Hosed.

Guest contributor J. originally composed this entry as an e-mail message to family and friends. If it sounds familiar to you, let me know, and I’ll tell you what your e-mail address was in 1995.

We had a strange experience yesterday morning (Saturday, August 6, 1995) when a gentleman from the neighborhood association stopped by our apartment. (Note: neighborhood association is a pleasant interpretation of what used to be called Kebele or Peasant Association, the lowest level of civic government in Ethiopia). He did not wait for me to invite him in, but walked right in and made himself comfortable on our couch. I was a bit apprehensive because Sara was in the shower at the time, and the living room lies between the bathroom and the bedroom. He introduced himself as the financial director of the Kebele, and its security chairman, and went on to explain about the Kebele’s sports program and its need for contributions to send a team to competition. He showed me a list of names of those who has already contributed and fully expected me to follow their example. (He took a break from his discourse to greet my discomfited wife as she made a beeline for the bedroom, wearing her green bathrobe and with a purple towel on her head). I caved. I contributed 50 birr and immediately he said, “Make that 70 birr.” We left it at fifty.

Our visitor was preparing to leave when he spotted some highly coveted M&Ms packets. Unashamedly, he mentioned that he had a little boy, and could he have some candy? I was startled. Most of the Ethiopians we’ve met are very reserved but this man was just the opposite. He was not unfriendly or rude, he just took me by surprise. I wondered if he treated all of the apartment tenants this way, or if we foreigners are just considered so rich that we certainly wouldn’t miss 70 birr (Editor's note: about US $11.65 at the time) or some M&Ms. Either way, it is good to be an ambassador for the Mars company.

After our visitor departed I intended to go to the office in order to catch up on some work and write some overdue e-mail. On the way there (it is only a couple of miles) the car blew its radiator hose. I heard a loud bang that sounded as if it came from under the car, so I stopped the car and looked around, but could find nothing wrong. I climbed back into the car to start it up and drive off when some boys – teenagers – who had been observing me cautioned me not to do something foolish. They pointed to the hood and I opened it, and the culprit was plainly visible.

I was less than half a mile from the office and I was in a quandary. I was tempted just to start up the car and drive off anyway, but prudence got the better of me. It didn’t matter, because my indecision lasted long enough for the boys to remove the burst hose. By that time, more than a dozen other boys had gathered – most of them around the front of the car – but one was intensely looking me over; he was so close I felt embarrassed about my long nose hairs.

Not far from the stalled car was a little shop that sold black electrical tape, and I was prompted by two of my companions to buy some. After ten minutes of work, the hose was taped back into place and the radiator was replenished with water. Now what? I hopped into the car, which was quickly surrounded by a dozen boys expecting some sort of payment. The one who had carried out most of the work looked at me and said “Chigger yellem” and walked off. If anyone had deserved payment it was him, but he had just told me, “No problem.” I felt a bit awkward. The voices around me reminded me, “I have not had breakfast!” “I carried the water!” “Pay me!” The unlocked doors of the car were being opened and closed all around me.

In a country where the people are so poor it is difficult not to feel filthy rich in comparison, yet I don’t like being taken for a fool. (Being a fool and being taken for one are two completely different things). I decided to give money to one of the helpful boys and told him to share, then I hastily started the car and it sputtered the rest of the way to the office. I discovered later that the helpful, happy boys had absconded with my brand new hammer while I was not paying attention. Cuisine is a bit different here, but scrambled hammer on toast seems like an awful breakfast to me.

A co-worker met me at our office gate. She smiled and asked if I would need the electricity to do my work – she hoped not, because it was out. Needless to say, I did not write this e-mail at the office. The positive part of the story is that we are driving a Toyota Land Cruiser for the weekend, until our little red Renault is fixed.

We ended the day by taking advantage of an unusual hiatus in the constant rain by playing some tennis with friends. We enjoyed whacking the ball around and getting some exercise. All of the tennis courts come fully equipped with a ball boy, which was a good thing since several balls sailed over or through the fence. Luxury exists in Ethiopia, and it has found us for this weekend.

Back To Work.

