Accidental Foreshadowing

J-I have a quick note to make about this blog before I tell my next story.  We only post from time to time because the internet situation here is less than ideal.  Still, whenever we have something that we want to post later, we write it out and save it on the computer so that we can do a mass posting next time we get a solid connection.  That being said, we don’t go back and edit/change former things that we’ve written so that one story will flow nicely into the next.  This is what I mean when I call this post “accidental foreshadowing,” because it has everything to do with the last paragraph of my last post.

We went out for dinner with 4 other PCTs on our last night in Addis.  We chose to go to a place called The Picnic Basket which was about a ten minute walk from the hotel we were staying at.  Three of the people in our group were guys, and two of them are more or less the biggest guys in our program, so we assumed that it was going to be a pretty uneventful walk.  Our walk home proved just how long and eventful ten minutes can be.

Within seconds of leaving the restaurant, a man walks up to us and says “I have tried to maintain my dignity but you fucking parasites….”  Yeah, this guy was obviously deranged, but dash it all if he didn’t have a pretty impressive vocabulary.  Luckily he was too in his own little world to bother us further, so he just kind of shambled off down the sidewalk in the opposite direction that we needed to go.  Then we were approached by a man who informed us of the shocking fact that that guy was crazy! 

This new man again spoke impressive English, and he decided that he really, really wanted to talk to one of the guys in our group.  He glommed on to this individual and walked a decent chunk of the way back to the hotel with us before finally making it clear that he wanted to sell us dictionaries.  Seriously, this guy walked with us, talking non-stop in English for at least five minutes straight because he wanted to sell us overpriced dictionaries.   When we made it clear that we weren’t interested, he was actually pretty cool about it and warned us to be careful on this side of town because it was crawling with gangs of child pick-pockets. 

Within a minute of getting this warning, we started to hear chanting, clapping, and shouting from up ahead.  Now, the streets of Addis aren’t exactly well lit, but we could still make out a group of kids a little ways in front of us.  I’d guess there were at least a dozen boys ranging from pre-teens to full blown teenagers.  They’d picked their spot well, because there was a potted tree in the middle of the sidewalk and there was a barrier that would prevent us from avoiding them by walking into the street (which would have been a dumb move in its own right). 

Donovan was up ahead of me a ways, and I was bringing up the back of our group with one of our guy friends.  My first instinct was to clutch my purse to my chest with both arms and take my phone out of my pocket and keep it tight in my fist.  I came up with three reasons for doing this in the split second I made the decision.  1) I figured that these kids were probably the same ones from before, so they’d probably go for my pockets.  2) If need be, it’s be something I could throw at the crowd to get the off of me while I ran away.  3) If worse came to worse, it’s a hard piece of plastic that I can use for self-defense.  Luckily, none of the above ended up being necessary.

I managed to skirt around the crowd with only a few of them grabbing at me.  When I broke out ahead of them, I saw another one of the female volunteers standing out front and basically told her to come with me and jog as fast as she could.  There was a shop open up ahead with a few grownups sitting around out front, so I figured that was the best place to go if these kids were trying anything worse than a snatch and grab.  That was just my instinct, get yourself to light and possible help as quickly as possible, and I’m happy that was my gut reaction. 

We looked back on the remaining four in our group, three guys and one very small girl (who one of our guys had grabbed hold of the second that the ids descended on them).  We couldn’t see this from where we were standing, but they told us what was going on in there later that evening when we were back at the hotel.  The kids were all yelling at them and trying to distract them by shoving pictures and other random goods in their faces like they were trying to sell them stuff.  Then they started to reach into their pockets to try to grab anything they could.  When the guys shoved their hands in their pockets to keep the kids hands out, the kids started pulling on their arms, pushing them, and more or less trying to tackle them to the ground.  As I said before, we had some pretty hefty dudes with us, so the kids were not successful at getting them to the ground. 

Donovan managed to break out of the crowd before the others did, and he promptly charged back at the kids, yelling and shouting to try to get them off of the other three.  In addition to what the other guys were doing, this seemed to freak the kids out enough that they started running the other way down the street.  The end results?  Nobody lost anything (at least in our group; the same can’t be said for some volunteers that were in another group about 10 minutes behind us).  We all made it out safe and sound, though a little shaken and annoyed for the experience. 

The only other thing that happened was that right before our hotel, a drunk guy with a big stick under his arm came stumbling up to us saying, “I love America.  I love Ethiopia!”  Then he started trying to follow us.  The nice thing with the encounter is that a very large Ethiopian man intercepted him and got him away from us.  We all said “Thank you,” and finally got back into the hotel parking lot, more or less swearing to never go out in Addis after dark again.

Like I said, it was an eventful ten minutes!