My Love Affair With Soccer/Football (the real one)!

This pizza menu that has English Premiership teams as
the names of the pizza made my day( please note
Manchester United is the most expensive and
probably the best, rightfully so)

Anybody who knows me well , knows that I have two great loves in my life, Dance and Soccer/Football. To avoid confusion, in this post I am choosing to call it soccer instead of football. I am a  huge huge soccer fan( not to be understated), and I love the game like it’s my job! I like to think I am too much of a “lady” to actually be a fanatic, but when my friend retells the story of how she thought I was going to fight this one Romanian guy at a bar, I think I am bordering on fanaticism a bit, perhaps. The 2010 South Africa Soccer World Cup is still one of my best vacations ever! I think my goal in life is to be rich enough that I can take a whole month off during soccer world cup years and sit in VIPs of every game there! I am kidding, I actually have other dreams and ambitions, like you know, saving the world and stuff, but probably just so people can play soccer and I can enjoy it! I had never taken the time to reflect on my whole soccer fanaticism thing until this summer when I found myself hustling each day to watch the Brazil Soccer World Cup, at odd hours of the night in a foreign country!

my latest Manchester United Jersey

Soccer and I have a love affair that people I meet and none of my friends have ever been able to comprehend, “especially” for a girl! I try to be offended by this slightly sexist view of my soccer fanaticism, before I realize that I happen to be the only girl amongst a bunch of guys, waiting for my favorite sports bar in Chicago, Fado, to open at 7am,  so I can catch the first English Premiership game of the day. For my team, the red devils aka Manchester united, I have been known to brave a lot of things including the cold, sleep deprivation and hangovers!

Watching the World Cup in Addis, thats Ryan Giggs
commenting for SuperSport on there!
Who is he you say,
only one of the greatest footballers the English
have ever had and a proud red devil

 I was exposed to soccer at a very young age, being it’s the most popular sport in Africa. My family circumstances really led me down this path of no return. Being the last of 5 children in my family, by the time I grew up everyone was gone from the house. I only had my parents as my pseudo siblings, especially my father who I adored and loved everything that he loved, including soccer. With a house almost overrun by women( 5 women and 1 guy), he was only too happy for the company and a child he could treat like a boy. I remember first falling in love with the local team that he worshipped in our local league,  Dynamos “DeMbare.” My first live soccer game was one in which Dembare thrashed some menial team 5-0, and the euphoria in the air from the game had me hooked. This turned out to be my one and only live soccer game in Zimbabwe, because a few years later there was a stampede at the local stadium when an altercation between the police and some losing fans got out of control, and 13 people were killed. 2 of siblings were lucky to escape with their lives, but my mother forbade any of us from ever going to a live soccer game again.

 If you count my high school boyfriends up to now, I look like a serial dater, but that’s only having me as a girlfriend in high school was completely useless. I cared more about arguing out the game and placing bets on soccer games with a bunch of boys than about holding hands and whatever people did in high school! My relationships consequently lasted not more than 3 months each time, oh well, high school!

As you can see one of my favorite pastimes is
taking pictures
of myself in Manchester United jerseys

I then moved to the US and in my first few years I felt deathly deprived of soccer. Being an avid fan of the English Premiership, I found myself in the wrong time zone for all my games and in a country where nobody cared about my beloved sport. As the months and years went by, I felt like a piece of my world had been taken away from me. At that same time, I was also fighting being culturally changed by America. I woke up one morning and I had dreamt in English instead of my mother tongue and it terrified me! It became so important for to me to keep pieces of my old self intact, especially my love for soccer. Everybody in my dorm remembers my first college boyfriend, as Nancy’s football player, but I never once showed up for his games because I was determined to not be sucked into anything American. In fact, one of our biggest fights was over him ditching our plans for a superbowl party! Never mind that super bowl parties are now some of my favorite parties of the year and, I actually cried when the Bears lost to the Packers last season.

me at the 2010 Soccer World Cup

I have acclimatized to American sports, I even call soccer football now,  but my American friends still do not get my beautiful game at all. I was so glad to be in Africa this summer where people are as crazy about it as I am, and I do not have to explain to them the wonder behind 20 men chasing around a ball for 90 minutes. A true soccer fan knows it’s not just about what’s happening on the pitch(which in itself is pure magic, the skill, the intelligence in the strategies, everything),  but all what is transpiring with everyone else in the stadium or bar. Soccer is more than just a game. Soccer fans are some of the most emotionally attached sports fans out there, sometimes getting ugly to the tune of the shooting death of the Colombian player who scored an on-goal to get Colombia eliminated from the 1994 world cup. Outside of the ugliness, what the world cup brings every four years is a platform for millions of people across the world to identify with each other on a level that they never do otherwise. Those 90 minutes, that sometimes do not produce a goal, are a platform on which the world sets asides its differences and become one in the name of the beautiful game. A ceasefire was brokered in the civil war in Ivory Coast after their team qualified for the 2006 World cup and the country icon Didier Drogba begged the opposing sides to lay down their arms.  Soccer fans like to call the game a religion, and indeed the stadium is our church and in Sweden, Zlatan Ibrahimovic is their god!

