About the House.

After writing about the apartment a few weeks ago I pestered J to sit down with his home design software and put together a floor plan, to refresh our dimming memories as much as to share on the blog. Here it is:

The front entrance is there at the lower left corner, next to the bathroom, with the living area and balcony at the top and the bedroom on the upper right. It’s far from perfect but it’s a good representation of the space; it's probably drawn a little larger than the apartment actually was. As I said, it was more than enough space for the two of us and the few items we brought with us, though we definitely acquired “stuff” to make it more comfortable.

One of our favorite acquisitions was a locally made, thick wool rug that we bought for the living area. There used to be a kind of artists’ market once a week, held in a large conference room at the Hilton Hotel, where local charitable organizations sold a variety of handmade goods that were designed to appeal to tourists and other foreigners – because they were relatively expensive – we could easily have found a perfectly adequate rug in a local shop. Anyway, we found a place that sold rugs with traditional Ethiopian designs, and it wasn’t until we picked out and purchased our rug that we realized it was going to be a challenge to carry it between the two of us, let alone fit the rug into the car! Obviously we made it to the house; I think you can see a teeny little bit of it, along with our new furniture, in this photo:

We brought the basket home with us, too.

In fact, we brought this rug back to the US with us, but alas, it didn’t travel well; by the time we unpacked it, moths had eaten the center out of it. It was a sad day when we heaved it into the trash bin.

So, the picture above points to a challenge we hadn’t even considered when we moved to Ethiopia – namely, how were we going to wash our laundry? There was no place in our apartment to hook up a washing machine – and anyway we couldn’t afford to purchase one with our limited resources, even at a government store. All of the other foreigners we knew, and most of our Ethiopian colleagues, solved this problem by hiring a maid.

A maid?!? We just didn’t see it happening for us. We certainly never imagined ourselves employing servants to clean up after us. After all, we were in Ethiopia to help other people, not to raise our own standard of living. But we really did need to figure something out. I spent a couple of unpleasant hours sloshing around the bathtub with dirty clothes, soapsuds, and warm water and I am here to tell you – washing clothes is hard work! I showed J my raw knuckles and gave him the news: unless he was willing to take his turn on laundry duty, we did, in fact, have to find a maid.

I don’t think we were ever totally comfortable, throughout our time in Ethiopia, with the notion of hiring a person to do our dirty work, but we did come to understand that working for foreigners was a great job for a young woman who could speak a little English. And so we asked around and found Elsabet, who already worked part time for our friend Dan and wanted to increase her hours. That photo above? was taken on Elsabet’s first day with us, a day on which she washed every single item of clothing we owned, apart from what we wore to work.

In addition to her superlative laundry skills, Elsabet was a good cook and baker. It was a treat to come home from work on Tuesdays and Thursdays and have dinner ready for us. Here’s her recipe for Coffee Cookies, in her own handwriting:

I am very sorry to say that I don’t have any pictures of Elsabet to share with you – she only worked for us for a few months before she found a job overseas. It was pretty common in those days (and I think it still is) for young Ethiopian women to be sent away to work as maids and nannies in countries like Syria and Lebanon, where they could theoretically make more money. And I think it was pretty common for these young women to find themselves in a very difficult position – not speaking the local language, not knowing anyone locally… an internet search tells a really disheartening tale. We never heard from Elsabet again, and I often wonder if she ever made it back to her family in Addis. I hope she did.