It’s been two months since I arrived in Ethiopia. It may be another two years before I leave.

What am I doing here? I am engaged in a long rite of passage, the equivalent of the Aboriginal walkabout — a period of voluntary exile, after which (supposedly) I will return to my former home a wiser and more adult person.

For anthropology graduate students, this is a normal part of our education. I have visited Ethiopia several times before, and each time I was taken aback by the suffering and the poverty. I have learned to expect melancholy and depression upon arrival in the country. But this time, I feel an overwhelming sense of well-being.

It’s a matter of perspective. While I pity the plight of many of the people around me, I’m also reminded of my relative prosperity, health and opportunity. If you ever feel like you’ve gotten a raw deal from life, take a trip to Ethiopia.

My happiness can also be attributed to being sheltered from the Western media. In the United States, I feel obliged to follow the news, almost to the point of obsession.

But Ethiopia has only one TV station, and the Internet is available via dial-up at speeds ranging from slow to glacial. The radio and newspapers are the main source of news, and they report largely on national issues. My life in Ethiopia is simpler.

But national news is far from uplifting. Although the rains have been good this year, the specter of famine still haunts Ethiopia. The country occupies a disadvantageous position in the global trade system, and the absence of democracy and freedom of expression at home make parts of Ethiopia vulnerable to famine even when there are bumper crops elsewhere. Since national elections were held in Ethiopia in 2005, half a dozen newspapers have been shut down for criticizing the government.

Last month, the Africa correspondent for The New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman, was expelled from Ethiopia for interviewing members of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, a militia group fighting for the independence of the ethnically Somali part of Ethiopia. (Gettleman did not respond to an e-mail for this article.) The Ethiopian army is also fighting a protracted war in neighboring Somalia, which it invaded with American support at the end of 2006.

Despite these problems, many Ethiopians are maintaining a stoic attitude. They have lived through decades of authoritarian rule, have been mobilized to fight wars on their own turf and have seen their country remapped and rebranded, as when Eritrea gained its independence and a nominally socialist government gave way to a nominally liberal-democratic one in 1991. This history gives them a different perspective on the news than most Americans.

Where Americans are alarmist, Ethiopians are skeptical. While their government plays along with the U.S. in the so-called war on terror as a means of obtaining badly needed foreign aid, most Ethiopians know that terror is as likely to be deployed against them by their own government as by shadowy networks of malcontents.

Spending some time in a country internationally renowned for poverty, suffering and conflict has its upside. It protects against the tendency to paranoid speculation and status anxiety that so afflicts American culture, it helps sharpen one’s ability to distinguish real problems from phony ones and it serves as a reminder that we must count our blessings.

Jed Stevenson is an anthropology graduate student from Colchester, England. He is studying in Ethiopia for the next two years.