Grabbed, Kissed and Followed

On my first morning in Addis, I woke to the sounds of chickens on my doorstep and the Muslim call to prayer.

I went to a little café across the road from my hotel for breakfast, everything was white inside – the walls, the floors, the tables the seats, it was decorated with excessively ornate wall hangings and glass centrepieces, it was quite garish actually. Nothing on the menu looked especially Ethiopian so I ordered a coffee and a croissant with egg.

When the food arrived I tried to remember what Mika had told me about the strict rules around eating in Ethiopia: Never, ever use your left hand to eat, never let food touch your hand above the knuckles and never lick your fingers. It was quite challenging trying to pull the croissant apart with one hand.

I also tried to learn some basic Amharic but each phrase is different depending on whether you are talking to a man or woman, and sometimes it changes depending on your own gender and the age of the person you are talking to, which effectively meant I had to learn each word in 2-4 different ways. I gave up on the language lesson before it had really begun and sat and stared out the window instead. I watched a mule lug a large load up a hill with a young boy on its heals hitting its bum with a stick. Taxis and BMWs swerved around it beeping and I marvelled at such a unique sight.

The first guy I met on that first day in Addis was named Tom. He took me to a shop to buy a sim card for my phone and what I liked most about him was that when I wanted to leave he let me. He didn’t beg or demand that I stay with him longer and he didn’t follow me for blocks like all the other men did that day. The only thing I didn’t clue onto straight away was that because he set up my phone for me, he had my new phone number, but I wouldn’t realise that until the next day.

After meeting Tom I had a series of run-ins with local men.

On two separate occasions I was nearly robbed. The first time, a man was walking along the street beside me and subtly got closer and closer. It was hard to tell if it was just the result of having to walk in over-crowded streets or if he was trying to sleaze on to me. But then he gingerly put his hand in my pocket and I shoved him away. The second time I had a guy run up to me and grab my ankles. Another man appeared out of thin air and also tried his hand in my pocket. I screamed and they both ran off and I thought with relief how much worse it would be if I had a bag with me.

The other big bother of the day was John. He claimed to work for a newspaper and at first I believe him because he seemed to know a lot about Australian politics and Julia Gillard. But he gave me that same creepy feeling I had gotten in Ghana from the guy on the bridge that was chased away from me by protective locals who knew he was up to no good.

Whilst walking along the street with John following closely behind me I was stopped by a preacher man. Even he asked for my number. I lied to him as well as John and said I didn’t have a phone but he made me write down his number.

John would not leave me alone. At first I politely told him I was happy walking alone, then I told him I was meeting a friend at a café which I ducked into quickly, but he waited outside for me. I got angry and told him that he had to leave me alone.

“I am not a bad man! I want to be your friend! I have been nice to you!”

Eventually I shook him off when I said that my male friend was meeting me. The walk back to my hotel I kept looking over my shoulder expecting him to be lurking ten feet away.

So the next morning when Tom called I actually said yes to meeting up with him. My hope was that with him beside me I wouldn’t get harassed by other men or robbed.

He picked me up from the hotel and we walked for over an hour and a half. We stopped at a museum to see the oldest human skeleton ‘Lucy’ and he walked me through the Hilton hotel which was like a mini gated city with its own shops, pools, tennis courts, restaurants and bars and finally we walked to the palace.

I was right about one thing, men didn’t stop and harass me and no one tried to rob me. But he did insist on holding my hand. Which, although it didn’t happen in South Africa at all, and only once in Namibia, I must have been used to it from West Africa because it didn’t even bother me.

We stopped for a traditional Ethiopian lunch. I had been looking forward to trying the food there. When I lived in Amsterdam I had eaten Ethiopian food a couple of times and loved it.

The restaurant was dark and dingy, which I like. Tom took me to a drum of water and placed a small, slimy blue rock of soap into the palm of my hands.

Lunch was a large round pancake, like a ‘family’ sized pizza and on it sat globs of various sauces and some fatty pieces of what I guessed was goat. I had expected the pancake to be warm, but it was cold and damp and it felt just like eating a wet sponge. It was slightly bitter tasting too. With my right hand only I tugged at the wet sponge and scooped up red pieces of dripping sauce. It didn’t taste too bad, if only the sponge (called Injara) had been warm it wouldn’t have been so bad. I was paying more attention to following the strict Ethiopian rules of eating etiquette than I was to the taste of the food.