King Ibrahimovic, the Swede who is
 one of the greatest footballers of this age!

Vuvuzelas all day!

Soccer is more than just a game for me too, for personal reasons. The physical distance between my family and I over the years, has also meant a chasm between the life my family lives and can comprehend in Zimbabwe to the one I have built for myself across the globe. It has become especially hard since I switched my career plans from the traditional physician track that I was on, to something that my parents are not even sure I am going to get a job with. After they had spent years telling everyone that I am a doctor in America, the meaning of this MPH/MBA business, and worse working in Africa, where I am supposed to have escaped completely eludes them. My parents used to hang onto every word I said on the phone to them, asking me to describe everything in detail so that they could somehow feel a part of my world but lately our conversations have been reduced to hearing the other’s voice, an finding out if the other is alive and in 5 minutes we are done, unless I bring up soccer.

You just need to ask my father if he watched the last game and it launches him into a full-on analysis of the game and the blunders that the referee made as well as how he could have strategized the game for our favorite team. I sit back and listen contently to his excited voice and I am taken back to 12 years ago when my dad and I would be on the edge of our seats yelling at the TV and my mum would in turn be yelling at us to just go into the TV and play the game ourselves! My family and I might have lost years and some emotional connection to each other but we still have soccer. Every soccer fan has a beautiful memory attached to the game in this way, that’s why soccer is called the beautiful game!

To lighten up the mood, here is John Oliver’s take on the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the issues in Brazil concerning it, but also a reflection on why soccer matters to the world!

                                    John Oliver’s rant about the World Cup

Lastly I am going to make a few calls regarding the World cup. My money is on the Dutch or the Germans taking this one! Brazil does not stand a chance! In addition a quick shoutout to my fellow red devils reading this and if you have the bad taste in life to bleed blue (Chelsea), our friendship is over before it even started!

All about the Dutch at the 2010 Soccer World Cup

 

Bleed red, through and through!

 

My summer reading list!

I finally started on my summer reading list! I used to be quite the reader in my younger years but academic reading ruined me. After I had the read The Wealth of Nations, Dante’s Inferno, The Iliad and The Communist Manifesto in undergrad I lost my enthusiasm for reading and soon after, science took over my life. I plan to claim that piece of my being this summer, and I started with my current favorite author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

I just finished reading her latest installment, Americanah, and I could not put this book down once I started it. I was completely engrossed in Chimamanda’s narration of the life of a Nigerian girl who migrated to America and I marveled and how accurate it was. I identified with the turbulent immigrant experience that Ifemelu, the main protagonist, was going through and I saw a lot of myself in her struggle. America has been this bitter sweet pill that I was forced to take, much like Ifemelu and a lot of other immigrants out there. Everyone knows when America calls, you answer. With Zimbabwe’s political and economic instability foiling my dreams, when University of Chicago gave me a full ride scholarship, I packed a bag and bid my family farewell and got on a plane to America. Everyone expected me to make a scene at the airport with my mother, being the baby in the family, but in the departure lounge at Harare International Airport, I did not even look back at them, only forward, to my brighter future, or so I thought.

Now 7 years later, I feel ambivalent, as I reflect on the long and twisty road I have travelled to get to

That time I wanted to be a doctor! Oh and a view from some height hiking
up Table mountain in Capetown!

this summer internship. In undergrad I had a close-knit group of ambitious African friends who dreamt of becoming surgeons, physicists and economists and our common goal was to “save” Africa. Over time, the immigrant “struggle” got real and those dreams either dissolved or manifested in a different way for all of us, and I am the latter. Although I abandoned my original dreams of becoming a surgeon, I am one of the few who still kept Africa in my future goals. My new career plans were inspired by an undergraduate summer experience I had, working with African women who had breast cancer in South Africa. I would spend my off – work hours in the ward visiting my favorite patients and listening to the stories that brought then to having ulcerating breasts and disease that had invaded their liver. Their stories spoke of systemic and institutional failures that thwarted their attempts to get the care they needed when they needed it, and it broke my heart. Most of all, for the big dreams I had, I realized how frustrated I would be as the physician who sends these women to palliation because I cannot help them beyond that, and that is when I became a convert to public health. As a dual degree in public health and business, I want to become an expert in global health policy analysis and market strategies to optimize and strengthen healthcare systems in sub Saharan Africa.

