Rain, COVID, Wildcats, and a New Language in a New Year

Ethiopian genet in our tree

Happy New Year 2014! This is a big holiday weekend here in Ethiopia, where they count the birth of Christ as taking place about 7 years later than we do in the West. Over the past few days, we have noticed preparations going on around us. All the small shops around our neighborhood began to sell little yellow sunflower decorations to wear in your hair or put up in the house – this seems to be the symbol of the new year, much as the poinsettia is a symbol of Western Christmas. Yesterday, the floor of our local mall was strewn with clean fresh grass and papyrus reeds, as decoration and to make the place feel beautiful and welcoming. Outside the churches, people were selling more grass, candles, and long pillars of some sort of dried brush (presumably for burning, but it wasn’t clear to us).

It’s a day of feasting and so people were getting ready to acquire fresh meat. On Thursday evening, I noticed a group of 10 hobbled roosters out for sale around the corner.  Apparently, older people really prefer to eat roosters on this holiday, rather than hens. One of our guards bought a whole sheep to celebrate his father’s visit from the village. The sheep found temporary lodging near our chicken coop until it could be slaughtered this morning. Sorry – but that is just the circle of life!

New Years decorations at the mall

We are very new here and so we don’t have any particular social obligations this weekend. I’m sure that will change by next year. We are just taking time to rest up and prepare ourselves for the week ahead. There is something about moving countries that puts one in an interesting place relationally. On the one hand, we are eager to make friendships and build a community. On the other hand, there are hidden ways that we feel our energy to be quite drained and so it actually feels essential to pull inwards and just have quiet family times more than we might in a year from now when we are more accustomed to this context. There is also a big increase in COVID, and so indoor socializing is not a great idea. We had one activity planned for today: to take the dogs back up to Gullele Botanical gardens for a walk. Unfortunately, the sunny morning turned stormy the moment we parked the car. We sat out the first round of heavy rain, started walking, sought shelter again, walked another 20 minutes and then concluded that that it was just too wet to keep persevering. Rainy season makes any fun outdoor activity very difficult! The dogs still had a blast running around, exploring, getting soaking wet.

David and Bella
waiting out the rain (in vain) 

We have now been in Ethiopia for about four weeks, and certain things are falling into a rhythm for us here. Our kids now have places on the school bus that leaves from a neighboring mission compound. We are grateful for continuing very strict COVID protocols on the bus (masks, open windows, no kids on the bus if there are covid cases in the family). The school also continues to take the rapid spread of the Delta variant here very seriously – every week, one or two classes have gone to online school for 12 days because someone in the class tested positive for covid. It’s just a matter of time before this happens in one of our kids’ classes. We remain extremely grateful that we have all been vaccinated, reducing the risk of life-threatening illness. The wife of one colleague became extremely ill about two weeks ago and in the end had to be hospitalized with their infant daughter. After receiving good treatment for five days, she was able to be discharged. Still, it was a near miss, we are pretty sure. A neighbor who runs a guesthouse Mennonites have used for years, a woman my age, died suddenly on Wednesdays, the day after a Mennonite pastor died (someone who refused masks and vaccines). This disease is real, deadly and deeply impacting society here in Addis. Anyway, back to routines and off of the sober subject that has caused not only death, but family division and long-term health consequences for so many.

David with Bella and Friday before school

The kids really wish we were still driving them, but as a compromise, I walk them down to the bus every morning at 7 am, for that last few minutes of conversation and togetherness. I have also found that it is really helpful and important to have conversations with the various other missionary moms dropping off their kids. I am now on a list to order tortillas and bagels weekly, have found out the best brand of local butter and learned more about the grocery stores which stock weird things like fish sauce. I’m usually back by 7:25, when Paul and I do our morning workout in the living room and listen to the daily audio bible. There is just enough time to break a sweat and then get a shower before our language teacher arrives at 8:30 am three days a week.

Poinsettia and the "tukul"
where we study Amharic 

We started Amharic lessons on September 1 and so far, it is very interesting and engaging. We sit under an outdoor shelter, rain or shine, so that our teacher can feel comfortable taking off her mask to pronounce Amharic words carefully for us – pronunciation of this language is incredibly intricate and subtle, and we need to see her mouth. The methodology involves listening and memorizing a lot of vocabulary, and then recognizing and pointing out the correct word when she says it. She has pages of pictures to show us, and we make recordings on our phones. Our homework is listening and memorizing. We probably won’t start learning the Amharic alphabet until 2022. According to the pure method, we shouldn’t even be speaking much yet, but it just makes more sense to try to use what we are learning. Our colleagues are very amused by our progress each day of lessons. And it’s true that there is so much we can’t say or can’t say properly. At the same time, I am already able to communicate more with our guards, and that is very practical and helpful.

New Years sheep in our yard

We finish lessons at 10:30 and then head over to the office for a quick cup of tea with our colleagues. And then there is always lots of email to catch up on, etc. We continue to share staff lunch together Monday through Thursday, sitting under our larger outdoor shelter. I am so grateful for the atmosphere of camaraderie on this team, a very healthy team dynamic that we have inherited. We share good serious conversation along with a lot of jokes each lunch time, talking about the political context, about cultural nuances and holiday traditions. It’s very easy to get along with our program staff, and we are confident that they will let us know if we are getting ready to do something inappropriate to the culture (personally or in work).

