I'm writing this blog in ballpoint pen on a piece of paper (the back of my e-ticket) as I sit in Frankfurt Airport. This is the first of several attempts that I will make in the coming weeks to sort out my jet-happy summer in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Egypt. I'm a grad student at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and this summer, I did an internship at the U.S. Mission to the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia before traveling to Kenya to visit a friend and then going to Cairo, Egypt, where my family has lived for just over a decade. Though I tried to write blogs during the trip, I found that I needed time to digest the experiences that I was having before I could write them down.
Topic #1
Views of Obama and the West in Ethiopia. I was surprised to discover a much more mixed reaction to Obama's presidential win in Addis Ababa than I had expected. I mean, sure, pass out picture-laden biography pamphlets about Obama's life at the African Union and be ready to run out of them before even half of all your other handouts are gone. Drive down the street in Addis in an official U.S. vehicle with its distinctive license plates and be ready at any time to hear someone shout "Obama!" in your direction. These were reactions that had I expected of the first black, half-East-African President of the United States.
However, I didn't expect some of the other comments that I heard from Ethiopian peers between ordering meals in traditional restaurants or sitting in cozy coffee joints while we waited for the violent weather to calm down during Ethiopia's rainiest season. One Sunday afternoon, in particular, I was out with a group of new friends, all between their mid twenties and very early thirties. Sitting inside Kaldi's, a coffee chain almost identical to Starbucks, the subject of our conversation turned rather abruptly to American politics.
"Barack Obama is a Democrat!" one of my new friends blurted, surprising me with his accusing tone.
"Yes," I said. No brainer. But the guy that I was talking to was clearly disgusted and had no time for jokes. Democrats, he said, support abortion and gay marriage. Republicans, on the other hand, he countered, have morals.
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