About to go cut some tumors,
jk, assisting in cutting tumors!
(cannot decide which internship was more awesome,
that one or this one)

I meet up with the old African gang from time to time and to most of them,  my ambitions are a pipe dream. America is supposed to be the great escape, where you make it, where you have the American dream. I should have gotten an economics degree, an investment banking job in New York and slid into a life of cutting monthly checks to my parents and visiting them for a few weeks every year with my biracial babies( my parents expect me to marry white, why, because that’s what people do in America apparently -_-, oh and it would make them so popular in the neighborhood). Its not such a shabby dream especially when you consider what Africa gives you to work with. You have a full menu of suffering from long ongoing civil wars in central Africa, terrorism in the west and east and disease epidemics, unstable economies and crazy politics in the south. Even my own parents cannot imagine why I care at all and sometimes when I get off the phone with them, or when I read African news, I ask myself, what exactly am I fighting for?

Then I remember it all. Having grown up in Zimbabwe, my life is the story of resilience.  It’s a gift that people to whom life has dealt some bad cards have, as immigrants from harsh places have experienced. Imparting parts of my life in therapy at some point and discussing suicide, I noted to my doctor that suicide is a luxury that people like me are not afforded. We are too busy trying to survive! The lost boys of Sudan walked tens of thousands of miles to have a chance at life, and children in villages in northern Uganda at some point went to sleep in the bush to avoid being captured by rebels, just so they can see another day, to walk 10 miles to school and learn the alphabet under a tree! Where I come from people often do not know where their next meal is coming from, but they wake up before the crack of dawn anyway and go about the business of surviving.

Which brings me to my second summer read that I just launched into, the Bright Continent by Dayo Olopade. Dayo wanted to provide insight into how Africans really survive, despite the wars, terrorism and disease. She travelled around the continent and documented stories to showcase Africa’s abilities to solve their own problems  in creative ways that bypass the broken social and political systems. Dayo maintained that there are two kinds of entrepreneurs; entrepreneurs by opportunity and entrepreneurs by necessity, and Africans are the latter.

 My mother comes to mind as I continue my forage into this book. My mother was never formally fully educated but she is probably one of the smartest women I know. As a fulltime housewife she supplemented the family income with various small business ventures, like keeping and selling chickens and making clothes and jerseys for resale amongst other things. She is in a “ home- improvement club” with her friends where they put money together and give it to one person each month to buy something they need for their home, and in recent years my mother has repainted our house and tiled her kitchen, from that income. Just last year she started making bed sheets, where she buys bedding cloth, hems it and sells it making her money back almost twice over. I sit in my classes and I can put everything that my mother does in business terms, micro finance with her friends, and her impeccable marketing abilities that gets her a margin of over 200%.  It endlessly fascinates me how I am going to be in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to learn things that my mother figured out on her own to survive.

My mum (in the middle), the last time i saw her in 2010 summer!

Survival is the key point to Africa’s entrepreneurship culture. People barely think beyond the next day as they go about the business of surviving,  but according to Dayo all this creativity is the backbone of Africa’s economy, not the formal institutions that everyone is worried about. Africa is not as helpless as the rest of the world thinks they are. I was recently at an emerging markets convention and Africa and was a hot topic. A number of economies in Africa, such as Rwanda, Mozambique and Ghana are growing at unprecedented rates of between 7-10%. In this new era, private investment, rather than foreign aid is the key player this phenomenon. In addition while natural resources were previously believed to be the source of economic success, it is now believed that human resources are playing a more significant role in development in sub Saharan Africa. In a moment of validation of my career choices, conference speakers noted that Africa’s future lies in its largely young educated population that can innovatively turn knowledge into action and optimize the resources at their disposal to drive progress on the continent.

