We spent the past few days at Longano—a lake about an hour and a half north of Awasa. The first night we spent at Sebana, one of the nicest resorts in all of Ethiopia. It was quite relaxing, with a black sand beach and well-kempt bungalows with squishy beds (soft beds are incredibly hard to find overseas!). We spent the day relaxing there, sunning on the beach and collecting pumice stones that were floating just off shore. We also spent a good amount of time eating at the restaurant there… they had oven baked pizzas, soups, pastas… all sorts of delicious foods.
The second day we packed our stuff into the back of Ben and Kelly’s truck and took a rather rattling road to the other side of the lake to Camp Longano. This is a place David used to come to as a child. It’s for SIM missionaries to come and retreat to. The site has had several improvements since David’s day. They just got electricity to the site four months ago and there are several new buildings for campers to sleep in. We met up with a missions team there and spent the night with them. While we were there we got to hear some testimonies from Ethiopians native to the area. One thing that really impacted me was how many of them came to Christ through visions and dreams. Much of the population in this particular part of Ethiopia is Muslim. There are mosques everywhere and colorful graves emblazoned with the star and crescent dotting the roadsides.
One story I heard that stuck out to me was the testimony of a former sheik. This man was the head of seven mosques and he also happened to be married to seven wives. One day he was sitting outside of his house on a stool when he had a vision. He saw a helicopter approaching from the horizon. It was going to land on his compound. He tried to wave it away, since his compound was quite small. The helicopter landed anyway and a man came out. He was a ferengie (a white man) and he was dressed in a white garment. He came over to the sheik and offered him a key.
“What is this for?” the sheik asked, looking at the key.
“With this key, you will open one door and lock another,” the pilot replied.
The sheik took the key and stared at the man. “Who are you?”
“I am Jesus,” the man said.
With that the vision vanished, and the man was back in his compound, alone. When he realized what had happened, he ran down the road to the closest church. At first the ushers would not let him in, since the sheik was known to disturb many services before. Once the sheik told them what he’d seen, they allowed him in and he shared his story with the Christians there. He converted and brought a Bible back to his house. When he tried to share his story with his wives and children, they thought he was crazy. One of his older sons tried to kill him with a gun—but ultimately his family ended up accepting Christ as well. His seven mosques were converted into churches.
There are countless stories like this. Men and women who encountered Christ through dreams and visions. I love this testimony for the fact that Jesus used a helicopter. Who would have thought?
On Sunday morning I got to have a brief taste of a backcountry church service. It was totally in Amharic, and the church itself was a larger version of the mud huts you see all across the country. Unlike the services in the West (and in Korea I suppose), this one seemed very unstructured. The first half hour we were there, the congregation was in prayer and meditating the scriptures. Every individual was meditating on their own. Then, slowly, a song began to rise out of the congregation. It wasn’t like a hymn or a Hillsong anthem. It was a love song from their hearts. I really got the sense that these Christians were wholly and simply admiring God through their prayers and songs. This is something you just don’t get or see in the structured services of the States. It was very touching to watch—as well as very striking for me. These people, who own very little, the clothes on their backs and the huts they curl in at night, praise and adore God with a singularity and fervor I have yet to reach. I have so much physically—and yet it seems that they are spiritually rich in a way I can’t comprehend. There is a passion here in Africa, among the poorest of the poor, that goes beyond the physical realm. They could possibly be the richest people I know.
We’re back in Addis now, to spend one more day in the city before we jet off to Kenya—the last leg of our journey! It’s a bit surreal to think that we’ve been traveling for two months now. I’m excited for Kenya—but I’m also excited for the States afterward. To see family and friends will be a blessing I’m quite ready for.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Water is Life
In the dusty plains of Ethiopia—dotted with teff fields and acacia trees—faucets are hard to come by. Clean, drinkable water is a luxury even those in the capital city of Addis Ababa don’t always have access to. Many days their faucets are dry.
So you can imagine how poor rural communities fare in such an environment. Pure, life-sustaining water lies meters under the earth. Layers upon layers of sediment come between families and water. Most of these mud-hut neighborhoods have only hand drawn wells. The type of wells you see in illustrated childrens’ books about medieval times. Wells with stone walls and a bucket attached to a rope. Water from such wells is often putrid with the decaying bodies of rats and moles which burrow their way in. Trash and other waste finds its way into the well’s opening. The result? Illness and death in the water.
