Cady Gonzalez is a second year MA student in cultural anthropology and an Amharic Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellow. This past summer, she attended Afaan Oromoo language training and conducted ethnographic research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Working in part with her chair, Dr. Marit Ostebo, she explored a new public health (development) project in Ethiopia. Since January 2016, the Addis Ababa Water and Sewerage Agency (AAWSA) has constructed “mobile toilets” at 107 locations within the city municipality. Promoted as urban parks and green spaces, these public toilets also feature the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony, once limited to the domestic sphere, but now becoming an integrated part of the urban public landscape. The project seeks to increase awareness of and access to better public sanitation and hygiene practices, by offering low cost services in spaces widely considered “dirty.” Coffee not only generates income by attracting customers, but also legitimizes these spaces to the public. Each site is managed by a cooperative of ten citizens, selected by the district government based on their unemployment status.
She set out to investigate the role coffee plays in “open defecation free” policy. Who decides how, when and where coffee and toilets should fit together? Using a multi-level approach to explore technologies of governance and user experiences, she encountered contested narratives about coffee’s ‘place’ and its relation to sanitation. What emerged was a complex story that speaks to Dr. Ostebo’s current research on theorizing models in development. As she continues this research, she will also consider the movement of coffee from the domestic to the public spheres and its impact on gender relations.
The research and language study was supported by the Foreign Language and Area Studies Summer Fellowship (Center for African Studies), Polly and Paul Doughty Research Award (Department of Anthropology) and Summer Field Research Grant (Tropical Conservation and Development).