Traditional Celebrations and a Field Visit in October

RPC Preschool students

Today is my last chance to put up a second post in September. I am committed to doing two updates a month so I am settling in to write. It is a Friday afternoon, about an hour before kids will come home. Normally we would still be working on other days, but Rebecca and I try to take a half-day off on Friday for a number of reasons, one of which is that we often work into the evening on other days in order to have zoom meetings with headquarters in the US and Canada. Friday is also a day we ask all office staff to work at home since the office is on our compound. We like to have a day when there is no one here. (Although there is always at least one guard here at all times.)

The past three weeks have had a number of highlights that I will mention first. We passed through two Ethiopian holidays. Ethiopian New Year is celebrated by everyone widely. Many who are reading know that the Ethiopian calendar differs in several ways from the Gregorian calendar. For one thing, they are 7 years behind us, so we just began the year 2015. Second, they have 13 months in the year (although the final month is only 5 days), and these months do not exactly correspond with Gregorian months. Finally, they celebrate New Year's in September. (Don't get me started on the clock which is also 6 hours different than ours -- but honestly is biblical time.)

Crafts at Mesfin's house

New Year's is a special occasion for children; gifts (or money) are given as well as paper flowers. Our colleague Mesfin invited us to come over to his house for a traditional Ethiopian meal. This usually features 'doro wot,' a kind of chicken curried in berbere and lots of butter. Mesfin has three young daughters, so we brought along some activities to do from Sunday School. We had made origami lilies for our lesson and brought paper to teach them how to make them. Since Mesfin lives close by, we were able to walk over to his house after church, and had an enjoyable and educational meal. His family comes from the South (Sodo / Wolaita) and they shared some wolayitinya music with us on YouTube. His younger daughter loves to do traditional wolaitinya dancing and entertained us with her enthusiastic bouncing to the songs. 

Well-drilling

When we are not celebrating holidays, we have been busy with office work. We have a number of projects in transition or at critical stages. We have been waiting for news of a well that our partner AEID is digging near a referral hospital that has had no water, located in West Omo Zone. It is in a very remote area. We were very happy to get news that they hit an abundant aquifer and have capped the well. Two other well sites have been very difficult to access and at the moment the district govt. has loaned them a bulldozer to try to make the road passable for the drill rig. I had planned to go with some co-sponsors to visit these wells in October, but we have been advised that travel in the area is not secure at the moment. We do hear somewhat regularly of attacks on vehicles and have tightened our security protocols around car travel far from Addis.

Despite the increased security at this time, we have been able to host some visitors in the past two weeks. We were happy to welcome the MCC Representatives from Chad, Samuel and Winfred, along with their Program Officer Jonathan. They arrived midweek last week and I picked them up at the airport and set them up in a guesthouse near our house. The next day they had a chance to have habesha food with our staff, prepared by our very capable cook Yeshi. They enjoyed it and Jonathan noted that in Chad they eat a nearly identical kind of bread as injera, which is made with millet rather than teff and is usually mildly sweet. (Injera has a sourdough taste because it is fermented.) I was surprised because I have not seen a similar kind of pancake starch anywhere in East Africa.

After sharing some details of our program during the afternoon, we took them back to the guesthouse but picked them up early the next morning for a trip about an hour and a half south of Addis to a town called Adama where we have an education project. I have wanted to visit this pre-school in the past year, run by our partner RPC, in a very under-served urban market area where there is a large population of orphans and single-parent children, some of them affected by HIV. 

Our rep counterparts from Chad were on an ongoing experience-building tour of education programs that was going to take them to South Sudan next, but they were very impressed with the way the RPC pre-school was so effectively organized toward child-centered learning. They use a Montessori school approach, with very interactive classrooms. All rooms have open areas for interaction with materials. 

