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?

Making Progress.

By the beginning of July (nearly Twenty-one Years Ago in Ethiopia, now…) we had gotten our bearings and settled into our new life in Africa.

At language school we continued to improve our communication skills, as I wrote to my sister on July 6, 1995:

We feel like we are making progress in Amharic! When I came into the office today, I responded to peoples’ greetings and THEY DIDN’T CORRECT ME, which means I GOT IT RIGHT! Language school was pretty fun today – we learned numbers and then played BINGO! to reinforce our knowledge. In phonetic Amharic, your age (27) is “haya sabat” (ALMOST “haya simmint”). The numbers are pretty easy: eleven is expressed as ten-one (“asra andt”), twelve is ten-two (“asra hulett”), etc. Amharic doesn’t have words for million or billion so we use English instead. Of course, the only time we hear those numbers is when street kids demand, “Give us one million dollars!”

At the apartment, we had managed to set up our bare-bones household, though we were still waiting for delivery of that duty-free stove. We had acquired baking supplies and a 1962 Betty Crocker cookbook from a longtime missionary couple who were retiring and heading back to the USA, and I was looking forward to baking a carrot cake for J’s upcoming birthday. Funny thing about the cookbook was that it relied on a lot of prepared ingredients that simply weren’t available in Addis Abeba, like canned beans, cream of mushroom soup, and packages of Jell-o. It also didn’t have a recipe for carrot cake. We did the best we could with what we had, and were unreasonably happy when we found a source for bay leaves and cornstarch.

It took us a little time, but by the beginning of July we had found ourselves a church home at the International Lutheran Church of Addis Abeba. Most of the young expatriates we had met attended the larger International Evangelical Church, but the one time we went there it reminded us a little bit too much of an American mega-church, a format that had never appealed to us. It took a little encouragement (thanks, Steve and Beth) and effort for us to find ILC but it felt like home as soon as we walked in the door, in large part because we had attended a Lutheran church during our student days in Salem. The liturgy sounds the same, even when it’s spoken with a Norwegian accent.

By the beginning of July, it had also started to rain. Addis Abeba is dry for most of the year, but as I have mentioned before, there’s a no-kidding type of rainy season that runs from late June to August. Unlike the Pacific Northwest, it isn’t cloudy and gray all day long with constant precipitation. Ethiopian rainstorms are relatively short but intense, a heavy downpour usually accompanied by thunder and lightning, with bright sunshine before and after. It wasn’t uncommon for drivers, ourselves included, to pull over and wait out a rainstorm since windshield wipers often couldn’t keep up with the demand.

I remember one evening when there was a huge storm. We were already at home when the rain started lashing against our apartment windows – and it’s a good thing we were. The living room windows were sheltered by an overhang, but our bedroom window bore the full brunt of the weather, and began to leak. A lot. The windows were just pieces of glass in a metal frame with absolutely no seal or weather stripping of any kind, so water poured in through the seams, over the windowsill and onto the bedroom floor. We pinned our makeshift window curtain (formerly a blue-checkered tablecloth) up out of the way and deployed towels and cooking pots to catch most of the water. We listened to a Harry Connick Jr. cassette tape until the power went out, then we made dinner by candlelight, read a little bit, and fell asleep. We woke up a few hours later to the light of the full moon shining in through our curtain-less window and it all made sense: “Oh, he’s smiling, ‘cause he’s in love. The man in the moon is smiling ‘cause he’s in love with the girl in the world.”