Faced with fetid, spoiled water in their community wells and rivers, many women and children must go elsewhere for water. Yellow jerry cans strapped to their backs, these Ethiopians must walk miles to fill their burdens. The more fortunate ones travel by donkey cart. This chore sometime consumes half or more of their day. Even after such a long and arduous journey, the water they collect isn’t always safe to drink.
This is the reality for 58% of Ethiopians.
That’s where Water is Life comes in. Since 2006, this foundation has worked together with Selam Awassa Water Drilling Works and Sanitation PLC to drill over 158 wells all across rural Ethiopia. One well at a time—they’re drastically changing the lives of those in the surrounding communities.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
This quote, in rising silver letters, graces the pump just outside the Mother Teresa school. At times it is barely visible through the clusters of schoolchildren who swarm around its stainless steel frame. About 300 rural children attend this school. Most of them can attribute this opportunity (in part) to the well itself. Instead of spending their day trudging into town and back, the girls and boys come to school for water. Girls pump water out for laundry and cooking after classes. They don’t have to make the agonizing choice between water and education.
-
Early morning at the river is a chaos of life and color. Dirty t-shirts strew the bank in piles of ruby and sapphire cloth, waiting to be washed. Battered, yellow jerry cans grace the backs of wearied donkeys, calling out a song of hallow plastic as they are trotted down to the water. Children half a donkey’s height wade in the swollen brown river, scooping water into the buckets with their hands. This water will be carried back over a kilometer to their homes, where it will be used for cooking and laundry.
The river is dark, colored with mud, filth and animal feces. This was the water they had to drink. This water brought disease and death, but it was all they had.
Now, just a few meters up the red-dirt road is a well.
-
The settlement is small, just a few mud huts placed under the shelter of the surrounding trees. Farming is the trade of most of these villagers. So far away from the main road, life here is especially hard for unmarried women.
“There is no one to help me,” one older woman says. “Not even my brother will help me.”
With no husband and no children, this woman has turned to the well for help. She beams with pride as she leads visitors through her garden. It’s only a few feet away from the well, capitalizing on the water runoff with ditches and culverts she dug by herself. Lush, green papaya trees tower out of the soil, the promising buds of fruit swelling at the base of their branches. Other, less dramatic vegetables pepper the ground, waiting for harvest. Once they are ripe, the woman will gather them and sell them, eking out a living that would have been impossible before the well.
It’s hard to believe that such a simple tool can change lives in such drastic ways. Yet that is exactly what these wells are doing. Water is education. Water is opportunity. Water is life.
While in Ethiopia we worked for Water is Life and Salaam, a company set on providing education and training for poorer Ethiopians. David made a brochure for them and took pictures of their work as well:
So you can imagine how poor rural communities fare in such an environment. Pure, life-sustaining water lies meters under the earth. Layers upon layers of sediment come between families and water. Most of these mud-hut neighborhoods have only hand drawn wells. The type of wells you see in illustrated childrens’ books about medieval times. Wells with stone walls and a bucket attached to a rope. Water from such wells is often putrid with the decaying bodies of rats and moles which burrow their way in. Trash and other waste finds its way into the well’s opening. The result? Illness and death in the water.
Faced with fetid, spoiled water in their community wells and rivers, many women and children must go elsewhere for water. Yellow jerry cans strapped to their backs, these Ethiopians must walk miles to fill their burdens. The more fortunate ones travel by donkey cart. This chore sometime consumes half or more of their day. Even after such a long and arduous journey, the water they collect isn’t always safe to drink.
This is the reality for 58% of Ethiopians.
That’s where Water is Life comes in. Since 2006, this foundation has worked together with Selam Awassa Water Drilling Works and Sanitation PLC to drill over 158 wells all across rural Ethiopia. One well at a time—they’re drastically changing the lives of those in the surrounding communities.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
This quote, in rising silver letters, graces the pump just outside the Mother Teresa school. At times it is barely visible through the clusters of schoolchildren who swarm around its stainless steel frame. About 300 rural children attend this school. Most of them can attribute this opportunity (in part) to the well itself. Instead of spending their day trudging into town and back, the girls and boys come to school for water. Girls pump water out for laundry and cooking after classes. They don’t have to make the agonizing choice between water and education.
