By James A. Everett  

Because of a heavier than anticipated workload it was necessary for me to overstay my time in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia by a full week.  That means that, after a full 48 hour air trip in order to arrive back home, I find myself on deadline for this week’s column.  

 September 12th marked the formal start date of Ethiopia’s Millennium Celebration which will continue for one full year.  Addis was lit up as never before.  Traffic in the city, which is normally terrible, was worse than ever.  Security in this city of more than 4 million people is usually quite unobtrusive.  But with the comings and goings of so many bigwigs, soldiers were often stationed every 50 feet along the main road to Bole airport and every so often all traffic would often come to a halt.
 My estimate is that at least 25% of the cars in Addis would not pass an American safety inspection.  One of my hosts offered to loan me a car, but there is no way that I would attempt to drive in Addis.  The beggars were not quite as omnipresent as on my previous three trips.  

This, I was told, was because the government had temporarily sent hundreds of them out of town to detention centers until after the Millennium Celebration.  Nevertheless, avoiding running over beggars, trying to miss enormous potholes while dodging bumper-to-bumper traffic, donkeys, goats and other assorted animals is not my preferred method of committing suicide.  
 This trip’s primary purpose was to help train a marketing team in Addis to handle a new electronic fund transfer company “built by Ethiopians for Ethiopians” called Birritu Express (birrituexpress.com).  This new company provides secure electronic fund transfers from the convenience of ones own computer from anyplace in Canada, the U.S. and U.K. to anyplace in Ethiopia or India.  Our greatest frustration was the slowness of the Internet connections and  intermittent power outages.  Computer capacity in a half dozen American homes would, at present, equal the Internet bytes allotted to the whole of Ethiopia; a nation of 75 million people.  That disproportionate ratio, we were assured, will change for the better in just a few weeks.    
 
Among the highlights of the trip was participating in the first annual business conference  for members of the Ethiopia Diaspora which was held in the beautiful exhibition hall of the United Nations Building and serving as one of the presenters at a Symposium on the International Day of Peace (Sept. 19) sponsored by Ambassador-at-Large, Professor Kinfe Abraham held at the Addis Sheraton Hotel.  Portions of this latter event made the evening television news reports country wide.  Professor Abraham received his PhD from the University of California and is the author of some 30 books and is widely recognized as one of Ethiopia’s foremost intellectuals. 
 Addis Ababa is hundreds of miles closer to the equator than Independence.  However being situated in a mountain plain over 8,000 feet high, their average summer temperatures are about the same as ours.  

 I shared a spacious three bedroom apartment with an American IT specialist from Kansas City.  The cook/housekeeper did her best to make my stay comfortable. She laundered my  clothes on a daily basis, which included ironing my underclothes and pajamas.  When I called home to report the fine care I was receiving, my wife simply advised me not to become accustomed to it. 
 Recent issues of the National Geographic Magazine and Vanity Fair tell us that we are all Ethiopians.  This is based on DNA results showing that we all stem from the ancient hominoid “Lucy” whose fossilized bones were discovered by the late anthropologist Leaky and are  now touring the United States.