Page 125 of 139

The wonder and brilliance of children

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

I am far from a perfect parent. I show my daughter my strength and also my weakness. 

I love children. If I had more patience, I would have spent more time with as many of them as possible. 

A little boy occasionally comes into the store where I work in the café. I believe he comes with his grandmother and by the time they reach me, she seems exasperated. And I know why.

They have their shopping bags. They are ready to leave. She offers him a pizza.

He’s about four and he never stops talking. And I try my best not to interrupt him because my manners need to demonstrate how people listen to and engage others. Then the questions start.

It’s Easter week. The store is busy. At this particular moment, I’m momentarily caught up and there’s no one waiting. 

So I answer his questions. These aren’t dumb questions, these are “how things work” questions. What is that light? What’s that sound? I explain everything he asks about, even though his grandparent clearly wants to go. But he’s processing, he’s learning, and maybe someday he’ll be a scientist or an engineer because of this interest in how things work.

But now, my daughter.

I frequently help my friend Nancy with her writing career. Nancy is an essayist and poet. She’s also blind so sending an email, managing submissions and finding writing markets can be challenging with a sighted person at a computer. Her diligence and prolific work habits inspire me so the relationship is mutually beneficial.

My daughter is on spring break so she joined Nancy and I at Dunkin Donuts where I sipped iced coffee flavored with pistachio and Nancy drank her vanilla chai. And we even had donuts!

When we were done working, my daughter piped in.

She thought it would be interesting if we all wrote flash nonfiction about the morning to see the different perspectives. Nancy and I were thrilled. We set word counts and pledged to write and submit this piece.

Daughter and I did ours. We love them. Can’t wait to see what Nancy does.

Made possible because we listened to a child. 

Review: A Rainbow in the Night

Angel Ackerman 2 Comments

  This isn’t going to be an elaborate entry but I wanted to mention that I finished Dominique La Pierre’s A Rainbow in the Night: the Tumultuous Birth of South Africa. 

I found the first 150 pages gripping, but as the 20th Century dawned it seemed like a shift happened in La Pierre’s storytelling. I don’t think that is the case, but that is how my brain perceived it.

La Pierre tells his story by choosing significant figures in South African history and using their story to build a national story. The tale seems to build and reflect on apartheid, whereas the title seems broader than the interior content. 

My knowledge is somewhat limited on South Africa and I thought La Pierre’s easy style would give me a quick basic review of key items in South African history, and it did. I guess it brings up the question of how does an author or scholar deal with a topic that is heavily overshadowed by something distasteful or tragic? 

Now I’m on to a book about war in Somalia, the Sudan and Rwanda so I don’t expect anything uplifting soon…

Fitbit… I love you but I think you’re no good for me

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Two years ago I had an unfortunate accident at work. I broke my right hand and spent my winter in a different job which requires less movement and I ate every piece of junk food I could get my hands… Hand… on.

I returned to full duty ten pounds overweight and so weak I couldn’t break apart the soda nozzles at the end of my shift.

I had a visit with my nurse practitioner two weeks before my annual physical and the numbers on the scale were higher than they were on the day I brought my newborn daughter home from the hospital. 

At first I just wanted to lose a couple pounds to show the doctor I had the situation under control. I’m not a big girl, so ten pounds hangs heavy on my frame even though I’m lucky that I gain weight evenly across my whole body.

But then I couldn’t get my thighs in my pants.

I had just turned 38 and I knew I had to shed the weight before I turned 40. 

I started counting calories, going for walks and bike rides and returned to weight training which I had done periodically since college.

I lost 30 pounds in six weeks. Oops. 

I am probably the only person on the planet who bought a Fitbit to make sure I eat enough. I had no idea how active I really was.

I’ve gained about 10-12 pounds back, over the course of two years, but my body has dropped dress sizes as the weight comes back as muscle. 

I’ve stopped counting calories. But I still have the Fitbit, and I love it, except for the fact that everyone is constantly challenging me. I work retail so I cover a lot of ground. People I know on Fitbit use me as their challenge but it stresses me out to “have” to keep ahead of them– especially since I know they’re using me as a success benchmark.

My goal is seven miles a day, so if I have a lazy day and only reach four or gasp three miles, I feel guilty.

I even monitored Fitbit when I broke my ankle this fall.

At this point I know my body’s needs and I can estimate how many steps I take on a day. So do I need Fitbit?

It’s nice to be held accountable but sometimes it’s too much of an obsession or strain. 

