Down in the Boondocks

Continuing to fulfill my New Year’s Resolution of going on more intentional adventures, last weekend my friend Tsion and I went beach camping at Lake Langano. Officially the only lake in Ethiopia that is safe to swim in because it doesn’t have shisto. Granted the color of the lake is still very brown, and people bathe, fish, water their animals and do other things in the lake, but it is safe to swim in. This makes it a very popular vacation spot for expats and rich Ethiopians and home to many fancy resorts and beach houses. We, however, stayed at a new place with few frills and plopped our tent down on a piece of sandy real estate. The only campers, while everyone else (2 families) stayed in the fancy cabins. More about that later.

Let me begin by introducing Tsion. Tsion is my first non-peace corps Ethiopian friend that I actually do things with besides drink tea and have lunch. I had Ethiopian friends in Masha, but because of the language barrier and lack of things to do we pretty much either shared a meal or had tea/coffee together. I still consider these people friends, but not real friends. Friends who share secrets, discuss ideas, talk about nothing and go on adventures. Tsion is different though. She is a smart, thoughtful, fun and outgoing person. She spent 8 years living in America so she gets it; she knows my culture, has similar ideas and is a great conversationalist. The coolest thing about her is that after living in America for years, she came back to Ethiopia to help her country. She volunteered as a teacher for a year and is now working with a group of young women at Addis Ababa University studying in male dominated fields as a mentor. When we first met we both expressed that we wished we had more female friends to do things with and how much we want to get outside of the city on the weekends. And now we do.

Over the summer, Tsion is planning to bring her young women on a retreat for their hard work during the academic year. She wanted to bring them camping at Langano, but had never been and needed to check it out. She called me up and we agreed to do a recon mission. After looking at a few of the ritzy resorts we found Karkaro beach camping, which was 80 birr instead of 80 dollars. Besides the water being brown and the rain the first evening, the weekend was beautiful. We camped, swam, sun bathed, read, walked on the shore and explored the area. It was relaxing and fun and everything that summer should be. It also made me very homesick for The River.

While overall it was fantastic, there were a few mishaps. First, the town of Langano is really nothing. A few villagers, no stores or much of anything. Second, Karkaro is really nothing, a place to pitch a tent and cabins. No stores or cafes or much of anything. We didn’t think to bring food; we figured we’d eat out. The first day we survived on breadsticks that we bought on the bus ride for breakfast and some trail mix that my mom had sent in the last care package. Finally, for dinner, the woman working made us 2 eggs and brought bread. For a whopping 50 birr (eggs usually cost 2 birr each, bread 3). Not wanting to do that again, the next morning we set off, determined to find reasonably priced food and not to starve. We found the one and only café in the town and had them make us shiro, a simple Ethiopian dish. Since that was the only place we also took some home for dinner in a plastic bag (imagine putting stew in a bag with a flimsy piece of bread and eating it hours later). Nothing fancy, but it was food.

That evening a few rich children were on the beach. Tsion and I were playing Frisbee and they came over to ask if they could play. Of course we said yes and learned that they were all somehow part of each other’s lives, but not siblings. Two of them lived in Germany, they were all at least half Ethiopian. They were all rich and spoiled. By no fault of theirs, they asked all the wrong questions and made me feel so poor. They looked at our tent and asked if we were sleeping there. When we said “yes” they asked why we just didn’t rent a house. Then they asked how we got there, when we said we took a public bus and then walked they said “oh we have a land cruiser”. Then they asked if we went for a boat ride, when we said “no” they asked why we didn’t go to the adjacent resort and rent jet skis. Up until then we thought we were having an awesome weekend. Then I started the fire. During the process the kids were a bit of a pain, and since they have never been said “no” to, every time I told them to back away or stop throwing sticks on my perfect teepee in a log cabin they laughed and kept doing it. After they finally stopped that, the girl said she was going to take some of my water. Clean water on Lake Langano is hard to find if you are camping. I asked her if she had a tap in her cabin, when she said she did I asked her not to drink it. We had no water sources and between the two of us we had half a liter to last the next 24 hours. She opened it up and nearly poured it out. I had to explain to her that not everyone has access to water and that she was being mean. The last straw was when they asked what we were going to eat for dinner. We answered honestly and said shiro, but both Tsi and I were so embarrassed at this point and we didn’t want to eat out of the plastic bag until the children were far away and unable to judge us. When their parents finally called them inside we had a good laugh at our poverty (Tsion actually isn’t poor, but she just moved into her own place and is spending her money on settling in. She is also a fellow budget traveler). The whole time we found the food and water situation a little funny, but didn’t realize how bizarre our lifestyle seemed to rich people. Those kids will probably always remember the crazy Ethiopian and white girl on what seemed to them a badass retreat, when really it was just how we do.