Nov 29   Saturday going to the market

Andreas and Susanne Neudorf, the German SIL couple in whose house I am staying while here in Asosa, left this morning to return to the capital city. That means that I will be responsible for my own meals for the next two weeks, so I made a visit to the market this morning.

The Neudorfs arranged for a friend of theirs, a young man named Wendemu who has a shoeshine stand near their house here, to accompany me to the market and help me buy what I need. The plan was for him to come by the house at 9:00 and take me first to an eatery near the market where I could get some good “ful,” a bean dish that I had been wanting to try, but hadn’t yet tasted. Then we would get the things on my shopping list and head back to the house. Today was one of those rare occasions where things actually went as planned!

The beans were served with bread and a fresh salad consisting of lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. I ate all of the beans, half of the bread, and none of the salad. (The salad looked very colorful and appetizing, but I try to avoid eating fresh fruits and vegetables in Africa unless I know that they have been purged of all the microscopic critters that can be hiding on them, and which would wreak havoc in my gastrointestinal tract. I was already full from the beans anyway, so I left the salad.)

As Wendemu led me into the market, the first thing I saw was lots of straw—two-wheeled carts piled full of bags of it, donkeys carrying two bags each, and people carrying one bag each. When I traveled south from Addis Ababa to Amaaro four weeks ago, I saw lots of “t’ef” being harvested. (T’ef is the local grain whose flour is used to bake the staple Ethiopian food—“injera,” which is similar to a large crêpe.) As we traveled back north some three weeks later, much of the t’ef had been threshed and there were piles of straw for sale along the road. I’m not sure what the straw is used for, but there seems to be an active market for it. The first 100 yards or so of the road leading into the Asosa market were lined with people offering straw for sale.

I don’t know what you think of when you hear the word “market,” but I suspect that it is something rather different from what I experienced here in Asosa. First of all, think “open air.” There is no building that defines the boundaries of the market. There are some semi-permanent structures consisting of four upright poles and a few crosspieces fastened together, with some sort of “roof” to provide shelter from sun and rain—I will refer to these as “stands.” But much of the market area consists of bare ground, upon which sellers spread a cloth, a tarp, or some such thing on which to sit and display their merchandise.

The stands, since they are semi-permanent, provide some structure for the layout of the market, giving some indication as to the placement of the alleys that the shoppers should use to navigate their way through the “mall.” But where there were no stands, the indication of pedestrian passageways dwindled to the point where I was unable to distinguish them.

Once past the straw, our journey took us on a zigzag path along the market alleys, past piles of plastic bowls, basins, and buckets, tomatoes in various stages of ripeness (from green to past their prime), cabbages ranging in size from 4 to 10 inches in diameter, garlic arranged in piles that in spite of their small size nevertheless consisted of five times the amount I would use in two weeks, pumpkins of various sizes and colors—the larger ones cut into pieces of salable size, whole regimes of bananas from which one could buy the quantity desired, piles (or baskets or boxes) of chicken eggs, potatoes sold by the kilogram, and much, much more.

When we got to the less-structured part of the market, I did my best to follow in Wendemu’s footsteps, seemingly stepping almost on both people and merchandise as we made our way to where the egg-sellers had taken up temporary residence. They had come from their homes, transporting eggs in large baskets or boxes, simply packed between bits of straw, from what I could tell. I was amazed that half the eggs hadn’t cracked during the journey! When Wendemu ordered my 10 eggs, the woman he had chosen to buy them from inspected each one in the sunlight to make sure that there was not a developing chick inside it. Those that didn’t pass the test were rejected, until she found 10 that she was satisfied with. (Andreas tried to teach me how to conduct this “light test,” but I was unable to see any light through the egg when I tried it. I’ll just have to trust Wendemu to get me the kind of eggs I’m expecting, I guess.)

There were a few things on my shopping list that Wendemu could not find in the market, so we stopped at a “souk” on the way back to the house, where I was able to buy those last items. A “souk” (pronounced like “soup” except for the final consonant) in the Ethiopian context is a small shop.

When we arrived back at the house, I thanked Wendemu and paid him for his time, then soaked in a potassium permanganate solution all of my things that would be eaten raw, in order to kill any of those microscopic organisms that have the potential to wreak great havoc in the gut of a person like me who has no acquired resistance to their effects.

After that I rested, feeling tired from the effort of walking 2-3 miles and carrying 10 pounds of produce in my backpack for the last mile, but also because I had not been feeling so well for the previous couple of days. My digestive system seems not to be working at 100%, so that I often feel full, even when I am hungry. I am planning to get a lot of rest this weekend, hoping that everything will get sorted out by Monday morning.