Lac Abbé

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

When we returned from Mogadishu, Somalia, we spent one night in our hotel and headed out with out backpacks for a final excursion to Lac Abbé. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, my visit to Somalia had made me more aware of the Somali cultural influence in Djibouti, so heading out to the Afar region excited the history nerd in me. I have a strong interest in this tiny Horn of Africa nation and how the French influence has blended with the crossroads nature of this area to create a country. The Arab presence is strong (especially now with the war in Yemen, fortunately I was able to visit Sana’a on my previous trip to Djibouti). The local culture is predominantly Somali and Afar so it made sense to explore more.

M, my travel companion, and I decided that though the journey is long and we’d already done a lot of travel by plane and car, that we wanted to see Lac Abbé. And we felt it had to be this trip. M also wanted to see the whale sharks, but our guide advised us it was too late in the season. Apparently, the increased activity in the water has forced some of the whale sharks away so when you once could see a dozen, you’re now lucky to see one. And he recommended attempting it in the beginning of the season not the end.

As also mentioned in a previous post, our journey to Lac Abbé involved a stop for coffee, a stop for lunch and a walk through Ali Sabieh. So while the journey took all day, it wasn’t all time in the car.

Traveling in Africa offers a different pace and a different perspective than travel in more Western or industrialized areas of the world. We turned off the main road outside of Ali Sabieh onto what, in the United States, would seem like an area where people play with their jeeps and other four-wheel-drive vehicles. Completely unmarked tracks in the desert.

  
This is one of the reasons they tell you not to attempt a solo trip to exotic locales in Africa. The driving is another reason: the crazy passing, driving on the wrong side of the road, the honking and flashing of headlights, the lack of seatbelts and gas stations. 

And the truck drivers heading back and forth to Ethiopia who are just beginning to face rules about how long they can drive without sleeping. I witnessed at least three truck accidents.

   
 

A Walk Through Ali Sabieh

Angel Ackerman 2 Comments

Ali Sabieh is a train town in Djibouti. The railroad to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, opened in the late 1880s, I believe. Ethiopia is landlocked and depends on neighbors for imports. 

We visited the old train and train station and walked through town. 

   
   
Next we visited the purple mountain in the background.

  
As the town shrinks…

   
  
 
At the bottom before lunch I saw strange things:

   
 
Lunch was chicken and many, many flies.

  
Our driver packed some French fries and fed them to these baboons on the roadside:

   
  

When we continued on our trip, where the standard highway meets the African desert road, our guide pointed out that Ali Sabieh has no petrol stations. We stopped at what appeared to be someone’s house and he filled our car with gas from jugs. They used a water bottle cut into a funnel and wrapped it with a scarf.

 

our guide, Momo, talking to the girl who found my tattoo

 
Meanwhile, I made a friend with a little girl in a green dress. She offered me a candy. I refused. She showed me the candy on her tongue as if I didn’t understand it was candy. Then she poked my arm.

I looked down. She had noticed my bat tattoo. She scurried away and returned with every kid in the neighborhood. I peeled up my sleeve and this horde of children poked and prodded my arm. The girl talked with Momo, our guide, but I don’t know what all the children said when they were chattering like crazy.

White lady. Head uncovered. Short hair. Strange bat on arm. I am indeed an oddity.

And then they left.

Road Trip, Djibouti style 

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

When we returned to Djibouti City from Mogadishu (last weekend), we booked a trip with Bambu Service Touristik to visit Lac Abbé on the Ethiopian border.

African road trips are precarious. You have the crazy drivers, lack of petrol stations, dessert roads and rocky roads and a general lack of, say, signs. 

A straight drive from Djibouti, Lac Abbé is probably a three or four hour drive depending on conditions. We had several stops booked into our day.

I was extremely excited about this trip, because Lac Abbé is traditionally Afar nomad territory. Djibouti, as a country and former colony of France (granted independence in June 1977), has two traditional ethnic groups (among a host of others): the Issa Somali, with connections to Somalia and Somaliland, and the Afar, who hail from/migrate to Ethiopia (and I believe Eritrea).

I had just returned from a three day visit to Mogadishu. Mogadishu had opened my eyes to the influence of Somali culture in Djibouti. As soon as I returned to the streets, I recognized the food for sale. And now I could go see the Afar region.

As a student historian, I was thrilled.

  
As you drive into the countryside, you need more improvised structures. Often small huts made from the volcanic rock, sticks, corrugated metal and other recycled objects. Tires are the fence of choice.

  
Homes often have tires fencing in little yards…

Along the route we saw a lot of cylinders and it turns out there’s a big water infrastructure project underway to bring water from Ethiopia to Djibouti. 

   
 
Again, big news for a small country with no natural resources. 

  
Our guide built a coffee stop into our trip and M and I do love coffee. I had forgotten how much I love tea in this area of the world. I think their secret is boiling the sugar into the water before adding the tea. Though I’m not sure. I don’t like sweetened tea other places.