The school materials themselves were probably the most interesting aspect of the visit. Teachers, who have been trained in this approach had developed a huge assortment of their own learning materials out of available items. In an American school, these kinds of teaching aids would be readily available in a classroom, but everything here had to be made from scratch. There were many examples of cleverly constructed game pieces and toys to teach counting, simple math, letters of the alphabet, the days of the week, months, etc. 

I was also surprised to see instruction in 3 languages in preschool! They learn Afaan Oromo (the regional language), Amharic, (the national language), as well as some simple English. The Chad reps, as well as Solomon (my MCCE colleague), and I really appreciated the thoroughness of the visit. We had the chance to talk to the director as well as visit many classrooms with kids. Teachers told us about their work and preparations. It was quite inspiring.

Back in Addis that evening, our guests were interested in buying some traditional Ethiopian clothing. We got help from an expat colleague, who guided us to a nearby clothing market area. Rebecca drove and translated for everyone, since it seemed that none of the vendors spoke English. Everyone gathered back at our house for a final dinner before their departure early the next morning. Johnathan found the chill of Addis nearly unbearable and was glad to warm up next to our fireplace. I was the driver, and did notice that security around the airport and on the roads at night is quite tight at the moment. 

Our office has seemed less populated these days as Mesfin, our Food Security Manager, has been out on a number of field visits related to our large conservation agriculture program. It seemed he was flying all over the country with project sites in both the north and south. 

new grill

Despite the heavy workload, not to mention increasing difficult Amharic lessons with substantial homework, we have had a number of nice social events. We have been able to connect with a number of returning neighbors at the SIM compound about a half-kilometer away. We have made friends with Jason and Liz P., who have been here for the past 10 years in total. They have kids David's age. We also continue to see our neighbors Pete and Katy as well as others. The various gatherings with new friends have given us several opportunities to use the new charcoal grill that we acquired since our return.

youth group

We are seeing growth in our church congregation since our return, with a number of new families joining. In addition, we have started to see a growing youth group emerge. We hosted the first gathering with about 16 kids, which was followed two weeks later by another gathering at another family's house that had about 30. It is great to see our kids building a core group of good friends. This was an answer to prayer because they had really felt isolated in year 1 of our time here. I think they are now not the new kids. 

We bookended the last 3 weeks with another traditional celebration, Meskel. This is an Orthodox celebration that is a national holiday. It celebrates the finding of part of the true cross (from the crucifixion) which is claimed ended up in Ethiopia. The celebration features a tradition of making a large bonfire in various locations. When the bonfire burns down, a cross is revealed in the flames (it is made of metal so does not burn.) People also burn small bonfires in their backyards and usually eat a lot of kitfo (raw beef).

Coffee ceremony

Our bookkeeper Hana invited us to her house. Her parents are Orthodox, and we had a lovely meal featuring quite a lot of kitfo (raw beef) as well as k'ocho (or false banana) which is a kind of fermented flat bread made from a plant. This is a tradition of the Guragay tribe in South (of which her family is a part.) The meal ended with the traditional coffee ceremony, beginning with the roasting of green coffee beans. (This was done by her mother). The traditional variation for them is the addition of butter instead of milk. It is an acquired taste in my opinion, a bit like broth. I tried a cup, but declined a second. (I was told it would make my face shine.)

I will end this blog with a necessary account of a tragedy that has deeply affected us. If you have read past blogs, you are aware that Solomon's daughters were given an opportunity to study in the US, through the generosity of a Goshen-based host family, Peter and Jan. This couple had served with MCC in Tanzania and Ethiopia and then Peter had returned to work at a high school in Goshen, Indiana. Peter and his wife have hosted many students from Africa. Tragically, he was hit by a car in the parking lot of the school where he taught (and the girls were studying). He died of injuries sustained from the accident. It is a terrible loss of such a generous man. It is also a very traumatizing event for the girls who are living at his house and were witnesses to the immediate aftermath of the accident. Please remember Peter Shetler's family in your prayers. https://obituaries.goshennews.com/obituary/peter-shetler-1086324272