-
Early morning at the river is a chaos of life and color. Dirty t-shirts strew the bank in piles of ruby and sapphire cloth, waiting to be washed. Battered, yellow jerry cans grace the backs of wearied donkeys, calling out a song of hallow plastic as they are trotted down to the water. Children half a donkey’s height wade in the swollen brown river, scooping water into the buckets with their hands. This water will be carried back over a kilometer to their homes, where it will be used for cooking and laundry.
The river is dark, colored with mud, filth and animal feces. This was the water they had to drink. This water brought disease and death, but it was all they had.
Now, just a few meters up the red-dirt road is a well.
-
The settlement is small, just a few mud huts placed under the shelter of the surrounding trees. Farming is the trade of most of these villagers. So far away from the main road, life here is especially hard for unmarried women.
“There is no one to help me,” one older woman says. “Not even my brother will help me.”
With no husband and no children, this woman has turned to the well for help. She beams with pride as she leads visitors through her garden. It’s only a few feet away from the well, capitalizing on the water runoff with ditches and culverts she dug by herself. Lush, green papaya trees tower out of the soil, the promising buds of fruit swelling at the base of their branches. Other, less dramatic vegetables pepper the ground, waiting for harvest. Once they are ripe, the woman will gather them and sell them, eking out a living that would have been impossible before the well.
It’s hard to believe that such a simple tool can change lives in such drastic ways. Yet that is exactly what these wells are doing. Water is education. Water is opportunity. Water is life.
While in Ethiopia we worked for Water is Life and Salaam, a company set on providing education and training for poorer Ethiopians. David made a brochure for them and took pictures of their work as well:
Awasa
On Wednesday morning we went with Ben and Kelly Taylor down to Awasa, a town of about 200.000 people down in the south. I was looking forward to get out of the city and into the countryside to see more of the landscape that I considered to be traditionally African. We rode in Ben and Kelly’s truck down a pretty straight shot road for over five hours. There were a few pit stops, mainly to Bishaftu, a lakeside resort where David and Kelly’s families would go for retreats and vacations. It was a very soothing place to sit and eat our lunch. David jumped into the lake and swam around for old time’s sake.
The countryside is almost sparse, but not quite. It’s covered in teff fields and the lone, sprawling acacia trees. Mud huts dot the roadside and dusty mountains frame the horizon. It looks a lot like I’d expect Africa to look.
Driving here is a different and often terrifying experience. There are no traffic rules except that drivers generally stay on the right side of the road. I say generally because when there’s no oncoming traffic, cars tend to use both sides at their leisure. Cars aren’t the only thing in the road either. Herds of cows, goats, donkeys and horses all meander across the asphalt. Often their direction is unpredictable, you have to pass them carefully lest you hit one and have to pay the animal’s owner in compensation. Even with all of these obstacles, the worst is people. They line the side of the road as if they’re holding some soiree or cocktail party. When you honk at them to get out of the way and drive past, they glare at you as if you’re intruding. The thing that makes these careless pedestrians so scary is the Ethiopian law. If you hit a person and kill them, then you automatically get thrown into jail for fifteen years! This threat is a very real one. In fact, there was a missionary at the guesthouse who’d faced this very dilemma. A few days ago she hit and killed a man on her way back to Addis Ababa. She was thrown in jail for a few nights and then taken to court. The judge found her guilty, yet miraculously let her return to her home country because of all the good work she’d been doing down country. Apparently such exceptions are quite rare. Needless to say, this prospect makes driving less than comfortable.
Our first day in Awasa was basically a tour of the city. It’s smaller and less polluted than Addis. Ben and Kelly live in a lovely little compound with their German Shepherd “Macintosh.” Their neighborhood backs up to a lake bordered with large, flowering trees. This emerald foliage is home to giant hornbill birds and monkeys. Ben and Kelly took us to the open-air market, since Thursdays are market days. It was dusty and hot. The sun was blazing down. We quickly collected a spectatorship of street children. They trailed us from stall to stall, doing nothing but staring at us. I almost preferred it to the alternative. Lots of people will shout out as we pass, “You! You! You!” or “Ferengie!” After a while the accosting gets rather exhausting. At times it can feel almost hostile. I much prefer the Korean way of handling things, where staring at people is rude and raising your voice a decibel over conversational level in public is considered very rude.
