudan is so rife with conflict, I wonder how many people from there might migrate to Wollega in the near future.

On our return home (on what is Christmas day in Europe and America, but just an ordinary day here in Ethiopia where Christmas occurs on January 7), we again drove past miles and miles of beautiful farmland as well as miles of miles of poverty. On the roadside, either squatting or standing, but always looking for the car around the bend, people sold coal, avocados, pumpkins, lumber, sugar cane, corn, beautifully carved wood utensils, and even dirt (for the walls of homes.) Women walked carrying bundles of firewood on their backs or gallons of water – “hewers of wood and drawers of water” — the classic biblical formula for the hard labor of women and servants (a biblical formula brilliantly discussed in its eighteenth-century transatlantic context in Rediker and Linebaugh’s awesome work of history, Many-Headed Hydra.) As we got closer to Addis, we also drove past miles of industrial-scale greenhouses cultivating flowers and other things for export. We also experienced the “traffic-cop” phenomenon that I had seen in the locally produced movie just last week. Traffic cops will frequently post themselves in the road and stop vehicles in hopes of taking bribes. Since I was the only white non-Ethiopian in the car, our driver insisted that I sit in the front seat with him since the traffic-cops were more likely to let us go if they saw me there. We dubbed this the “Ferenji pass” (ferenji being the word for foreigner), so essentially my official “job” in the car was “being white.” On the 432 km journey back from Gimbi to Addis, we were stopped ten times (five in the Wollega district, five in the Shoa district, in case anyone wants to keep score), and usually we were just waved on (the ferenji pass), but twice we were searched (once in Wollega, once in Shoa), and one cop hinted that the presence of a ferenji meant the driver could afford the bribe. We never paid a cent. I decided to make a drinking game out of this, since Juwar had procured some home-made arak liquor in Nekemte, and he and I took a swig after every encounter.

As I reflected on all of these local-global paradoxes, I wondered how the economy and culture of Wollega might soon change since the road has been completed (two months ago, just in time for my trip.) For instance, would the new highway and new presence of universities bring industrialization to the region? Since I noticed that some of the children were confused about the difference between “ferenji” (the word for European) and “China” (the word for all Asians), would they start learning Chinese in Wollega? Would the khat trade (which I have written about [here]) expand now that it could be exported more quickly, as it did in other regions after highways were completed there? I wondered what my Ethiopian students would have to teach me about this in the days and years to come. What movies might they make to dramatize this complexity?

This is going to be a short and quick blog post. I would write later, but this is my last night in the hotel with wi-fi, so I’m not sure when I will have a chance to blog again. As I mentioned in the first paragraph of my Finfinne Diary of December 16th, our trip had a number of goals. I outlined four, but in my haste I forgot to mention one of them — the investigation of possible topics for documentary film projects. Towards that goal, in addition to meeting with girls from the Resources for the Enrichment of African Lives project that I mentioned before, our documentarian Jennifer Dworkin returned to the studio of Paulos Regassa with some of the Sandscribe Communications students and has spent some time later with the students themselves. We will also meet with the Gudina Tumsa Foundation tomorrow, and then most of our official work will be done. Stephen Greenwald has already left, and tonight I got to finally spend some time with Maya’s grandparents and other relatives.

The previous night (Thursday) we invited the scholar Alessandro Jedlowski out to dinner with us again and also the young film-maker whom we had met at Addis Ababa University and whose film we had gone to the cinema to watch the night before (as I described in my blog post for 18 December 2013). Happily, my wife Maya, who had just arrived the night before, could join us also.

Most of the past two days (Thursday and Friday) have been various meetings with a diverse group of government officials at various locations in the city. We had intentionally left Friday wide open on our schedule just in case something came up or to do a little tourism, but it ended up being our busiest day of the week. Possibly, after our public presentation on Tuesday, some word got around about our trip, or possibly just serendipity, but in any case, Dhaba got some calls from worthy individuals. Out of respect for those officials who met with us, I will refrain from mentioning their names or posting photographs here, but let me just say that we did get to see the inside of Parliament, which was cool. We have learned a lot about the current state of film and media in Ethiopia from all these meetings, and I hope we were able to contribute something useful as well and that they will lead to great things in the future.