 

making our coffee


  She poured our coffee from her thermos bottles and when people paid her, she tossed the coins in a basket under her little table.

coffee and tea

  

other patrons having coffee


Our next stop was the town of Ali Sabieh. That will be my next topic. 

Lido Beach thoughts 

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

I heard about the attack at Lido Beach while at work today. I visited Lido Beach last week. Last week.

I flew to Mogadishu on a flight from Djibouti, a stopover on a flight from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I and my travel companion, M, stepped onto a plane full of black African men and women in black niqab.

The flight was originally a Jubba flight, but it turned into a code share with Daallo, the Djibouti national airline that had once gone defunct.

I noticed immediately that the staff appeared to be Eastern European and not very happy about their current assignment. Part of the problem was apparently the baby that a preschooler had on her lap. A preschooler was holding a baby on her lap before take-off! 

I think, perhaps, the enthusiastic flight attendants were bickering over who needed to deal with that. The woman crew member finally gave the baby to the man who might have been the father and moved the girl to next to the potential mother.

The flight attendant went for the baby lap belt extender and somehow, the baby ended up on the child’s lap again. This flight attendant, receiving no help from the male staff member (I swear he folded his arms, huffed and went and sat in his fold-down seat), seemed on the verge on losing her mind.

She finally forcefully grabbed the baby, realized how gruff she seemed, and made some sort of Russian-esque “coochie coochie coo” noise. She passed the baby to the mother and buckled everyone in before they could move.

And we didn’t see flight attendants again until landing.

  
I don’t want to digress too much with the beginning adventures, but now that I’m safely home I can tell you we stayed at Hotel Sahafi and I found it amazing.

  
There staff did a wonderful job feeding us and protecting us.

  
The first place we visited was Lido Beach, the most recent site of a terrorist event. Last week I was there. Last week I was frisked (in that special intimate kind of way that only happens in Muslim countries) and passed through a metal detector to go the beach.

   
   

And I did think it odd to have such tight security for the beach, but I had just arrived and it hadn’t really sunk in where I was.

Mogadishu.

And we had four armed guards with us as the local population frolicked on the beach.

  
The woman swam in their long dresses and headscarves. Boys and young men played a game of soccer in the sand and joked that we were scouts from FIFA.

But Mogadishu suffered a nearly 25 year civil war, a tribal war that only ended in 2012. Hopefully someday this gorgeous city and delightful population will be a place safe enough to visit without security.

But today it is Mogadishu.

  
Of “Black Hawk Down” fame.

   
 
Where Pakistani tanks line the streets in addition to American military carcasses.

 

A land of barricades.  
 
And passive defense systems to protect against suicide bombers.

   
    
 
And battered buildings, many “destroyed” but occupied.

  
Even what used to be embassy row… Now protected by barbed wire and suicide bomber walls because peacekeeper soldiers sleep in the wreckage of what used to be the embassies.

   
 
But in the end, I went back to a cozy hotel room.

The Amazing Lives of Camels

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Our second day in Somalia featured some excursions outside of Mogadishu. We visited… for lack of better terms… a camel dairy farm.

Apparently we arrived at just the right moment as two of the camels were mating. We were told that camels mate for four hours, and we had arrived in time to see the camels finish. (I posted a video on my Instagram account: angelackerman.) A baby camel gestates for 13 months and will have an average life span of 25 years.

Camel milk is touted for its medicinal properties against cancer, HIV and other diseases. We tried some fresh out of the camel (from a communal African bowl) and it was sweet and had an almost vanilla-like taste. I kept comparing it to almond milk in my mind.

They gave us some in a plastic sandwich bag, tied at the top in a knot, to take home. The armed guards in our contingent and our other staff also took some, but they bit the corner off their bag and drank it right away. We put ours in the hotel fridge. After dinner, M bit the corner off the bag (not as eloquently as our Somali hosts) and we poured it into our water glasses.

I mixed up the glasses and M corrected me. At this point I reminded him that we had shared a communal bowl with a bunch of random Somalis and he was concerned about switching our glasses…

We both decided that cold it tasted like milk. We were disappointed as neither one of us likes milk. Maybe you have to drink it warm.

Camel

 

 

The Coffee Lady in Mogadishu

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

On our first day in Mogadishu, we were driving back to our hotel, Hotel Sahafi, when the traffic slowed and a gendarme told us that the white car a few car lengths ahead of us contained a bomb. Apparently, a suicide bomber had made it this far (about two miles from our hotel) when authorities noticed the bomb and the bomber-to-be deserted the car and ran.

