To: Friends

Subject: Now in Ethiopia

The streets of Addis Ababa contrast sharply with the more developed and westernized Nairobi. They are dirtier, dustier, and have more potholes. This city of about 3 million is clogged with traffic - trucks and buses belching black diesel exhaust, blue-and-white Toyota vans that function as mini buses weaving among traffic, streams of people crossing roads between vehicles, burros laden with sacks of grain or stacks of hay trotting alongside the roads, sometimes escaping their owners and running onto the street. Herds of goats, flocks of sheep, and crowds of people make their way along the uneven earth that functions as a sidewalk along the roads. Vendors spread blankets on the ground and display pyramids of charcoal or potatoes or onions for sale.

The city seems worn out, tired. Paint peels off buildings, trash lines the streets, and everything is covered with dust. Addis Ababa smells like a city in a developing country: exhaust from traffic and charcoal smoke from cooking fires mingled with exotic spices. It's a smell I've come to associate with adventure, a smell that sets my heart beating faster...

Last fall during a trip to Africa, when I arrived in Ethiopia's capital of Addis Ababa, I tried to describe the city in an email I sent home. Yet, try as I would, I just could not convey the enormity of poverty, the sheer magnitude of the crowds, the rundown state of the city, and the unlikely mix of vehicles and livestock on the city streets.

I learned that of the 3 million people who inhabit Addis Ababa, 85% live in slums. To say that housing is substandard is an enormous understatement. Residents erect their own houses with whatever materials are available: sticks, mud mixed with straw or manure, plastic sheeting, corrugated metal... About half of houses in Addis Ababa have only earthen floors. I could see some of these houses from the car window as I was driven through the city. But how could I describe them and the hectic street scenes around me?

Perhaps I could do a better job if I took more detailed notes. I began to jot down observations as I my host drove me from site to site:

- Rundown storefronts, rusty metal

- Traditional dress mixed with Western attire

- Women carrying stacks of wood on their heads

- Ping-pong tables and foosball on the "sidewalks"

- People everywhere - walking, shopping, doing laundry

Still, I was frustrated. Words weren't enough.

Then it hit me: a friend had lent me his V570 digital camera. Unlike the P880 that I was using for most pictures, this camera was small and inconspicuous. And it had a wide-angle lens that captures more of the scene than most cameras. I rolled down the passenger-side window, turned on the camera, set the scene mode to Sport (to use the fastest possible shutter speed), turned off the flash (wouldn't want to attract unwanted attention), and pointed the camera out the car window. Since there is no way to compose a picture in the camera's LCD when taking pictures from a moving vehicle, I had to simply point and click as we approached a likely looking subject.

I took close to 500 pictures this way - not something I could afford to do in the good old film days.

Note: I cropped the pictures 2:1 to take out some of the excess sky and foreground.

Taking pictures this way was hit and miss, and I got a lot of blurry shots. However, I was astounded at the number of good pictures I captured, snippets of daily life in the city: A woman washing laundry in a basin. A man carrying home a sheep for slaughter. People carrying bundles and boxes. Chasing a running burro. Playing ping-pong. Lying in the street. Hanging up laundry. Everyday scenes that are common to Ethiopians, but foreign to me. I put these pictures in a Kodak Gallery album, and if you want to see what I could not describe in words, click here.

With these pictures I could better convey the essence of Addis Ababa.

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