It’s odd to see the wildlife here. Animals you’d expect to be caged up in a zoo roam quite freely. Monkeys, birds every color of the rainbow and hippos have all been on our sighting list. All of these within the limits of the city. Kelly and Ben took us to a local monkey hang out. We brought stale cookies and fed them by hand. They walked up in a very dignified fashion and take the cookie straight from your grasp. The oreos were their favorite. They would take special care to lick the cream.
Contrary to popular belief, we haven’t just been sightseeing here. The Taylor work for a foundation called “Water is Life,” which organizes the installment of freshwater pumps in poor, rural communities which don’t have access to clean water. David and I have been traveling out to the well sights, gathering photography and writing material to help out with the organization’s media needs. David is taking pictures for their brochures and newsletters while I’m writing up snapshots on how the well has impacted peoples’ lives. It’s been pretty cool. I’ve never done something quite like it before.
Visiting the wells was a bit overwhelming for me at first. One of our first stops was at a Compassion school, where over 300 kids use the well during school hours. We got there just as the kids were getting out of classes for the day. It was a mob. Literally. Children pushing and shoving each other to get close to us. My braid kept getting tugged by kids who wanted to feel my hair. My arms were pinched to the point of pain by curious fingers. I don’t do too well under attention… and the rapt, intense attention of almost 300 kids was nearly stifling. It’s not like I could avoid it either. Any way I walked, the crowd of children migrated along with me. At some points it got so bad that some of the school officials had to drive them back with sticks. In some ways I imagine it’s what celebrities must feel like when mobbed with fans and paparazzi.
The kids were really sweet though, and it was pretty cool to be able to see a Compassion project in action, since we sponsor children through that organization. There was one point in the visit that was a little heartbreaking. One of the little boys was crying, and our translator Yar asked him why. Apparently he’d lost his pen, which meant that his family would probably beat him when he got home. I was about to give him mine (I’d finished with my notes) but Yar slipped him a few birr before I could. I ended up giving my pen to one of the other kids. It’s funny how an item that is essentially worthless to us is so incredibly valuable to them.
Happy Birthday David!
We visited a lot more well sights in Longano… I’ll post my finished writing product on those in a few days once David gets all the pictures and stuff ready for it.
The countryside is almost sparse, but not quite. It’s covered in teff fields and the lone, sprawling acacia trees. Mud huts dot the roadside and dusty mountains frame the horizon. It looks a lot like I’d expect Africa to look.
Driving here is a different and often terrifying experience. There are no traffic rules except that drivers generally stay on the right side of the road. I say generally because when there’s no oncoming traffic, cars tend to use both sides at their leisure. Cars aren’t the only thing in the road either. Herds of cows, goats, donkeys and horses all meander across the asphalt. Often their direction is unpredictable, you have to pass them carefully lest you hit one and have to pay the animal’s owner in compensation. Even with all of these obstacles, the worst is people. They line the side of the road as if they’re holding some soiree or cocktail party. When you honk at them to get out of the way and drive past, they glare at you as if you’re intruding. The thing that makes these careless pedestrians so scary is the Ethiopian law. If you hit a person and kill them, then you automatically get thrown into jail for fifteen years! This threat is a very real one. In fact, there was a missionary at the guesthouse who’d faced this very dilemma. A few days ago she hit and killed a man on her way back to Addis Ababa. She was thrown in jail for a few nights and then taken to court. The judge found her guilty, yet miraculously let her return to her home country because of all the good work she’d been doing down country. Apparently such exceptions are quite rare. Needless to say, this prospect makes driving less than comfortable.
Our first day in Awasa was basically a tour of the city. It’s smaller and less polluted than Addis. Ben and Kelly live in a lovely little compound with their German Shepherd “Macintosh.” Their neighborhood backs up to a lake bordered with large, flowering trees. This emerald foliage is home to giant hornbill birds and monkeys. Ben and Kelly took us to the open-air market, since Thursdays are market days. It was dusty and hot. The sun was blazing down. We quickly collected a spectatorship of street children. They trailed us from stall to stall, doing nothing but staring at us. I almost preferred it to the alternative. Lots of people will shout out as we pass, “You! You! You!” or “Ferengie!” After a while the accosting gets rather exhausting. At times it can feel almost hostile. I much prefer the Korean way of handling things, where staring at people is rude and raising your voice a decibel over conversational level in public is considered very rude.