From here on, although I will continue to follow through with my research and the various goals of the trip here and there, I will mostly be spending time with Maya and her family, and we plan to travel west about 250 miles to the Wollega region where her family comes from. I don’t know if I will be able to blog again until I return on Wednesday.

When I blogged about our trip in Oromia-Ethiopia two days ago, I had some foolish notion that I could actually write a blog post every night, but last night we were having too much fun, out on the town in Addis Ababa with colleagues and friends at a delicious Italian restaurant called Grani de Pepe, that houses the environmentally  conscious Slow Food shop organized by my friend Roba Bulga. After some delicious food, delicious company, and probably too much wine, we returned to our hotel quite late. And tonight, my wife Maya will be arriving at the airport, so once again, I will be writing as fast as I possibly can, and I apologize if it is just a list of events streaming past — we’ve been so busy these past two days that “streaming past” is precisely what it felt like.

So, to catch up, we continued to pursue our agenda that I laid out in the first paragraph of my last post. First, Stephen Greenwald and I visited the premier national university of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa University (AAU) where we met with the chair of the Theater Department, Dr. Aboneh, the chair of the Communications and Journalism Department, Dr. Negeri, a couple of their graduate students who work on film, and of couple of journalists who graduated from that program. The journalists, not coincidentally, also took the transnational class on film and globalization that I taught last spring that connected a classroom of American students with a classroom of Ethiopian students. One of our topics was the discipline of film studies, which some faculty at AAU are interested in creating there. While we were having this discussion, Jennifer Dworkin was at Rift Valley University College where she held the second class for Sandscribe Communications on documentary film-making.

The next big event, as I promised to talk about at the conclusion of my last post, was the grand event — a three-hour panel discussion on the production and distribution of film in Ethiopia and the possibilities for its development. The panel included Sandscribe’s founder Dhaba Wayessa who explained the reason for Sandscribe’s existence — to create a climate for young people to make creative and socially responsible films — and the point of the panel — to explore this question and get feedback from an audience that included students, professors, media professionals, businessmen, and government officials all interested in this topic. Next up was Sandscribes’ managing officer who reported on the surveys he conducted about the viewing habits of film-goers in Addis. Third was the visiting scholar Alessandro Jedlowski who gave a brief overview of his extensive research comparing different African film industries. Fourth, Stephen Greenwald outlined the key ingredients of a sustainable film industry and what he had learned about Ethiopia’s strengths and weaknesses when measured against that standard. Last, I ran the discussion organized around key questions and points brought by the panelists and solicited feedback from our audience and the diverse expertise that it represented. The discussion was lively and attentive.

One unexpected bonus for me at both Addis Ababa University and the Sandscribe panel at Rift Valley was the chance to meet some of the students from last spring’s class. It is also wonderful for a teacher to discover that his teaching mattered to someone, and I was overjoyed that some of them were there and could pose with us for this group photo. I was even more moved when I discovered to learn that the conversations my class had started about the globalization of the film industry were still continuing. We capped off a great day by going out to dinner as I mentioned above.

me and Berhanu

Another fortunate consequence of the panel discussion is that it created enough buzz that it generated more opportunities for us. One person in the audience, Wosenyelleh Tilahun,  is a businessman working for nascent production and distribution company, Sebastopol Films in Addis. Wosenyelleh had also taken my class while he was simultaneously translating another film criticism textbook from English into Amharic. This morning we visited one of the studies and theaters and discussed the business with us and the goals of his company, including the new theaters it had built. After this visit, we stopped by the Mekane Yesus Seminary, which is where Sandscribe ran its first workshops back in 2011 and 2012, to visit with its President Dr. Belay and its director of the music and media program Bereket Melese. We returned to our hotel to be interviewed by Mr. Berhanu, a journalist for the English-language newspaper The Ethiopian Herald. Meanwhile, Jennifer had gone to film interviews with three girls who are part of the REAL program to provide opportunities for disadvantaged.

Next on our agenda was a conversation with Mr. Mesfin Dereje at the Oromia Radio and Television Organization Office. As many readers of this blog may already know, most of the radio and all of the television in Ethiopia is a state-run enterprise. Only recently, in 2008, has this enterprise diversified somewhat with new regional stations, such as Oromia’s, that can broadcast in the local languages. We discussed this historical change as well as the challenges of television programming in Ethiopia.

