WhyTravel

The Addis Ababa Sheraton Hotel is a beauty. The yellow-frosted, white-columned building is perched on a hill. You can admire its wedding-cake splendor on the long road as it winds its way up.

It was the first time my work team was summoned to the Addis Sheraton by our hosts from the U.S. government. The image I remember most clearly is not the yellow-cake palace, but what lay at the foot of the winding road: a squatters’ community. Squatters. Community. “Community” is the common parlance, but to me that is odd. The word seems to require a pool with a club house, tennis courts, perhaps a golf course. And carbon-copy mini villas surrounding one or more of those features. And it’s probably located in Florida. A UN-Habitat report from around that time calls them “informal settlements”. I hope you’ll excuse me, but for the rest of this piece I’ll be calling them “slums”.

Our white air-conditioned minivan turned left at a corner onto the road that wound its way up the hill to the hotel. The approach to the hotel is long, no doubt intended to impress the visitor further. The Sheraton is the nicest hotel in Addis. But my body was twisted in my seat – sandwiched between two co-workers – still watching the view behind us as it receded. The clump of flattened cardboard boxes, thin branches lashed together with rope, and plastic tarps comprised the dwellings, a sheet or two of corrugated tin for a more fortunate family.

A child in a T-shirt and underpants squatted in the dirt in front of one, a finger poking into a puff of dust. I did not see a parent, but perhaps she was behind the cotton sheet that hung over what I supposed was a doorway.

A dog trotted by the child. Dogs are not pets here; they live outside like many of the people do. But the dogs of course procreate and they have to eat too. They spend their lives, like the people, scrounging what they can from the streets.

By the time we reached the security guard at the hotel entrance, passed the parade of international flags along the driveway, and alighted from the minivan, the slum village was well out of view. Out of the view of everyone I was with, it seemed, except for me. It was burned in my brain and I had to look through a filmy version of it to see, to make sure I didn’t slip on the marble lobby floors or trip up the gold-carpeted staircase to the ballroom.

We were guests at a U.S. government gala. There was a buffet lined with silver chafing dishes, an open bar set up on either side of the ballroom, standing tables topped with white tablecloths and vases of flowers. The gala was put on by the U.S. government to honor an Ethiopian government minister, so his crew was there as well. At some point, a band played. I couldn’t see the room well. It was too dark or I’d forgotten my glasses or something and the hazy image of the slum still persisted in my view. I tried to snack on something deep fried on a skewer, but couldn’t.

An Ethiopian friend and colleague told me the minister being honored was her cousin. After the party, in front of the hotel, she introduced me to him. He connected with my gaze and flashed me a glittery smile as he climbed into the back of his German sedan. The slum veil must have lifted by then, because that I could see clearly.

I was anxious to get back into the minivan, to drive back down that twisting road into life, into reality again. It was dark by the time we wound down the driveway. I strained to see out the minivan window, but the glare of a cell phone screen and reflections on the glass prevented me from seeing anything but the dark shapes and shadows of the small slum. But I knew there was not a patch of green or a plant growing anywhere around the slum.

Where was the bathroom? Their water supply? Their money supply? Where did they find food? Did they shop? Did they work for pay somewhere? Read? Beg? Use public transport if they had somewhere to go? No doctors, no schools for the kids, I am sure. Each one lived a life of however many years he or she has on that red-orange patch of earth. Doing what? Loving whom?