It’s odd to see the wildlife here. Animals you’d expect to be caged up in a zoo roam quite freely. Monkeys, birds every color of the rainbow and hippos have all been on our sighting list. All of these within the limits of the city. Kelly and Ben took us to a local monkey hang out. We brought stale cookies and fed them by hand. They walked up in a very dignified fashion and take the cookie straight from your grasp. The oreos were their favorite. They would take special care to lick the cream.
Contrary to popular belief, we haven’t just been sightseeing here. The Taylor work for a foundation called “Water is Life,” which organizes the installment of freshwater pumps in poor, rural communities which don’t have access to clean water. David and I have been traveling out to the well sights, gathering photography and writing material to help out with the organization’s media needs. David is taking pictures for their brochures and newsletters while I’m writing up snapshots on how the well has impacted peoples’ lives. It’s been pretty cool. I’ve never done something quite like it before.
Visiting the wells was a bit overwhelming for me at first. One of our first stops was at a Compassion school, where over 300 kids use the well during school hours. We got there just as the kids were getting out of classes for the day. It was a mob. Literally. Children pushing and shoving each other to get close to us. My braid kept getting tugged by kids who wanted to feel my hair. My arms were pinched to the point of pain by curious fingers. I don’t do too well under attention… and the rapt, intense attention of almost 300 kids was nearly stifling. It’s not like I could avoid it either. Any way I walked, the crowd of children migrated along with me. At some points it got so bad that some of the school officials had to drive them back with sticks. In some ways I imagine it’s what celebrities must feel like when mobbed with fans and paparazzi.
The kids were really sweet though, and it was pretty cool to be able to see a Compassion project in action, since we sponsor children through that organization. There was one point in the visit that was a little heartbreaking. One of the little boys was crying, and our translator Yar asked him why. Apparently he’d lost his pen, which meant that his family would probably beat him when he got home. I was about to give him mine (I’d finished with my notes) but Yar slipped him a few birr before I could. I ended up giving my pen to one of the other kids. It’s funny how an item that is essentially worthless to us is so incredibly valuable to them.
Happy Birthday David!
We visited a lot more well sights in Longano… I’ll post my finished writing product on those in a few days once David gets all the pictures and stuff ready for it.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Addis Ababa
We stayed the night in Oamaru and headed up to Christchurch the next morning to say farewell to New Zealand. Our flight was at 4:00, and we managed to get there early, which turned out to be a very good thing. Because we’re in the process of moving back from South Korea, we have a rather awful amount of luggage with us. Our flight to Ethiopia was with Emirates Air, one of the top-rated airlines in the world. For some reason, they’re super-strict with luggage requirements, only allowing about 30 kgs per person. For every 1 kg over the limit you are, they charge you $90! Also, your carryon luggage had to weigh less than 7 kgs… or it had to be checked. Overall we were about 27 kgs over the limit… if we wanted to take everything it would have cost us over $2000!!
We sucked in our breaths, dragged our suitcases over to a non-crowded corner and began gutting. It’s amazing what suddenly becomes disposable when you have to pay $90 for every extra kilogram. After about forty-five minutes of wistful tossing, we finally whittled our luggage down to an acceptable weight. Definitely one of the worst experiences I’ve had with check-in before.
The flight was 29 hours long (including the layovers and such). On Emirates, it wasn’t bad at all. They had personal TV screens with on demand movies. Gourmet meals every few hours. I managed to get about 7 hours of sleep and watch about 5 movies. Another highlight was that, flying out from out layover in Dubai, I got to see the tallest building in the world from the window of the aircraft. It’s pretty dang tall.
So we’ve finally made it here to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, David’s homeland. We arrived rather weary and jet-lagged at 12:00 in the afternoon. One of David’s childhood friends, Biruk, met us at the airport. It was so wonderful to have a friend who speaks the language fluently. He haggled with cab drivers for us and helped us get to our guesthouse without any hitches. David and Biruk spent the afternoon catching up over the six years that David has been away while I fought off the urgent urge to take a nap. Over the past year I’ve learned well that the best cure to jet lag is to just make your body submit to the local schedule, ie, wait until nighttime to sleep.