 

Dayo took it upon herself to write the story of the Africa missed by World Bank GDP statistics, CNN, BBC and by Africans who lost the vision for its betterment. Her book is appropriately named the Bright Continent, to dispel the long standing perception of Africa as  the "dark" continent that needs to be helped out.  Chimamanda alluded me to a new term for my vocabulary. Instead of evolving into an African-American, the longer I live in the US, I am more of an “American- African.” I have enjoyed most of the best that America has to offer, from the fine education at top-notch universities (thanks Uchicago and Umichigan i.e. go maroon and go blue), to being a young professional who sips Cosmos at the top of the Trump Tower on Friday nights and goes wine and whiskey tasting during the summer. However America has never really felt like home to me, and l continue to fight for my “ saving” Africa dream, despite all its complications, challenges and uncertainty. My graduate education is giving me a roadmap of where I will take this passion and this summer experience in Ethiopia is only one of the many to come, as I build expertise in using health policy analysis and market strategies to improve healthcare access in sub Saharan Africa.  People always ask me if I want to go back to “Africa”, and I think, I never left, in all truth!

 As I walk on the streets of Addis everyday, get Amharic shouted after me because well, I look African and eat shiro for lunch, I feel like I never really left, my heart never left!

The Land of Coffee!

Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee! This  is one of first things I found out about the country while doing my research on it after taking this internship.  I almost dropped from my chair in Starbucks with delight! Having proclaimed myself a caffeine addict back in undergrad, I could not contain my excitement to spend my summer with people who lived and breathed my favorite “drug”! I attribute a lot of my accomplishments to coffee, especially in my last few months as a senior in undergrad, racing against time to complete my theses. At some point,  I had two friends; the basement level of the Regenstein library at the University of Chicago, and COFFEE, as I slaved away on my two honors theses (and regretted ever being a double major!). 

Coffee production anchors the Ethiopian economy and is the country's largest export, bringing in as much as $3.08 billion in revenue in 2013.  It is also a way of life for Ethiopians. Drinking coffee is everyone’s favorite pastime anytime of the day. There is a spread of coffee shops across the city from the chain  Kaldis, (that looks a lot like Starbucks) and the smaller ones that are in shack-like establishments in the local neighborhood. When people like you, they invite you to their home for coffee. It was therefore only fitting that coffee was the first food in my stomach on Ethiopian soil.On our way home from the airport, we stopped by a coffee joint and the double macchiato I had was one of the best tasting coffee I had ever had in my life!! Ethiopians serve coffee, (like their former “colonizers”, the Italians), in dainty little cups, that I am  frankly finding hard to appreciate. At my first drink,  I found myself wanting 3, and then embarrassed to order a 4^th as I tried to drink as much as my daily Starbucks order of a vente double macchiato, on my way to class. I was however instantly seduced by Ethiopian coffee and I was eager to find out how Ethiopians made their coffee and its cultural significance to them.

The coffee set( wonder if i can get through customs with this!)

Woman pouring coffee!

I then got to experience coffee in an Ethiopian home with my host Belen and her family. Belen's family served coffee right after lunch in a very intriguing ceremonial way. There was an elaborate set-up to it, a coffee set complete with a coffee pot and the tiny cups, a burning coal pail and the water. First incense was burned to make the air more relaxing. Next the coffee beans came out and were roasted over the hot coals. Thus I found out the first secret to why Ethiopian coffee tasted so good, it was always fresh!After being roasted, the beans were passed around the room for everyone to take in their wonderful aroma, another instance of cultural significance where everyone shares in the deliciousness of the coffee beans. The beans were then  ground into a power. Previously a mortar and pestle served this purpose, but in recent years coffee grinders have become more common. 

I then learnt a few more things about communal coffee drinking. The first was to not be as slow as I was drinking mine the first time. My goal of savoring the fresh taste by sipping slowly was not in line with the way everybody gulped down their tiny cups,  like they were “shots” and had them back on the tray in no time, ready for the next round. The next round was not served until everyone’s cup was back on the tray, so my being slow was inconveniencing everybody around me,  but they were too polite to tell me! In addition the tiny cups of coffee kept coming until you say no more, if not you could possibly drink coffee for 2 hours!

Then an amazing thing happened!! After 4 cups of this strong and delicious coffee, instead of feeling wide awake, I found my eyes getting heavier and I felt a strong need to lie down on the couch. Between by jetlag, the elegant Amharic conversation around me, that I only participated in every 5 minutes when Belen translated something to me, and the gentle rain outside, Ethiopian coffee had done the unthinkable; put Nancy to sleep! I concluded that I would have never survived school in this country!