Before we finish up with language school, I want to share an anecdote from our friend Wendy, who was in the senior class while we were starting out. Wendy had come to Ethiopia a couple of years earlier to teach at Bingham Academy, the SIM mission school in Addis. She was learning Amharic to prepare for her new role as Bingham’s homeschool coordinator, traveling to remote towns and villages to help missionary families educate their kids at home instead of sending them to boarding school. 

Wendy was living at the Press Compound that summer, so a group of us would often gather for lunch at her little apartment. One Monday, she told us that she had gone with one of the language tutors, Solomon, to an Ethiopian church the previous day, where she tried desperately to follow the preacher’s enthusiastic sermon in Amharic. She was able to recognize a few of our basic vocabulary words, including the repeated phrase “siga menged.” We knew “siga” from our meals at the office, where on Tuesdays and Thursdays we had “siga wot” – stew with meat in it. And we knew “menged” (pronounced men’-ged, with a hard g) from driving directions – it means “road”. Siga menged, the preacher said, and Wendy could not for the life of her figure out what he meant by “Meat Road.” After the service, she asked Solomon, who explained that the preacher was denouncing “the way of the flesh.” Foreign languages make literalists of us all, I guess. 

Spoiler alert: Wendy married Solomon a few years later. 

As we prepared to return to the office full time, there were some changes taking place at FH/Ethiopia. J’s boss, one of the most senior Ethiopians on the staff, had been arrested that summer, accused of participating in the Red Terror in the late 1970s. In his absence, the organizational structure was adjusted and some new staff members came on board. The new guy in charge of administration – and J.’s new boss – was Tesfaye Habtiyimer, a local guy who was trained as an accountant, and who quickly won our respect. The new guy in charge of the program(me) side was Andy Barnes, an American expatriate with a background in forestry, who had been teaching at an agricultural college in Ethiopia. (Ten years later Andy became the Country Director of FH/E, and he still works for the organization. We have, alas, lost track of Tesfaye). 

Also, at the beginning of August, I had boldy told the big boss P. that I was not very happy in my role at FH/E. Part of my dissatisfaction was professional, insofar as it didn’t seem like there was enough work to keep both Joy and myself occupied on a full-time basis. Part of it was inter-personal, as by this time it had become clear that my supervisor E. and I were not, shall we say, simpatico. You may recall that the big boss P. was married to my supervisor E., which complicated the matter. As I wrote to my sister at the time, “talking with P. really cheered me up, not because he was extremely helpful, but because I needed to be clear about my frustrations and get it off my chest.” 

So what happened was, I became a teacher.

Happy New Year!

Everyone else is acting like it’s the middle of September, but our Ethiopian friends are celebrating New Year's Day, Meskerem 1, this weekend, on the day we know as September 11. Meskerem is the first of thirteen months in the Ethiopian calendar year – there are twelve months of exactly thirty days each, and a thirteenth month of five days (or six, for Leap Years) to make up the difference at the end of the year. This calendar is the basis for Ethiopia’s uniquely charming tourism slogan, “Thirteen Months of Sunshine”. Ironically, Meskerem marks the end of the long rainy season, at least in the central highlands.

This Sunday marks the beginning of the year 2009 in Ethiopia, a little time warp that’s based upon some arcane early Christian scholarship. Back in the day, circa 400 AD to be somewhat more precise, an Egyptian monk named Annianus of Alexandria determined the date of Creation – the exact date of “In the beginning…” – to be March 25, 5492 BC, and established an Anno Mundi calendar system based on the number of years since that date, “in the year of the world.” About a hundred years later, another monk known as Dionysius the Humble introduced a new system of dating called Anno Domini, “in the year of the Lord,” which should sound somewhat familiar to you. Dionysius thought it would be way cool if the Incarnation of Christ (the Annunciation) took place exactly 5,500 years after the date of Creation, so his system starts eight years before Annianus’ system. As you may already have guessed, the Western world eventually adopted Dionysius’ system, while Ethiopia still uses Annianus’ calculations, which accounts for the discrepancy.

As an aside, Internet research tells me that the name of the New Year’s Day holiday in Amharic is “Enkutatash,” which is a word I cannot ever recall having heard while we were in the country. But I do remember learning about the Meskel flowers, bright yellow like tiny daisies, that bloomed everywhere at the end of the rainy season; it was traditional to gather a bouquet of Meskel flowers to welcome the new year.

