Frightening Encounters with Unfathomable Exotic Mentality--my journey

Provided you're be-nooked, the daily rainstorm offers a pleasant moment for reflection.  Everyday since I arrived in Addis three weeks ago, the day begins with sun and about 75 degrees.  At 2:00 the clouds gather from the north. By 3, heavy rain, lightning and thunder, which peter out by 6.  After dark, twenty-foot puddles and swampy dirt roads challenge any outing.  But there becomes a comfortable rhythm to it.  As I hopped home last night from one mid-puddle rock to another, (a better strategy than guessing the firmness of puddle-rim dirt) I thought of a town in Austria somewhere with especially long-lived town-folk. Their secret to life apparently is the jagged and irregular cobblestones that compose the town's steep mountain streets and demand a life-bestowing set of strong core-muscles.  Maybe rock-hopping will win me some rock-abs too.  A group of women in front of me, like most folks here get around the wetness with umbrellas and beach sandals. Avoiding the balancing act, they slosh through the water and dry off whenever. 

My favorite time of day is when the thunderheads role in and the feeling of the afternoon air changes.  The wind picks up, cools down and the sun angles through the oncoming rain.  The best part is seeing the animals in the street, the cats, dogs, sheep, goats, donkeys, cows and horses all have the same hurried look as their owners—an excited loose-limbed hurry for cover.  The situation is without communication problems. To every living node the message is clear: Get ready!

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It shouldn't have been a surprise, but embarrassingly, it was.  I've only been here for a little while, but I didn't expect folks to relate to each other in the ways that I'm so familiar with already.  It may be a cliche in all the worst ways, but things just aren't as different here as I expected. It's like I never went anywhere at all, Todo. 

This observation brings both disappointment as well as a sort of warming self-assurance.

Disappointment because the thought of genuine diversity in terms how people are in the world is an exciting one.  I don't want to discount differences between peoples, but what is different strikes me now as so small. Part of the purpose for my travels, the purpose I hear about from other travelers, is to gain insight into myself by contrasting the relief between me and the people around me.  This is the seed of my frustration: There's not much to contrast.  Or if there is, I have to make an effort to find it.  In some ways, I find myself longing to live in a world more like the Lord of the Rings.  In my fantasy world, dwarves would be dwarves, elfs elfs, hobits hobits, Ethiopians Ethiopian and Americans American.  --Abhorrently other-ing and childish, I know, but there it is.  Disappointment revealed.

 Warmingly self-assured because I've always felt that dominant white American culture, my culture, a sort of bastard, orphan culture.  A rootless, floating collage of image-obsessed corporate agendas and arbitrarily detached strings of other peoples and times.  This may be as true as ever, but I was unsure of how much it affected me.  I was afraid that I was missing an essential part of myself  because of this lack of cultural rooted-ness.  But on a general, basic level, I think that while culture may affect many parts of who we are, it doesn't really affect how we are, collectively at least.  How we are is a colorful but fairly repetitious design on the human fabric.  Placing myself more squarely within this design gives me a feeling of ambivalence.  On one hand I feel free of my assumptions about cultural identities, and on the other, trapped in a predictable Country Buffet of universal being, if you will.  How I am, I realize, is less American and more essentially me.  But how I am is also less myself and more essentially everyone.  So, uh, cool, rite.