First impressions of Addis Ababa. This city actually reminds me a good deal of La Paz, Bolivia. Something about the atmosphere of the streets: the dust and exhaust, the way tiny wooden shops proudly display cultural handicrafts, the broken sidewalks, the old, beaten cabs. While we’re in the thick of the capital city, it’s sometimes hard to believe that this isn’t some sort of outlying suburbs. It’s not thick or terribly crowded like Seoul. The buildings are all almost uniformally one storey tall, occasionally two or three. There seems to be a very deep cultural heritage here, different than the sort of Korea or Cambodia or Bolivia. I think much of this is due to the fact that Ethiopia has never been enslaved or overrun by a culture different than theirs. I’m told they’re one of the only nations in Africa that has never been officially colonized.
The guesthouse we stayed at in Addis!
First time in Africa!
I got a very good taste of that heritage when Biruk and another Ethiopian friend named Addis took us to a cultural restaurant for dinner. I’ve had Ethiopian food before with the Strausses in Charlotte, but this food was on another level of goodness! injerabowat is their traditional food. It’s a dish that consists of a very flat, spongy pancake-like bread (injera) and a bunch of different sauces with meat, vegetables and butter all brewed into tons of spices (bowat) on top of it. You use your hands to tear off pieces of the bread and dip it into the meat. Overall it’s quiet a filling and satisfying meal.
The restaurant we went to had performers playing traditional music and dancers performing traditional dances. Biruk and Addis thought it would be a clever idea to have David and I get up and dance on the stage in front of the entire packed restaurant. They wrote a clever note to the band members, who then coaxed us up on stage and got us to dance. It was challenging, and I’m sure I made a fool of myself, but at least I had the guts to go through with it!
Our first full day in Addis was spent catching up with people David knew as a kid and going to sights that were familiar to him. We went to the very dusty Merkato, where everyone yelled “Ferengie!” (foreigner!) whenever we passed by.
We also went to the compound where David and his family lived when he was growing up. It was like an oasis apart from the city, with lush gardens and yards, clean, well-fed dogs with glossy fur, swingsets and stucco houses. It looked like a nice place to grow up. David says he doesn’t recognize a lot of it. Things change when you’ve been away for almost ten years!
When we were done visiting the press, we went to see Chaltu, David’s “second mother.” Chaltu helped the Strausses out with the household chores and such. She was a very sweet woman, and I could tell she loved David very much from the way she wouldn’t let go of him when she first saw him. She doesn’t speak too much English, and David doesn’t speak much Amheric, so communication was a bit limited. We sat around looking at old photos and eating while she held David’s hand and said his name over and over again (they pronounce it Dawit). I was still full from a huge lunch of injera, but she was quite insistent that I eat a lot. I had to keep eating, lest she think I didn’t like her food. By the time we left my stomach was bulging!
Unfortunately, later that night, the Enjera came back to haunt me. =( Which was no fun at all. The next day I felt weak and terribly dehydrated. So I hung around the guesthouse for the morning while David tramped around Addis and took pictures the whole morning. By lunchtime I was feeling better. Enough to be willing to go with David to tour some more of his childhood stomping grounds. These included ETC, the church and school were David’s father helped found (he taught classes there as well) and Bingham Academy, the school David attended when he was a child. Both of these places were a lot like the press compound in that they were lush and green and very well kempt. Very unlike the rest of Addis.
While I really enjoyed visiting these childhood places of David’s in Addis, I confided to him that I though it would be really hard for me to live in the city for a long amount of time. It’s just too barren, too full of dust and diesel fumes, too littered with trash. I know this sounds selfish of me. I’ve been married into a family that lived there for nearly twenty whole years. I greatly admire the dedication and commitment that shows to their calling there. God would definitely have to give me a special grace to stay long term in such a place. David and I had such different childhoods!
We sucked in our breaths, dragged our suitcases over to a non-crowded corner and began gutting. It’s amazing what suddenly becomes disposable when you have to pay $90 for every extra kilogram. After about forty-five minutes of wistful tossing, we finally whittled our luggage down to an acceptable weight. Definitely one of the worst experiences I’ve had with check-in before.
The flight was 29 hours long (including the layovers and such). On Emirates, it wasn’t bad at all. They had personal TV screens with on demand movies. Gourmet meals every few hours. I managed to get about 7 hours of sleep and watch about 5 movies. Another highlight was that, flying out from out layover in Dubai, I got to see the tallest building in the world from the window of the aircraft. It’s pretty dang tall.
