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.
Film and Media 
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