Bekah in Ethiopia 3.10.08

Hello world! Or, Salaam as they say here. So....we have arrived. Its been real crazy so far & also beautiful, spinningly. Outside the window is green & green & mountains & stacks of houses. Birds are diving kamikaze-style. Somebody is singing from the back of their throat and it sounds like water ripples that he's moving up and down to make the sound. I wish I could sing like that... Roads are packed, color-swarms. I keep wishing I had 10 or 20 more eyes to look at everything with. Inside the taxi we were just in the driver had a photo of Haile Selassie and a teletubbies sticker. A boy reached in to try to sell me a 50 cent tape-I thought that was hilarious...

I keep getting struck (as in-Arrow to the heart) by how crazy-beautiful everybody is. Ugly people are really hard to find...I swear its something in the water (I know, I know I can't help it I'm corny :) ) ...Everyone is so proud of their history, it really makes BE-ing in a place. Within the first few minutes of talking they tell us about how Ethiopia was never colonized and that all of us have this great-great-great (times a million) grandma who lives here. Her name is Lucy and I hear she's really small.

It has been a brain-squeeze (the kind that ouches and messes up your chest) to be put up in the fancy Hilton hotel while outside little kids are hustling hard for their money. Their hustle is....guess what...us! Or, guiding us foreigners round town. Our first friend is also a guide. His name is Jimmy (after Jimmy Carter). He wears a rainbow one love bracelet on his arm. He was telling us some funny stories (funny, like how ignorance is funny because it makes it swallow-able) about foreigners who come here with ideas about how Ethiopia is starving...apparently this one business man came and his wife had packed him all this food because she thought there wasn't going to be any here. While we were walking with Jimmy to share some pizza (yes, pizza) I saw this graffiti somebody had scrawled on a wall "my name is love"- thats the big feeling I've gotten from the people here, and it gave me a small poem in my head that goes like-

us of one heart
us of the dirty planet
all belong....

Today we met with the IPAS people, and tomorrow we're moving to a "countryside location" where Lisa is gonna start filming about unsafe abortion. The meeting was intense but not scary like I thought. I got to watch Lisa do her thing, and she does it very fancy. The woman was talking about how illegal abortion here is a huge problem..a lot of women are dying because of it. Also I found out that a lot of abortion here is done without anesthesia or pain killers (I can't even say ouch or make a noise to describe that)....so thats really horrifying to me..but also I see how this film is even more important than I thought...

I don't think I'll be able to write for the next 4 or 5 days....
so in the mean time
love-love-love and hugs and uhhhh...all things fuzzy,
-Bekah

ps. apparently in Amheric one of the languages here, "Be-kah" means "Enough!"...
just thought that was funny
pps. Lisa says hi!
okayokaybye...for real now....