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.”