< Magazine Index > < Index For This Edition > < Subscribe >

As a Peace Corps volunteer recently returned from Ethiopia, Gina Perfetto’s stories are varied. She has had authentic human interaction in a foreign culture as the following story well illustrates.  She’s been evacuated due to war; she’s been arrested; she’s seen poverty, as most people never have.  She leaves in October to go to Moldova, Budapest, Prague, and Vienna.  She’ll sleep in a stove bed.  She writes, “I try to not write about everything, but instead choose singular moments that are elucidating and human.” She plans on writing a piece about Moldovan culture and social concerns. Gina Perfetto is a writing student at the graduate level, at William Paterson University in NJ. She’s finished twenty-one stories that focus on social issues in foreign locations. Additional Resources Expat Reference Desk  CIA Fact Book  Contact Gina Perfetto

Today, I am longing for milk in a way I haven’t ever before, not even as a young girl. I am in a bus in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with friends, people I’ve known for a year and a half.  We have swapped stories of outhouse catastrophes, teaching successes, intestinal maladies. Dave, the hippy Ohioan, sits on one side of me, and Kim, the chain-smoking New Yorker, sits on the other side.  My thighs are glazed sticks of dynamite smoldering under my skirt. I know that in Gambella there is not only milk, but cold milk like the milk you have as a little girl, after rock skimming and tree climbing. Kim last had cold milk on her vacation to South Africa. I keep going to hot-milk countries, and I look forward to

Gambellan people that play checkers with cork pieces and the cold milk that I thought nothing of as a child but now look forward to with ludicrous, laughable zeal.  I tell Kim how much I miss milk. “Tell me about it.” she exhales her smoke, and she’s so urbane it kills me.  Kim’s teeth are yellow-brown from cigarettes and perhaps from something else.  She is only twenty-five.
 

In the Addis station, we sit in the bus and wait while men work on the engine. Under the vast sky, girls sell oranges and lemons from plastic bowls; boys have metal pails filled with bottles of Coca-Cola and Sprite. The bus attendants are incomprehensible auctioneers yelling destinations to people who don’t listen. We sit in the front seat to avoid backward stares. Kim smokes furiously and rivulets of sweat roll lazily down the three of us, making white trails down our dusty skin.   We are in an old ‘78 Cacciamalli bus,  the only decent thing the Italians left behind before abandoning attempts at colonization.

The trip is supposed to be fun.  I have never traveled with a man before. I feel lucky because it all seems rather like an easy day.  “Yeah, I noticed that too,” Kim said through a nicotine cloud, “Incredible isn’t it?  I thought maybe it was me, but no, you’re right. No one is really bothering us.”

Dave had just left to relieve himself somewhere off the main road, probably an outhouse behind a nearby suk.
 

The bus is full, and balsa stools were pinned down the center aisle under the weight of passengers.  Already a middle-aged man of about forty-three is growing cantankerous, yelling in Amharic, “Close the windows. The breeze will make me sick.” He is two rows behind us, and in the seat between is a woman breast-feeding her baby. I turn around and say in polite Amharic “The bus isn’t moving yet.  Please, my brother, we are hot.” The angry man is a highborn red, with the expansive, open forehead of the rich Ethiopians who live in the capital.  The man is adamant.

He hovers over the woman with the baby, and Kim says “Fresh air is healthy, it is the heat and all the people breathing that will make you sick.”  But the man stands up and yelling, he reaches forward in front of him, pushing the woman with the baby in his attempt to push me from the window.  He is slamming the window shut and the woman’s head wrap is undone and the baby is free of the nipple, wailing in a round siren cry, and I feel full enough with anger that I grab his arm as it extends outward.

“You push a woman and a baby, because of a window?”  I say. He slaps my arm away when I open the window; he shuts it, and I open the window again. I am angry and I slap his hand repeatedly. Kim stands, too, and is yelling with me in Amharic, and now it seems the whole bus is having a really wonderful time.  There are the old men in the cloth wraps, barefoot, with walking sticks; they murmur to the man that we don’t know any better. The old women yell at us to obey. The baby is crying louder. Someone helps the mother climb over people in the aisles and sit on a stranger’s lap. I already know I have lost. 

Dave returns in the middle of the pushing.  Kim is pointing in the man’s face and talking of God, and I am now screaming that I am hot, and I am calling this man a du-riay, which means something like no-good-piece-of-trash.  All I want is to see Gambellans and drink cold milk from a glass.  The man lowers his hands when he sees Dave and stops looking at us entirely. He says to Dave, “Tell them to close the window!” 

Dave’s wide eyes, his open jaw, and red face tell me this is completely new for him.  He looks at us with compassion, as if it were new for us, too. Dave turns into some absurd figure, full tall, moving in front of us, shoving us behind with a bold elbow and shoulder. I imagine there is a red cape slung about him.

He yells in Amharic and breaks off into English because he can’t concentrate enough to yell properly. He gesticulates, raking his hands through his strawberry blond hair. The son of a mailman and homemaker points in the man’s face and pushes his arm back, saying in Amharic “You do not hit women!” and “This is unacceptable. I don’t even believe this!” The man is uncomfortable, puzzled, and sits down silently. 

Dave is shaking and muttering to himself. Kim and I are calm now, and we look at Dave, then each other, exchanging quizzical glances, but when he sits beside me, I pull away on the seat and lean closer to Kim. I feel the point of the argument has shifted.  The baby is still crying, and the mother is across the bus-aisle looking at me blankly. Dave’s hands are trembling and he clenches them at his sides, turning back repeatedly, giving the man a hard stare and muttering “Absolutely bloody incredible. Unbelievable.”

For a moment I feel bad for Dave, but then I suddenly hate him and do not know why. I am angry at this virginity of his. His never having had to fight for things.  When I look around I see amusement and vicarious interest of the usual sort, but Dave being around somehow makes the fight seems a bigger deal than it is when I am alone and it happens. I want to punch him in the face. I look hard at the women and the little girls. I search for something not there. 

I look at Dave and in a sharp movement, I slam the window shut.  Dave snaps. His blue eyes are wild, fierce. “Don’t close it, for him.” he says moving his hand to indicate the man.  I say through gritted teeth “We always have to fight. If you weren’t here, I would’ve lost the argument, so the window stays closed.”

Kim is silent, stunned with a realization, and says to Dave, “This is actually new for you, isn’t it?” Dave is tight-faced and steely, and he slowly deflates as his eyes drift downward to his lap and his face grows flush and his hands release from fistedness.
 

Ten minutes later, we are off towards Gambella.  The music is blaring, and Dave’s face has grown pale. At the next stop, I get a Coca-Cola for him, a Sprite for Kim, and for myself, a Fanta orange, which is really just Sunkist.  I buy the drinks from a girl, the same as a boy, since she has not yet developed.  She is about eight, I think, and she is not wearing a skirt because she cannot afford one, not even the town-made ones with the cheap, fluorescent pink fabric.  She has ripped shorts and the hole shows her bottom, though no one notices. I give her a trip, climb back on the bus, and give the sodas to Dave and Kim. I remember it is still four days to Gambella, and all I think about is a cold glass of milk.