Arriving in Addis Ababa, I walked down the steps onto the airport runway. I wasn’t immediately met by the smells of wood fires, as I am in Uganda, but there was a hint of the exotic in the air, and I was ready to explore a new country. As I made my way out of the run-down airport, the shine of a novel city wore off quickly and wariness of the unknown filled my mind. A man approached me, saying “do you need to change money? The best rates are in the airport.” I know that this has been true in other places I have travelled, so I nodded and followed him. But instead of leading me to a forex bureau, he led me to a dusty booth of curtains and folding chairs in the side of the airport lobby. He asked how much I wanted and told me the rate was 31 birr to the dollar. I had a hundred dollars to exchange, and he opened up a drawer and pulled out 31 grimy 100 birr bills. There was no sign of any form of record keeping of this transaction, and it set off alarm bells in my head. I pulled out my cell phone and looked up the current birr to dollar exchange rate, which was listed as about 29:1, so I decided to proceed. The man simply smiled and shook his head when I asked about a receipt.
In contrast, when I had changed money in Cape Town, I had had to transfer the bills through a little metal sliding drawer underneath a glass window to a teller, provide my passport to be copied, and fill out a form with my personal information including local address. Although I felt unsettled after this highly informal money exchange, having the feeling I had either gotten swindled somehow or been part of something illegal, I got on with searching for the hotel shuttle. It was nowhere to be seen, and I was accosted by at least 10 taxi drivers in the meantime, who just rudely tried to hustle me to their cars, which seemed to me even less polite than the Ugandan method of cheerfully calling out “madam, you come and we go!” I had had to lug all my bags down to the shuttle parking area, and when I tried to lug them back up towards the airport (where I could access wifi to see if the hotel had tried to contact me) there were armed guards who refused to let me back up in that direction, forcing me to take a circuitous route for no reason I could determine. There was a man at the top of the ramp who saw my tired expression of confusion and exclaimed in a German accent “they will not let you in this way! This is the most ridiculous place in the world! Once you step out, you cannot step back in, there is no explanation for it.”
I wandered the sidewalks, clutching my heavy suitcase, until finally, I located a driver and a bellboy standing by a shuttle with my hotel’s name on it and holding a sign. “Ah, you are here,” said the bellboy with relief as they got in the car and prepared to depart. “Don’t you think we should wait?” I asked, gesturing to the sign. They looked confused. “The name on the sign is not my name.” They looked at the sign again, and I was slightly amused that they were about to accept that my name was Li-Cheng Hu [or something equivalently obviously Chinese). It turned out that they had not even known I was coming, so fortunately I was able to hop on to the shuttle with Li-Cheng Hu and we headed to my hotel.
Upon arrival, the bellboy, Lemesgen, took my bags and brought me to my room. I debated internally what to do, since I had only 100 birr bills, which seemed too large for a tip, however a tip also seemed polite to give, especially since Lemesgen said he had waited two hours for me at the airport the night before (for my original arrival time which I had missed, even though I had contacted the hotel 6 hours prior to that to let them know my arrival time had changed). When I set my bags down in the room and reached for my pocket, however, Lemesgen said “How long do you stay in Addis? Do you need a SIM card?” It was like he had read my mind, and I enthusiastically said “yes! I do need that!” “Wait 10 minutes here,” he replied mysteriously. “I’ll be back.”
True to his word, Lemesgen knocked a short time later and handed me a SIM card, with no sort of packaging attached. “Great,” I said, “how much do I owe you for it?” He looked at me rather impishly and said, “how much do you want to pay for it?” “No,” I said, irritated. “I don’t know what anything costs here. How could I know how much it is worth?” “It is worth whatever you think it is worth.” He looked at me expectantly.
While he was gone, I had removed a few of the birr bills from the stack and hidden them by the door, so that I wouldn’t have to pull out a wad of cash to pay him. However, I regretted answering truthfully when he quizzed me on the ride about the purpose of my visit to Addis, because he had been addressing me as “doctor” ever since. It is highly ironic being a young female physician that the people who care most about identifying you as a doctor tend to be the people who you wish you could keep that fact hidden from. I threw two 100 birr bills at him, which I figured should be sufficient, but he looked at them in disgust and did not move. “This is very little money,” he said. “This is not enough.” I narrowed my eyes. “Well, you’re the one who was supposed to tell me how much you want for it, and you didn’t say.” “Ah, doctor, but this is very little money, very little,” Lemesgen reproached me. “Less than ten dollars.” In my mind I shouted “A SIM card is worth less than ten dollars even in the USA!” But I was tired, and I just wanted him to get out of my face. I threw another 100 birr bill at him, he continued to give me a disappointed look, but I told him that I was tired and going to take a nap, and he reluctantly departed, while I remained angry and feeling like I had been the victim of highway robbery. I was told the next day that SIM cards are worth 30 birr.
I had accomplished what needed to be done that morning, getting a good rate on currency exchange, and paying less than ten dollars for a local SIM to be delivered to my door, but it struck me how the feeling of completing these transactions in Addis was different than completing similar tasks in Cape Town, where prices are known and posted. Paying a set price for an item has a completely different feel to it compared to paying a lower price that you've had to haggle and argue for. It takes so much more out of you. I’ve lost what willingness I ever had to pay a different price because of who I am, I realized, and I’m out of patience with people who try to take advantage of me. This was not a good frame of mind to be in as I started out on day one of my stay in Ethiopia.
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