Twenty-one years ago, it was 1988 in Ethiopia and we were making the transition from six weeks of language school back to working at the FH office on a full-time basis. Or were we…?

Hello Again.

We were reminded in a conversation the other day about how expressive African greetings can be. The topic of that particular conversation was the Zulu greeting “sawubona” which translates to “I see you”; this greeting can be taken as a statement of physical fact or the recognition of an intimate personal connection.

In Ethiopia, we learned to greet people using the Amharic phrase “tena yistilign” or a variation thereof – it was often pronounced as a single word with the “y” dropped – which literally translates to “May (He) give you health”, where the (He) refers to God. Even though it’s only two words long, there’s a lot to unpack from this little phrase. First of all, there’s a cultural recognition of Count Rugen’s immortal statement, “If you haven’t got your health, then you haven’t got anything.” The closest we come in the Western world is saying “Gesundheit!” to bless someone after a sneeze. Second, there’s an implicit monotheistic perspective that assumes the presence of a (male) divine being but works across religious differences, which is handy in a country split almost evenly between orthodox Christianity and Islam. Thirdly, because God is the subject of the phrase, there’s no need to deal with tricky verb conjugations that depend on the gender and the social status of the person you’re speaking to.

The basic verbal greeting can be embellished in a couple of ways. As in the west, there is usually a handshake, but in Ethiopia the left hand often plays a role, grasping your own right wrist or forearm as you offer your right hand in greeting. A small but respectful bow is an optional but acceptable addition to a formal greeting. (Or maybe we bowed because we tended to be taller than the people we were greeting?)

When you’re greeting people you’re close to but maybe haven’t seen for a while, it’s perfectly acceptable to raise the level of difficulty with the addition of kisses – at least two, often three, and sometimes four or more – delivered on or near alternating cheeks. In this case, the handshake is used to draw you in and position you for optimal kiss delivery. The handshake is maintained throughout the kissing phase, and the kisses are punctuated with repeated questions and comments regarding each other’s health and overall appearance: “Endeminesh? Dehnanesh? Endeminesh?” “How are you? Are you well? How are you?” And of course, here’s the place where you have to pay attention to the status and gender of the person you’re talking to, and conjugate your verb accordingly.

How are you? Are you well? You look well. Are you well?

Hot Weather.

It's hot today and supposed to be even hotter the next few days, and invariably when we comment upon the heat we hear something like "Oh, you must have gotten used to hot weather, living in Africa!" In our little corner of the continent, not so much.

I have mentioned before that Addis Abeba is located at about 7,500 feet above sea level, way more than "mile high". This makes it a challenge to breathe and to bake, but it really mellows out the subtropical climate so that the weather is bearable almost all the time. Located a few degrees north of the equator, the city has the same summer-winter pattern that you would find in the rest of the Northern hemisphere, but there's not a huge difference between the seasons in terms of temperature. In fact, because the summer months are also the wettest in terms of rainfall, the average high temperature is about the same in January as it is in June -- a balmy 74 degrees Fahrenheit.

There isn't a lot of energy dedicated to modifying the indoor environment, which is to say, no air conditioning and also no central heating. We were grateful for the advice to bring our down comforter, which we only took off the bed when the nights warmed up in April and May, and for our warm winter coats on chilly January mornings when our breath hung frosty in the air. We wore long sleeves and sweatshirts far more often than we wore shorts.

But this entry is about heat, not cold. Even though it didn't get extremely warm in Addis, there is definitely an intensity to the African sun that could seem relentless on a hot day, even to the Ethiopians. During the early days, we noticed that drivers would stop short of the line at a red light if it meant that the car could idle in the shade of a nearby tree, a technique that we now find ourselves embracing on hot summer days in Oregon. It was just as likely in those days to see umbrellas used as protection against the sun as against the rain, which is why I carry an umbrella in the desert -- although Ethiopian sun umbrellas are gorgeous, elaborate objects made of damask fabric and fringe that put my little umbrella to shame.

Of course the best way to deal with heat in the Pacific Northwest is to escape to the ocean, a technique that was never available to us or our friends in landlocked Ethiopia... but one that we plan to put into practice ourselves, this weekend. Stay cool!

A Little Language Lesson.

I was looking through boxes in the garage the other day and I came across a stack of papers from our life in Ethiopia, including some of our books from language school.