The kids are getting used to walking themselves back home from the bus, so that we normally work until about 4:30 pm. On the rare sunny afternoons, we try to go for a walk around the neighborhood with Oren – the best time to actually talk with our teenage son. Other days we have one or another of the neighbors over here hanging out with our kids, playing video games. We try to suggest playing basketball or badminton in the few breaks in the rain. By 6 pm or so we need to switch gears to homework and dinner. We need to make a fire in the fireplace on lots of evenings because it’s super damp and chilly. By nine we need to head to bed because it’s an early morning at 5:30 am!

Cobblestone streets in our neighborhood

In the last blog, Paul mentioned that we have needed to turn  a lot of attention to short-term humanitarian assistance efforts. We are grateful that people in North America have taken note of the human toll being taken by conflict in Ethiopia, and that we have some funds to put towards food and non-food assistance. In addition, we’ve found our colleagues at headquarters extremely responsive to getting short-term proposals approved quickly. It has been a real joy to find ourselves in a place where we do actually have some power to do good quickly. Let me cite just one example.

We partner with an organization called Afar Pastoralists Development Agency (APDA). They are a local NGO based in the Afar region, one of the hottest, driest and most desolate places in the world, tucked into a volcanic depression south and west of Somalia. In theory, the Afar region has nothing to do with the violence that has broken out around Tigray. However, there was an increase in conflict in August, spilling over the borders of Tigray and Amhara into Afar. Thousands of people had to flee their homes empty-handed to escape with their lives. People from APDA had to go on a three-day journey on foot to find these internally displaced people, hiding in a remote grazing valley, in order to make an assessment of their situation and their needs. Hunger is a big problem, but one that is easier to solve through traditional humanitarian organizations like the World Food Program. It turned out that many of these people had absolutely no shelter at all. Every evening and night it was raining heavily, and all they could do was to try to hide under little bits of scrub bush for protection. People were chilled and in danger of sickness, particularly children and the elderly who had fled their homes.

Camels bearing palm mats and sticks
for traditional shelters  in Afar
Photo credit to APDA

We got the report from this walking assessment on a Tuesday, and by the end of the week a concept paper was approved for MCC to support APDA to provide shelters for 630 households. Typically, UN agencies provide plastic sheeting for internally displaced people (IDPs), but we learned from APDA that plastic was totally inappropriate in that environment. Clear plastic provides no shade during the day, and is easily ripped and destroyed by the high winds of the region. APDA suggested that locally-produced palm mats (what people normally use for shelter in Afar) would be much more appropriate and durable – in fact, if we provided a woman with 6 palm mats, she would have a home she could use for the next 10-12 years, an important factor in her recovery from displacement. Local producers were ready to make the mats and they would be transported out to the remote areas by camel. I tell you, this is an amazing project because of the multitude of ways it is designed to be appropriate to the community, meet their actual needs, and use locally available materials and means of transport.

Traditional Afar houses
Photo credit to APDA

Anyway, through the next few days, we were able to help APDA write a full project proposal, in spite of high winds blowing off the roof of their office in the process, cutting electricity and causing delays. We just kept pushing through because the rains continue, and people continue to suffer without shelter. Every time I sat in our house, on a rainy night, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Last week Friday, I was able to sit in my chair, get news of the final project approval to APDA, send them a Memorandum of Understanding to sign, enter the details of their project into our MCC database, and start the process of requesting funds to be sent over to us ASAP. It had been just 10 days! I know that sometimes our administrative job can seem a bit dull, but it was really amazing to feel the power that we do have to push through help for people who are really suffering if we sit and work at it faithfully.

We worked on a 1500 piece puzzle
for our first 3 three weeks

As far as other details of our after-hours life, I’ve been really happy to start getting involved in music at our international church. For now, I’m joining other people who are leading the music, figuring out how it works in this community. Paul is also now on the list of Sunday school teachers for this church and will probably start teaching in the next few weeks. I was able to join an evening ladies’ bible study here for the first time, and I trust that will also become a group of good friends. It’s great that I can also share a ride with our next-door neighbor Katy.

Last Saturday, we also had a really nice afternoon with another American family who has lived here for 7 years, the Kempens. He studied at Johns Hopkins University under Paul's dad, and they lived in BAltimore for while, so we have many, many mutual friends through that connection. Our oldest boys seem to share a real love for complex military-historical board games, and our younger boys also have a lot in common. I hope we will find ways to keep connecting with this family. 

Completed puzzle

When we got home that evening, our guard, Solomon, brought us down to the lower part of the yard. Here is how David described the scene for school:

At around 5pm on Saturday the guard randomly called us out, I knew something was up because the dogs were running around barking around the base of a jacaranda tree. The guard beckoned me over to a part of the tree where there were no leaves and in the tree I saw a wild cat. it had Weasley body with a long ringed tail, it had a leopard’s coat but was very small. Afterward, he was throwing rocks and sticks at it to keep it away from the chickens because it could potentially kill the chickens. A few days later I learned it was called an Ethiopian Genet.

We only had one visit of that exotic wild predator. The other exciting news is that we have rats that seem to know how to get into our house and night and wreak havoc. We are working on ways to catch or kill them. A little too much wildlife around here this week!

That’s the round up of things going on around here these days. More to come in another week or two.

Heavy rain and hail on the way back from school

New years preparations on the street