Decorating my New Home Ethiopian Style

Rats don’t come as high as the first floor, so that’s one less thing to worry about. I’m living in a condominium now, situated right at a busy street. Bajajs, damasses, horse and carriage, every means of transportations rattles by. When I enter through the gate, a guard humbly bows, and we exchange a ‘salaam new’. It’s a little muddy at the moment, with the loads of rain we are getting. But you better take your dirty shoes off in my new apartment. It’s on the first floor, middle apartment, the one with the barred windows and door. As I sit here on my sofa writing, a girl walked up to my window, placed her hands on it, and elaborately scanned my new place. I waved, and when she discovered me, she was momentarily shocked, then a big smile appeared and she waved back enthusiastically. You get a lot of looks here, whatever the state of your appearance. Right now, there are not even ten white people in a city of hundred thousand. They stop, stare, say ‘hi’. Ask you where you go, tell you they love you, that you look ‘delicious’ and that they wanna marry you at first sight. And I’m not even blond.

Anyways, the new couch I bought already has a history. On Saturday, I went shopping with Magdas, the cleaning lady of the family I work for. At ten past nine she arrived, just ten minutes late. The week before I had inquired what time she got up on Saturdays. Six, she said. So, I figured we could easily meet at 8 or 9. But when I called her at nine, she was still in bed. Turns out, she was talking Ethiopian time: If you subtract six  hours you’ll get the biblical time they use. Still pretty on time, we first went for buna, local coffee. We sat outside, on a heightened, covered veranda and watched the rain. Magdas got into a conversation with some guys sitting there and one of them offered to bring us to a store that sold couches. We followed him and came in a store full of shiny coffee tables and just one couch. Huge one. If that was all they had, I asked. Nope, after some talking they took a key and could we were guided up the stairs. Up in the building, a few floors higher, there was the entire collection. Maybe thirty sets of couches, chairs pushed into one room, leaving barely enough space to manoeuver around. They had some really nice ones. ‘Cente birr?’, I asked? 50 000, about twelve hundred euros. When we were on the way, I had explained Magdas my budget, only 5 000. Well, that clearly hadn’t helped. We kindly thanked the guys who had brought us upstairs and we continued our search. Prices in Ethiopia can sometimes be absurdly high, other times, pretty low. For example, a twenty-year old car can cost you 40 000 euro’s, whereas a for a cup of coffee you pay twenty cents.

So, we left and first bought some kitchenware. I contacted another Ethiopian lady and she directed Magdas to another shop for a cheap sofa. Magdas now explained the situation clearly, because we had to put our bags down and follow another guy. A truck door was opened and we were to enter. Me, in the middle. Now this was a vehicle with one-and-half seat on the drivers’ side, then the poke, then another seat. Although I sat nice and cosy against the driver, we realized Dutch legs are too long for operating the poke during the drive. Switch. A couple streets farther, we entered a closed lot. A lock was removed from the door and we were welcomed into some storage barn, full of junk. No lights. Broken furniture everywhere. In the back corner they started moving some stuff around. A piece of couch appeared. In the mean time, I was convinced this was a waste of everyone’s time as I was never gonna buy damaged furniture. Turned out, the couch I’m sitting on was the only whole piece of furniture in the entire building, for exactly the price I had mentioned to Magdas. Not a beauty, but it looked solid. I even got an extra pillow as a ‘gift’ which I believed belonged to the couch in the first place. Then we got it transported, a pillow fell in the mud, ‘no worries’ said Magdas, ‘I clean.’ The guys who brought it upstairs received half the money, plus tip for transportation, converted to two, three euro’s, a days’ worth of salary. The other half of the money they would receive when they would give a receipt. The majority of the Ethiopians simply don’t make receipts, because they don’t want to pay tax. But it got handled, and voila, a couch to sit upon.

We painted the rooms in the apartment. Here you have to mix the paint yourself, so I picked dark blue for the bedroom. Bright blue it became. O, and you probably know me, as fast as I wanted to go, the paint was not thoroughly mixed, resulting in some lighter and darker patches. The curtain is hung Ethiopian style, when you want to open it, you just push both sides to the middle, and there you go. The rest of the house was meant to be mint green, but turned out a little brighter, sea green. Combine that with white-and-black tiled plastic, bought by Magdas after another miscommunication, and you’ve got quite the mix.

This apartment was by far the best when they searched for living space. The tap leaks, and is pretty flexible. If you want to open the kitchen window, you can simply move the sink and the tap and it’s all good. The bathroom is probably the least desirable place to be. It looks gross, even after cleaning it multiple times. I found a plastic bottle, a broom, a sandal and other shoe articles. However, the worst is the fact that the plumbers have been very generous with the cement, it’s laying everywhere. We made a handle to flush the toilet, a piece of wood tied with a rope. Now it occasionally fills up, flushes half the time, and leaks always.

Still, I like life in the condominium so far. My own space, a territory where I can sing, laugh, talk and chill out.