Drinking coffee with Belen’s family was a really grounding experience for me. Coffee is more than just a drink for Ethiopians. It is a substance around which Ethiopians built their economy, family ties and a cultural identity. To quote another blogger, "coffee is money, coffee is job, coffee is history, and most of all for Ethiopians coffee is love and pride."Coffee ceremonies bring people together, and is a symbol of union among family and friends I found the "rhythmic" way in which Belen's family served their coffee as the afternoon went on in many rounds,  to somehow bring everyone in sync with each other as they got caught up on each other's day. As a visitor  I felt very much a part of this  rhythm and was grateful to share in the warmth and richness of their culture! 

So friends, feel free to be jealous of me because I am in coffee heaven!! They do really need to upgrade the cups though, this coffee is just too good for the dainty little cups!

This cup is so tiny!

 

I AM HOME!!!

I AM HOME!!

Well not really! I am originally from Zimbabwe and in Ethiopia for the summer, so technically no, but in a lot of ways yes! I have not seen my family in Zimbabwe in 4 years. However from the moment I arrived at my terminal at  Dulle’s airport, I started to feel right at home! From the insane amount of luggage that people had, (where 2 of the bags are usually your fellow countrymen using you as a courier service), to parents  threatening a beating to their kids who were running around the airport, and the chit chat all around me in languages I did not even understand, I felt a sense of familiarity with my surroundings! At that point it did not matter that I was not going to Zimbabwe, but to Africa, my home!

Solyana and I just off the plane!

On the plane I made an Ethiopian friend, Solyana, who was on her way to visit her family in Addis.A recent graduate of UC-Davis, Solyana is on her way to public health school ,so we had a lot to talk about right from the start! To add to our great chance encounter, no-one claimed the seat between us so we got to occupy a prime piece of real estate in the plane; a 3 person back seat that we took turns to stretch our legs on and steal a few minutes of sleep over the course of our journey! In addition, courtesy of Solyana, I breezed through immigration and customs, because she knew where exactly I should be at any point in time, from experience and being able to communicate faster in Amharic. Solyana delivered me safely to my host Belen, a good friend from public health school back in Michigan who has been my host for the past 5 days.

Although my internship does not start officially for another week, I decided to fly in early so as to get a head start on getting to know Addis Ababa, get over jetlag and get a chance to experience Ethiopia though the eyes of its natives, Belen’s family. Belen “warned” me of the differences, like how many of her big family I would meet, and that I might be sharing everything including a bed, and I did not mind at all! Since I moved to America, I might be a visitor to Africa once in a while but I am no stranger to it, and its ways, something I  have to keep reminding the people I meet of;  at times unsuccessfully. At my last African summer in Capetown, no matter how many times I explained where I am from to my work colleagues at Tygerberg hospital, I was still known as the American and I entertained the nurses with my “antics” of taking public transportation and going to places in town they deemed dangerous for foreigners! In response I would tell them, you can take the African out of Africa but you cannot take Africa out of them!

Belen and I!

I have had the most wonderful 5 days ever with Belen's family! From the airport, Belen and her uncle  had already planned out my day, complete with  my first taste of Ethiopian coffee(which is amazing), procuring a phone and a sim card for me, and a hair appointment that her uncle had found someone to come to the house before my arrival. Nothing beats the warmth and skilled hands of an African on my head at a cost of about 400 Birr (about 32 dollars) as opposed to the $200 that bankrupted me every few months in America when I had to get my hair done!For the last few days I have fallen in love with Belen's family and the Ethiopian culture that they have exposed me to. I have already started to learn about healthcare access in Ethiopia from many conversation with different people who are so eager to impart their experiences to me. I have seen parts of the city from driving around it, and learnt a great deal of history about it from Belen's uncle. Most of all I have enjoyed some amazing Ethiopian home cooking from  Belen grandmother which I already miss sitting in my guest house : (! 

Cannot get enough of this new hair!

Belen's uncle Assefa, our driver and historian!

  How much Belen’s family opened up to my presence is a yet another mark of African culture; amazing hospitality : )! In our culture, we are communal people who  take care of their own, in this case a fellow African. Every African knows the experience of a relative visiting without notice and staying for months on end! Belen’s grandmother raised 7 children, and countless cousins who came in and out of her home in a 2 bedroomed house. No matter how little people have, it is always enough to go round for everyone in the house! We extend this hospitality to non-Africans as well! On my last day with them, Belen's grandmother sincerely told me she loved me, in her first full sentence of communication in English to me since I have been with them!, and it warmed my heart to the core! I cannot wait for what else this summer is going to bring for me : )!

Waking up  to a cock crowing  and breathing in the soil after the heavy rain of the night, one thought runs through my head...

I AM HOME!!

Belen's grandmother's amazing cooking!

Belen, her grandma and I, saying goodbye!