We capped off the evening by going to one of the government cinemas and watching a locally produced romantic comedy about a female traffic cop who falls in love with a taxi driver. The film was actually produced by one of the graduate students whom we had met at Addis Ababa University the day before, and happily her brother met us at the door and helped us understand some of the story (since there were no subtitles.) It was a delightful movie, and what we all agreed that we most liked about it was its attention to details of the ordinary lives of working-class people.

All of these events and conversations have given me a lot to think about, and I have learned a lot. I wish I could devote some time to reflecting on the events now or even just add some more hyperlinks, but it is well past midnight and instead I must go to the airport to pick up my wife. Fortunately, tomorrow has a less intense schedule.

I am writing from the Bole Ambassador Hotel in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city, also known by its Oromo name, Finfinne. It is late at night, and tomorrow I have another busy schedule, so I hope you will excuse the hasty and sloppy style of my writing in this blog post, but I wanted to speedily tell about my trip so my friends, family, and colleagues back home could follow my experiences day-by-day. My colleagues Stephen Greenwald (director of film and media initiatives at Wagner College), Jennifer Dworkin (documentary film-maker), and I arrived in Ethiopia late Saturday night to join my good friend and collaborator, Dhaba Wayessa (Voice of America journalist and all-around renaissance man) who travelled ahead of us to prepare for our project. Our trip has several goals: (1) to continue my ongoing research about the cultural history of America’s relationship to Ethiopia, (2) to investigate the state of cinema in Ethiopia and the potential for its development, (3) to give two quick, introductory seminars for Sandscribe Communications on the business of film and documentary film-making, and (4) to look for potential partners for education abroad opportunities and international exchange with the college where I work in New York.

On Sunday, I woke up and went for a quick jog around the neighborhood and soon discovered that either I hadn’t had enough sleep after 20 or so hours of airplane travel or wasn’t used to the high altitude of Addis Ababa (almost 8,000 feet above sea level.) After breakfast, we all met to discuss the agenda for the week, go out for lunch, and do a little tourism, driving up the forested Mount Entoto above Addis and checking out the Church of St. Mary, the site that inaugurated the religious dimension of the colonization of the Oromo town by the Abyssinian empire.

documentarian Jennifer Dworkin captures Paolos Regassa’s work as Stephen Greenwald, Dhaba Wayessa, and Alessandro Jedlowski look on

Today, Monday, we began our work and were joined by the scholar from Italy Alessandro Jedlowski, currently doing postdoctoral study in Belgium on the production and distribution of film in Africa. We began by meeting with a local entrepreneur to discuss the state of finance and the legal framework business in Ethiopia. Though not directly related to film and the goals of our trip, the question of capital investment and the rather unique system that governs business in Ethiopia is germane to the potential for film production. After an unexpectedly entertaining and surreal — and therefore especially useful — conversation, we drove to visit the studio of a brilliant local film-maker named Paulos Regassa, director of the dramatic film Ashenge and many documentaries, to discuss the challenges and opportunities of making films in Ethiopia.

We then went for lunch and briefly met with someone from Resources for the Enrichment of African Lives (REAL), an organization that provides mentors and support for disadvantaged girls in the Oromia region of Ethiopia and in the United States to discuss the possibility of filming a few of the girls in the organization.

Stephen Greenwald, Steven Thomas, and Dhaba Wayessa with a few Rift Valley University College faculty and administrators

After lunch, we all traveled to the Bole campus of the extensive Rift Valley University College. There, Dhaba, Steve G., and Steve T. met with several faculty and administrators. We explained our goals (as I outlined them above), and they explained the history of their school, and we discussed possible points of mutual interest and future endeavors. They were a wonderful and enthusiastic group. Meanwhile, Jennifer led a workshop on documentary film with some Sandscribe Communications students. Later in the evening, we were treated to a tasty dinner at the Hilton Hotel by the president of Rift Valley, Dinku Deyasa.

At some point, I want to theorize about one of the main topics of conversation that we had to today and the many things I learned regarding the question of film and media production in Ethiopia, since theorizing is the sort of thing that I usually do in this blog, but it is now midnight, and tomorrow is another busy day, and that is precisely the question that all of us will formally give a public presentation about tomorrow afternoon. Stay tuned!