So we’ve finally made it here to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, David’s homeland. We arrived rather weary and jet-lagged at 12:00 in the afternoon. One of David’s childhood friends, Biruk, met us at the airport. It was so wonderful to have a friend who speaks the language fluently. He haggled with cab drivers for us and helped us get to our guesthouse without any hitches. David and Biruk spent the afternoon catching up over the six years that David has been away while I fought off the urgent urge to take a nap. Over the past year I’ve learned well that the best cure to jet lag is to just make your body submit to the local schedule, ie, wait until nighttime to sleep.
First impressions of Addis Ababa. This city actually reminds me a good deal of La Paz, Bolivia. Something about the atmosphere of the streets: the dust and exhaust, the way tiny wooden shops proudly display cultural handicrafts, the broken sidewalks, the old, beaten cabs. While we’re in the thick of the capital city, it’s sometimes hard to believe that this isn’t some sort of outlying suburbs. It’s not thick or terribly crowded like Seoul. The buildings are all almost uniformally one storey tall, occasionally two or three. There seems to be a very deep cultural heritage here, different than the sort of Korea or Cambodia or Bolivia. I think much of this is due to the fact that Ethiopia has never been enslaved or overrun by a culture different than theirs. I’m told they’re one of the only nations in Africa that has never been officially colonized.
The guesthouse we stayed at in Addis!
First time in Africa!
I got a very good taste of that heritage when Biruk and another Ethiopian friend named Addis took us to a cultural restaurant for dinner. I’ve had Ethiopian food before with the Strausses in Charlotte, but this food was on another level of goodness! injerabowat is their traditional food. It’s a dish that consists of a very flat, spongy pancake-like bread (injera) and a bunch of different sauces with meat, vegetables and butter all brewed into tons of spices (bowat) on top of it. You use your hands to tear off pieces of the bread and dip it into the meat. Overall it’s quiet a filling and satisfying meal.
The restaurant we went to had performers playing traditional music and dancers performing traditional dances. Biruk and Addis thought it would be a clever idea to have David and I get up and dance on the stage in front of the entire packed restaurant. They wrote a clever note to the band members, who then coaxed us up on stage and got us to dance. It was challenging, and I’m sure I made a fool of myself, but at least I had the guts to go through with it!
Our first full day in Addis was spent catching up with people David knew as a kid and going to sights that were familiar to him. We went to the very dusty Merkato, where everyone yelled “Ferengie!” (foreigner!) whenever we passed by.
We also went to the compound where David and his family lived when he was growing up. It was like an oasis apart from the city, with lush gardens and yards, clean, well-fed dogs with glossy fur, swingsets and stucco houses. It looked like a nice place to grow up. David says he doesn’t recognize a lot of it. Things change when you’ve been away for almost ten years!
When we were done visiting the press, we went to see Chaltu, David’s “second mother.” Chaltu helped the Strausses out with the household chores and such. She was a very sweet woman, and I could tell she loved David very much from the way she wouldn’t let go of him when she first saw him. She doesn’t speak too much English, and David doesn’t speak much Amheric, so communication was a bit limited. We sat around looking at old photos and eating while she held David’s hand and said his name over and over again (they pronounce it Dawit). I was still full from a huge lunch of injera, but she was quite insistent that I eat a lot. I had to keep eating, lest she think I didn’t like her food. By the time we left my stomach was bulging!
Unfortunately, later that night, the Enjera came back to haunt me. =( Which was no fun at all. The next day I felt weak and terribly dehydrated. So I hung around the guesthouse for the morning while David tramped around Addis and took pictures the whole morning. By lunchtime I was feeling better. Enough to be willing to go with David to tour some more of his childhood stomping grounds. These included ETC, the church and school were David’s father helped found (he taught classes there as well) and Bingham Academy, the school David attended when he was a child. Both of these places were a lot like the press compound in that they were lush and green and very well kempt. Very unlike the rest of Addis.
While I really enjoyed visiting these childhood places of David’s in Addis, I confided to him that I though it would be really hard for me to live in the city for a long amount of time. It’s just too barren, too full of dust and diesel fumes, too littered with trash. I know this sounds selfish of me. I’ve been married into a family that lived there for nearly twenty whole years. I greatly admire the dedication and commitment that shows to their calling there. God would definitely have to give me a special grace to stay long term in such a place. David and I had such different childhoods!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)