I'm writing this blog in ballpoint pen on a piece of paper (the back of my e-ticket) as I sit in Frankfurt Airport.  This is the first of several attempts that I will make in the coming weeks to sort out my jet-happy summer in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Egypt.  I'm a grad student at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and this summer, I did an internship at the U.S. Mission to the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia before traveling to Kenya to visit a friend and then going to Cairo, Egypt, where my family has lived for just over a decade.  Though I tried to write blogs during the trip, I found that I needed time to digest the experiences that I was having before I could write them down.

Topic #1
Views of Obama and the West in Ethiopia.  I was surprised to discover a much more mixed reaction to Obama's presidential win in Addis Ababa than I had expected.  I mean, sure, pass out picture-laden biography pamphlets about Obama's life at the African Union and be ready to run out of them before even half of all your other handouts are gone.  Drive down the street in Addis in an official U.S. vehicle with its distinctive license plates and be ready at any time to hear someone shout "Obama!" in your direction.  These were reactions that had I expected of the first black, half-East-African President of the United States.

However, I didn't expect some of the other comments that I heard from Ethiopian peers between ordering meals in traditional restaurants or sitting in cozy coffee joints while we waited for the violent weather to calm down during Ethiopia's rainiest season.  One Sunday afternoon, in particular, I was out with a group of new friends, all between their mid twenties and very early thirties.  Sitting inside Kaldi's, a coffee chain almost identical to Starbucks, the subject of our conversation turned rather abruptly to American politics. 

"Barack Obama is a Democrat!" one of my new friends blurted, surprising me with his accusing tone.

"Yes," I said.  No brainer.  But the guy that I was talking to was clearly disgusted and had no time for jokes.  Democrats, he said, support abortion and gay marriage.  Republicans, on the other hand, he countered, have morals.

After the grueling election cycle that preceded the 2008 U.S. elections, I had, clearly, heard this argument a thousand times.  But this time, #1001, the discussion led me into new territory: it was my introduction to the cognitive dissonance characterizing many of the ideas about President Obama and the West that I would encounter during my time in Ethiopia.  A little while after that conversation--which I ended as quickly as possible once I saw the fervor in the eyes of my accuser--another Ethiopian friend willing to help me understand the situation a little better explained the bifurcated prisms through which he and his friends had come to view Obama.  On the one hand, he was the triumphant East African, living proof of a common dream that even people from the often-out-of-luck Horn of Africa can succeed in, and even lead, the most powerful country in the world. However, this view has been largely overshadowed by what many of my peers would consider the high cost of Obama's success: succumbing to and supporting the heretical practices plaguing many countries in the West such as granting equal rights of marriage to homosexual couples or granting women the right to abortion.  For many of the Ethiopian youth that I ran into this summer, standing in support of Obama, even though he was an East African brother, when he condoned what they considered to be pure and damning evils was just too much.

Taken in the context of Ethiopia's culture and religious demography, this information isn't so much of a surprise.  Ethiopia is a very conservative, mainly Christian country (though Islam is quickly growing).  According to the 2009 Ethiopian census,  43.5% of people in the country report themselves as Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, 33.9% are reported to be Muslim, and 18.6% are Protestant (the remaining 2.6% adheres to traditional beliefs).  Many of the country's cultural norms are dictated by strict religious dogma.  In the words of a devout Protestant friend, "in this country, if you are gay, you can die."

Still, I eventually came across some youth in Addis who had decided to take a leap of faith.  The choice to move past this conflict of beliefs and support Obama was a difficult one, but some had decided that the stakes were too high not to. One friend, the leader of a youth organization in Addis, told me that, because he believed in the change that Obama would bring to the U.S., to Africa, and to the world, he had gone against hs peers and supported him anyway.  He told me about the shock that he encountered, time and time again, from his friends when he told them that he had wanted Obama to win.  And as he told me the story, I was surprised to hear how very radical of an action it had been for him to simply listen to what Obama was saying during the 2008 presidential race.

Now, before we proceed, let's get one thing straight -- I'm not writing this blog to be political.  In any case, none of the people in this story had any real power over the American ballot box one way or another. I'm writing this blog to tell you what listening to these youth in Ethiopia taught me:  sometimes the unlikeminded are those who appear to be most similar to us.  Sometimes, it can be harder for us to digest when people who look like us, talk like us, come from where we come from, etc., espouse views that are radically different from our own than when those who are alien to us do so.  "We don't do that!" we want to cry.  "Other people do that, but not us!"

It takes a brave person to look beyond how they think a person is supposed to be and to listen, especially when that person threatens their own identity.  They don't necessarily have to accept the person's views, but just being receptive to what that person has to say can at least lead to a decent conversation.  And decent, productive conversations can be pretty hard to find these days.

Samantha Power wrote in Chasing the Flame that Sergio believed “the best way for outsiders to make a dent in enhancing [individual dignity] would be to improve their linguistic and cultural knowledge base, to remind themselves of their own fallibility, to empower those who know their societies best, and to be resilient and adaptable in the face of inevitable setbacks.”  It’s sometimes easier said than done, however. Living in the United States often makes it difficult to get truly nuanced perspectives of different cultural realities, and the kind of humility that Sergio sought can easily be forgotten.

For that very reason, anyone interested in foreign aid would do well to listen to Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippet’s recent discussion with Binyavanga Wainaina, winner of the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing, African’s most prestigious literary award; founding editor and executive director of Africa’s most well-respected literary journal, Kwani?; contributor to South Africa’s largest newspaper and director of Bard College’s Chinua Achebe Center for African Languages and Literature. It’s a strong reminder of the often unforeseen counterproductive effects of charity and the need to question easy assumptions.  How else can we try to do better?