Ephrem Endale Contributer
Recently, a few of us were talking about, what else, the horrendously rising cost of living. Maybe by just getting things off our chest we might ease the pain. No way!
“So, how is everything with you guys? You seem to be sad.”
“If you have any grey matter left in your head you should be, too.”
Of course, being sad never solved problems.
So some changes are needed around the house. Ok; maybe you might call off the idea of hiring domestic help; slowly that’s becoming a sort of luxury. You wouldn’t believe what many of them are asking for a monthly pay. Of course, one has to sympathize with their position too.
But sympathy is something, while being able to pay is another story. Two thousand five hundred, three thousand birr per month! Add to that the greedy landlords, the greedier business people and you get the picture.
So Mr. ‘Man of the House,’ “Put on the apron and on your way to the kitchen ASAP.
“To the what?”
“To the kitchen; you know the kitchen, don’t you? In case no one told you, or you never asked about it, it’s the place where everything you eat it is prepared. Yes, I’m talking about all the extra calories hanging from your mid-section.
Look, price increases don’t rock only your wallets, but the peace in the house too. Unless members of the family are ready to let go some habits you’ll forgive the baker who snapped at you. Self-centered hubbies refusing to cut back on their ‘nights out with the boys,’ self-centered Eves refusing to settle for cheaper brands of cosmetics aren’t’ stuff with which happy families are formed!
Who cares if you are a jolly good fellow for your wife! What she now needs is a helping hand in the kitchen! Hey, at least you can wash the dishes! Starvation wouldn’t be the nicest way of chasing all your midsection calories away for good. So, cook what you eat! Of course, people seeing the folds of extra flesh thought you had some secrets up your sleeves. You’re having your three meals in those fancy hotels.
“How is their food?”
“How is whose food?”
“The hotels where you’re always dinning.”
And you thought such comments were compliments!
Believe me unless you start doing something about your budget the months coming our way wouldn’t be nice. So get into some ‘emergency budget mode!’
In the old days you at least have the luxury if bargaining. You know those things were about ‘luxury’ when you hear the tone of finality of the businesspeople and shop owners these days.
“Ok, I’ll take it for a hundred.”
“A hundred! Did you say a hundred? I paid for it a hundred twenty per piece from the wholesalers.”
A hundred twenty! Really!
Believe me if you have some notion or two of the tricks of the business guys around here you can take home that item for seventy five birr. The shop owner would still make a forty-birr profit.
It is a pity. Trying to strangle us financially over the minutest of pretexts; sometimes you’re forced to think these business guys have their own prayer books;
“God, please give us the slightest of reasons to increase prices.”
Even the local baker practically grows horns and fangs!
“Could you give me three pieces of that.”
“The price is four birr apiece.” that is one instance where you get the idea of what people are trying to say when they talked about their blood running cold. Yours is almost frozen!
“What! It was three birr only yesterday!” Even three birr was too heavy a load on your budget. But the next alternative being going hungry you’ve been trying to carry the burden.
“Take it or leave it!” he snaps. The baker from whom you have been buying for the last a decade or so talks you in that tone! ‘Take it or leave it!’ that’s what he said! You couldn’t believe your ears.
But one look at the twenty-odd folds across his forehead, and reality hits hard. He meant business. And this was the one person you were ready to nominate for sainthood!
As if the extra cost wasn’t enough the some shopkeepers act as if they own your very souls.
I’ll tell you what the most amateurish business trick around here is. The shelves of the shops are filled with products which have been lying around for the better half of the year. Say, there comes some increase on the price of gas. It is party time!
All of a sudden the prices of the products which have been gathering dust on the shelves for so long shoot up by forty or more percent! Bingo! Believe me the nastiest thing you can face these days is the shop owners’ “Take it or leave it!” rant.
Who’s to Blame!
There’s a pool of dirty water on the road right near the curb. And this guy who drives like he was training for some Grand Prix in Monaco or somewhere else splashes the dirty water all over you. And you were dressed in your best for one reason or another! If tears threaten to come gushing out don’t panic. O feeling would be more natural!
“But, who’s to blame?”
“I look like I have been rescued from some Catacomb or something and you’re asking me about blame! Of course that good for nothing driver is the one to blame! He’s probably driving around with a fake driving license!”
Don’t bet on that last part. It is not only the fake ones creating traffic on our streets, but also those with years of driving experience. Things these days aren’t only about skills, they are also about this tendency of kicking dust into the face of the rules and regulations. Saying that ours is a very law-abiding society would be missing the facts by long stretch. Well, that’s an issue for another day, isn’t it?
Ok, you blame the driver. But that hole holding all that dirty water shouldn’t have been there in the first place! Some guys are not doing their jobs! And your tax money goes into paying their salaries.
Aren’t they to blame, too? And what about you? I mean knowing how road repair in this city has continued being a complete disaster for decades shouldn’t you have been more careful.
Like not being so close to the curb? Look, there is nothing simpler than throwing the blame at everything and everyone, except your way. Ha! Isn’t that one, big problem denying is the joy of stitching the torn parts and raising the fallen ones!
The driver could say, “I was driving on the right lane, I broke no rules!” You could say “I was walking on the sidewalks and did nothing wrong! The repair guys could say “The office is low on budget, and that we’re only the foot soldiers!” It is a sort of vicious circle. But all comes down to one fact; no one wants to share the blame!
Your house maid is about to serve you coffee in that pretty cup an ex-girlfriend gave you years back. What a memorabilia. Just think of the images that fill your brain every time you take a sip. It is easy to equate the soft edges of the cup with the soft wholes of you know what. Anyways your maid approaches you.
Just as she is about to hand you the cup she stumbles and the coffee ends up on your lap! You’re wearing a five-thousand birr suit you bought after having saved for about a year and a half and this happens! Your first impulse is shouting at the poor soul; “You! You…” even finding the right words is tough. Then all the four-latter obscenities, not exactly your nature, rain down. But who’s to blame?
“Of course she is to blame. Look what she did to my precious suit! She should have walked more carefully!”
But she did walk more carefully. Aren’t you forgetting something? Yes, the rugs! Your rugs which marked their silver jubilee three months back are torn in four or five places and the family has been commenting for months. You have a fifty five inch flat screen TV in the living room and rugs looking like stuff of an abandoned warehouse! What happened was the poor girl caught her feet
in one of those ‘holes’! Go, buy a new rug!
It’s so easy to put the blame on others, isn’t it? That’s the problem with us. No one has the guts enough to take or his/her fair share the blame.
There is this issue we raise sometimes back. Many years back our national soccer team went abroad for games and retuned beaten black and blue. We know where our soccer stood; we knew the skills of the players; we knew all the un-soccer like shenanigans happening on the field and off it.
Yet every time they were asked as to the reason for their defeat they used to blame, what else, the weather! Yes, it is like ‘the weather’ sneaked into every plane they boarded, followed them for miles, got on the filed with them and turned their legs into bananas during the games!
Look, the elections coming around the corner we are entitled to be worried. This blame-throwing thing which has remained some sort of a political wound refusing to heal. We worry it would spoil real debate on issues, which is what everyone wants. It is really funny when you think about it.
There are even politicians who claim this nation is no more than a century old and still blame rulers who lived three or four hundred years back! Talk of shooting oneself in the foot!
Hearing at what members of many of the political groups say on the media or elsewhere we wonder when, oh when blame-throwing ever won the hearts of the people so much so as to but the blame-throwers in office! Not to our knowledge anyway!
The Ethiopian Herald February 28/2021