“Do you chew?” Tom asked me

I was confused… of course I chew, I mean, the food is soft so I suppose I don’t chew a lot, but I definitely chewed.

“No, no… chat! Do you chew chat?”

Considering I had no idea what he was talking about I assumed that I don’t in fact ‘chew chat’.

He took me into an even darker, even dingier bar. It was probably made darker and dingier by the think cloud of suffocating cigarette smoke. The floor was carpeted in sticks and dead leaves, and sitting on up-turned crates and boxes were twenty or so men with bunches of leaves poking out of their mouths.

The leaves that littered the floor was the ‘chat’.

Tom inspected some bunches offered to us and chose two.

He gave me a lesson on how to choose the right leaves, how to roll them into a ball and shove them straight in. The idea is to leave them in one side of your mouth, and chew it over and over before finally swallowing.

So I did. And it tasted exactly like you would imagine chewing a bunch of leaves would taste. It was the swallowing I found hard, it wasn’t a horrible experience, but it wasn’t that great either.

We ordered water and some peanuts which I would use to dull the taste and make the chewing a little easier.

“What is it supposed to do exactly?”

“Makes you feel calm and happy. Gives you tingles. Makes you feel awake.”

I scanned the bar, I was definitely the only woman in there. A few groups of young men with dred-locks sipped Coca-Cola in between the hands-full of leaves they shoved in their gobs, but mostly the bar was occupied by middle aged men, who also had small cups of black coffee and a newspaper. They definitely looked like they had settled in for the entire day.

Five young guys who knew Tom appeared so they sat with us. They were very friendly guys, and all claimed to be Rasta’s. They were funny and interesting and despite the fact that I was constantly struggling to swallow a steady wad of leaves, I was enjoying myself.

That is until Tom kissed me. Right there in the bar in front of his friends. He totally caught me off-guard. And it took me too long to push him off me. I think I mainly didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his friends.

The chat was making my head tingle a bit, but apart from that I wasn’t feeling any other side-effects. Tom kept insisting I chew more, but after the second bunch I had to stop. It was gross, I was feeling ill from the dead forest inside my belly and Tom kept trying to put his hands on my thigh. I kept pushing his hands away and minutes later they’d re-appear. He tried to kiss me again and again I pushed him off. He tried again, and again, and funnily enough he seemed to be the only one there who couldn’t tell he was getting rejected.

I had to say my goodbyes and leave, which I wasn’t happy about because I liked everyone there except for Tom.

Tom followed me out.

“I have a boyfriend back home. I feel sick from the chat. I am tired. I thought we were just friends. I don’t kiss anyone I just meet.”

My excuses were pathetic, but for some reason I felt like I couldn’t act like I would at home in Australia. For some reason I was scared of just saying no, of being assertive. I felt like a mouse in a cage, weak and cornered. He promised not to kiss me again and for some reason I agreed to have a beer with him.

For a little while he seemed to be friendly, he said he wanted to take me North to meet his parents, I regretted being there instantly. He got aggressive and grabbed my breast and tried to kiss me again. I got up, walked away. He followed me and I shoved him so hard he fell back.

I was acutely aware of the fact that he knew where my hotel was.

I tried to get a taxi.

“How much?” I asked through the window.

“Get in and I will tell you” he replied.

“NO. Tell me now, how much?”

“Get in and I will tell you!”

“Forget it!” I said and stormed off. I was marching away angry when the same cab crawled passed. The driver was leaning across his seat leering at me.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I want you in my car!”

I kept walking. He stopped the car and got out. I stood confused when he walked up to me and reached out to grab me.

I didn’t know what to do so I just turned and ran.

I had to weave through the sea of people and I turned back to see the driver get back in his car and drive toward me again.

I continued to duck and weave through the people and made a sharp right turn, and a quick left and just kept my head down and kept running.

I didn’t know where I was, but it was dark and I knew I had the shadows on my side.

Eventually I thought that there was no way I hadn’t lost him. I put my head down and walked all the way back to my hotel, rudely dismissing every person who tried to stop me, talk to me or demand money.

Tom and a bunch of chat

The toilet at the chat bar