mTs...It is syllabically singular, expressionally infinite. It is first aid and band aid, compassion displayed, action waylaid. It is contempt and respect. It is understanding and disdain. It is an air sucked, teeth clenched, lips pursed engagement with a person, an act, a dream, an experience. If you are Ethiopian, you have said it, heard it, expressed it or suppressed it. And you have a story about it, from it, with it, or against it. Is it fatalism on display? Compassion in action? Disdainful refrain? We want to hear about it. Your myth on "mTs". Here - by the 20th of May. A picture, story, poem...anything but a singular mTs.

If you hear some people say it (as they arrive two and a half hours late to a public event), Ethiopia's problem is lack of modernity. Some people will declare (as they pop yesterday's qateNa into the microwave to get it re-crisped) that Ethiopia's problem IS modernity. Some people will insist (as they send off their son to a high school an hour's hoary jog away) that Ethiopia's problem are the modernizers themselves. And some will swear (as they push aside a staggering stack of the people's business on their bureaucrat's desk to make way for a cup of macchiatto), that the Ethiopian people are irredeemably unmodernizable. For this double issue, we first of all want to extract out of you those compelling stories of modernity gedls, such as; "The gedl of The First Person to Wear European Shoes in My Town", or "The gedl of The Encounter with an ATM Machine", or "The gedl of When My Breasts Became Sexual Things", or "The gedl of Explaining the Idea of a Flower Garden to My Country Relations Coming to Visit Us in Addis". And secondly, we invite you to pontificate on this topic. Is modernity being western? What do you lose on the road to being modern? Does Abebech's kitchen modernity extend to the bedroom (you wonder)? Were we all taught to be "modern", or simply to reject what is ours and to covet the white man's ways? And finally, the mother of all questions, "The Gap" opens a franchise on the third floor of a new fifty-story building in Addis... Is that modernity? Discuss, think, intellectualize, dissect and synthesize. Do whatever you have to do to get us something topical, enjoyable and stimulating by June 20.