Our main text was a booklet called Amharic for Beginners, put together by the Norwegian Lutheran Mission Language School. Here’s a look at one of the basic grammar lessons:

Looks like fun, right? We also had some exercise books to help us learn and practice our vocabulary. These three were produced and printed at SIM Press, where we went to school – they were originally designed to be used by Ethiopian adults who are learning to read and write Amharic.

 

The one in the middle is a simplified version of the Gospel of John. The other two are picture books for learning the fidel. Here’s the page for the “b” sound:

On the left hand page you see the “b” sound in its seven different forms, each associated with a different attached vowel sound. You can tell which vowel sound to used by how the first form character – in this case, the croquet hoop – is amended. So first form is the consonant plus a schwa sound, “bə”, which is used in the word for sheep, “bəg.” The second form, with the little arm sticking out to the right of the croquet hoop, is the consonant plus “oo”, used in the word for coffee, “boo-na”. The vowel sound for third form (with the flat right foot) is “ee”, for fourth form (with the longer right leg) is “ah”, for fifth form (with the circle on the right foot) is “ay”, and for seventh form (with the longer left leg) is “oh”. But what about sixth form you say? The one with the little arm on the left? That’s a tricky one. Depending on context, a sixth form character can be pronounced either with a short “i” sound or as the absence of a vowel sound. It’s used here in the word for money, “birr.”

To make matters trickier, differently shaped characters are annotated in different ways, so the various forms of “b” are not congruent to the various forms of, for example, “r”.

One of our friends helped us memorize the different forms of each character by singing them to the tune of “Camptown Races”:

Bə boo bee bah bay bih boh

Doo-dah, doo-dah

Tə too tee tah tay tih toh

Oh, doo-dah day…

On the right hand page is a series of questions and answers: What is this? This is a house. What is this? This is a sheep. What is this? This is coffee. We practiced these sentences over and over again with our language helpers. Turns out, being able to ask, “What is this?” is very helpful when, say, you are eating something you’ve never seen before.

Photo Phriday.

I thought I'd wrap up this week by sharing a few leftover photographs that I have lying around, so pardon me if I revisit some things I have mentioned before.

Here's one of Joy and E. in E.'s office at FH/Ethiopia, which would become the office of all three of us by the end of the summer of 1995. (Spoiler alert: the reason I'm not using E.'s name is that we ended up having a very rocky relationship, and although I have no intent to slander her, I would prefer that she not be able to find herself here).

Here's J in the process of opening one of the packages that arrived in time for our birthdays. I definitely mentioned this back in August, when I posted another photograph, taken on the same day, where I'm playing with a hand puppet from the same package. The hand puppet ended up going to language school with us for about a week, where we expanded our vocabularies by learning and retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood in Amharic.

Speaking of language school, here are four of our language tutors -- Zemenay, Genet, Solomon, and Yosef -- posing for an album cover. No, just kidding, they're goofing off during one of our breaks. The other day J. and I had a conversation about whether language school was a half-day or a full-day experience, and we couldn't remember at all. Then I came across an e-mail message I had written to my sister indicating that the hours were 8:30 am to 3:30 pm, just like, you know, school. That made sense because we had recalled occasionally eating lunch with our friend Wendy, a missionary teacher from Canada and senior level language student who was living at the SIM Press compound at the time. A few years after this photo was taken, Wendy and Solomon were married. We hope they are living happily ever after.

Finally, a photograph of J and myself taken outside the Institute for Ethiopian Studies at Addis Abeba University. IES operates a museum in what used to be the Genet Leul Palace, built by Emperor Haile Selassie in 1930. Twenty years ago the museum was pretty basic, essentially a couple of rooms set aside to honor the Emperor's memory. The tour included the imperial bedroom and a couple of cases of artifacts, including a tiny dress uniform -- Ethiopians tend to be small-framed people and Haile Selassie was only about 5'4" tall. IES also had/has a research library and an art gallery, and we were able to view an exhibit of Ethiopian art that had opened in Baltimore in 1993 and traveled around the USA before ending up in Addis Abeba. Poor as we were, we splurged and bought the catalog for the exhibit, "African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia." Fifteen years later we met the author, Marilyn Heldman, when she came to speak at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem. So how's that for a small world?