As a result, the road was closed and we were rerouted until the car bomb could be diffused. We were returned to the hotel and locked in for the night. While our driver and guide were getting information from the gendarme, I noticed this woman making coffee and started taking photos. Since I don’t speak Somali more than “Yes,” “No,” “My name is…” and “Move,” I didn’t realize at the time that we were so close to a live bomb.

Of course I used the time to snap street photography from inside our vehicle. These photos were taken on the outskirts of a makeshift village of refugees who left their homes in flight of the rebel group Al Shabaab.

As we pull into the square… I noticed a woman adding what looked like sugar to a tea kettle.
She then started grinding coffee
She goes into what appears to be her kitchen.
And continues her work
Grinding
She takes the coffee beans
She approaches the kettle
And someone catches her eye
Woman making coffee
She finally added the grounds (I missed it; foot traffic)
And she cleans up
The road side beside where she worked. Not her kitchen.

 

Departure from Mogadishu

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

I know it’s a tad in-contiguous to write about leaving Mogadishu before I chronicle our activities in Somalia, but I jotted notes on my phone and wanted to share my impressions while they were fresh.
This was written in the airport and on the plane using the notes feature of my iPhone.

Today was probably the most challenging of our time in Somalia. I’ve become more aware of our guide/”fixer” having more interest in his business affairs and his personal life than our comfort. As isn’t uncommon in more rustic destinations, if we don’t have exact change we can forget seeing our remaining money, despite promises otherwise.

But he delivered on showing us what we came to see and our security detail did their job. 

This morning, we got up and had breakfast intending to leave for the airport at 9 a.m. Our fixer arrives late, provides our souvenirs (and no change). Then he announces our 1:30 flight has been moved to 11 am (and yesterday he implied the flights are overbooked and we may be turned away at the gate).

So in the equivalent of a Third World hurry we hop in the truck and bring with us a Somali fellow also headed to the airport. It is our last time leaving via the hotel’s security measures and we zig zag up the route to the airport.

The airport is 10 minutes away, very close to the UN compound. We approach, walls beside us to protect from suicide bombs, barricades and barbed wire. Traffic chaos as everyone tries to reach the chute that leads to the airport.

It takes 30 minutes to get to the first checkpoint. Ugandan peacekeepers and local security ask for our passports, gaze at our white faces, greet “good morning,” scan the car for bombs.

One official wants our bags removed from our possession. I believe our staff protests that we don’t have time for that and they want to get the Americans to their flight. The bags are returned to the truck.

Two of our hotel security detail have left the truck and watch cars around us, passersby and the scene in general. I’m starting to know them: the skinny one with the full goatee, the badass looking one with his big shiny sunglasses. 

Heavy military vehicles roll by one after another.

It’s 10 a.m. and we weave to the final checkpoint, a boom arm that blocks the road in front of the actual airport. The Ugandan peacekeeper in his camo and sleek pink sunglasses waves us toward the end of terminal. A local gendarme without firearm directs us to the parking lot. After ten minutes of banter in Somali, we leave the car and walk to the terminal.

We arrive at the airport. One of my souvenirs from Djibouti raises an eyebrow at security. I knew exactly why they wanted me to open my suitcase. It’s a gift I bought for my husband.

We have to go to the ticket counter for a stamp on our e-ticket. We go to check in. We go to another desk where they match our names and passports to what looks like the flight manifest. We go to immigration, probably the quickest part of the process. Ladies in robes and head coverings check our passports and tickets again. A second round of security. Finally the gate.

Keep in mind, the international departure area of the airport is probably the size of a small elementary school gym. And all of this has happened before the departure gates.

  
At the gate, the bathroom has no water, no soap and at least a functional toilet but no paper, spray or other creative method to cleanse oneself.

M asked about smoking, and one of the staff brought him outside to smoke and back in. 

Plus, the flight to Nairobi scheduled for 2:05 left before we got here, so perhaps there is something to the panic. But the board says our flight is checking in and still listed as 1:30

At the gate, surrounded by windows, one watches the planes arrive. Then the staff comes through screaming airline names & destination cities. They give everybody about five minutes.

  
The plane arrived, a British jet or something with flight attendants that might be Ukranian or Russian. Unlike the ones on the flight down that acted like they were being punished doing a routine between Jedah, Djibouti and Mogadishu. The aircraft smelled like someone had been smoking– we’re guessing the pilots.  

  
This is a direct flight, flight time 1 hour 40 minutes. Meal service was water or pineapple juice and fish with Somali style rice. The flight attendants keep running in and out of the cockpit.

The flight attendant is spraying air freshener neurotically because someone is indeed smoking in the cockpit.