v5#4

"Are you carrying any ironic items in your pockets, sir?", asked the security officer at the airport checkpoint in rural Ethiopia.

"I don't know, I suppose that depends on your point of view.", I thought. The US dollar bills in my wallet, the ones that say, "In God we trust" on them, some might say those are ironic. Or perhaps the CD by the locally famous pop artist who was recently thrown in prison for writing lyrics mildly critical of the current government, there might be those that see that as ironic. Maybe even the pants the pockets were on, the total value of which is probably close to equivalent to the monthly income of a typical working Ethiopian, surely that might be an ironic item. If I thought about it long enough, probably all the items in my pockets could be ironic in some way or other.

But somehow I managed to keep all that to myself, and only responded,"No, nothing ironic." So my check through security, and my travel from rural Ethiopia to the capital Addis Ababa went without incident. This gave me time for one last cup of coffee, in the very birthplace of coffee. This made each cup an event for me, and I felt compelled to document this photographically as you will see in the attachment or on the blog. And as I sat there, waiting for the long flight from Africa to my homeland in the New World to begin, the sounds of Eric Clapton doing a reggae interpretation of "Swing low, sweet chariot, comin' for to carry me home..." came up on my MP3 player, one more ironic item I should have mentioned to the security guy.

Photo: every cup of coffee I drank in Ethiopia, plus a few coffee related shots.