white, black, red

black:

the sedan car is not made for these roads. our driver does not mind, or slow down. he floors it down rocky dirt tracks as the stones beat a loud percussion against our undercarriage. it is hard to stop wincing, especially when he splits the break line, tapes it up with hair ribbon, and decides not to slow down.

i yell out to stop just past the entrance and he slaloms to a halt fifty feet later, begrudgingly backing up to drop us off. as if if he drove fast enough we'd forget we paid him to take us here into the forest. and let us walk a while.

we get a guide, an older guy with a quick pace and he leads us down an overgrown path telling us we probably won't be lucky, probably won't see anything. but we are. he stops and listens and we hear it, a screamed "hah hah hah" that he describes as "chimpanzee's making telephone calls."

we struggle through the jungle until we find them, a family of about twenty chimps in the trees, on the ground, staring back at us from big black eyes in big black faces. they're bigger than i expected, stronger. they walk up trees using their hands and feet. they perch in forked branches and eye us warily. they are, we're told, dangerous. they are, i see, our closest relations. practically human. black furred, opposable toed, staring back at me practically human.

red:

it's after seeing the largest falls at sipi and on our way to the second set that dennis tells us about it. dennis is local, an orphan, and twenty-three. he karate-chops banana palms as he passes and runs up the steep rocky hills to show he can.

when he was twenty, in front of his community, he was circumsized. it was a public ceremony. to prove his manliness, he could not cry out, tear up, move, swallow hard or show that he felt anything at all as they cut away his foreskin. it hurt like hell, but he didn't flinch. when it was over and he was wrapped in the ceremonial robes, he drank an entire case of soda.

after the hike, he takes us to the local (and only) hangout in sipi. it's a dingy room with dusty couches, a "panasonaeoic" television, and old promotional posters hung crookedly on the walls. it is there that we begin discussing AIDS. a surprisingly erudite farmer says he heard the disease was created as bio warfare by the americans and got out of hand. we say we've heard that rumor too, but don't believe it. another man says he's heard that syphillis can turn into AIDS and that condoms give you cancer. i let my wife, the scientist, dispell these myths. we sit around, watch local music videos and eat matoke -- mashed, fried green banana paste. we feel oddly at home.

and now we're in nairobi and tonight we'll be in addis ababa, where email will be difficult to say the least. we're not sure what we're in for. we only found a guidebook to ethiopia from this decade yesterday. we're reading it quick. i'll do my best to remain in touch but if you don't hear from us for a while, that's why.