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?

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.”

Vintage E-mail, With Endnotes.

From: j-----@padis.gn.apc.org

To:     ohsu.wpo2 (deppmeie)

Date: 6/30/95 6:24 am

Subj: tomato and cheese omelet

Hi Sis,¹

Thank you for the doily! Did you know that I have been coveting the doilies you’ve made for Mom and others, and now you are helping me not to break the tenth commandment.² Doesn’t that make you feel good? It is gorgeous, and we are pleased to have it in our home. It’s really perfect, because not only does it look nice, but it reminds us of you and it will be easy to pack and bring home. So, thanks again.³

We were very happy to receive the package⁴ from Mom and Dad this week. (Obviously we got it, since that’s where the doily was). It was like Christmas and my birthday⁵ all rolled into one. Of course we were thankful to get some of the things we had asked for, like sponges and Kool-Aid⁶ and twisters⁷, but the surprises really pleased us – dried fruit and OAT SQUARES⁸ and wheat germ. Thanks for your part in making the audio tapes. It was really nice to hear some familiar music! J was listening to Jackson Browne while making breakfast Thursday morning.⁹

It’s only 11 am and already it has been a very happy day for me. J made breakfast for me (tomato and cheese omelet in our new frying pan), and I opened my doily and birthday cards. J brought out from hiding our half-kilo chocolate bar – but now that we have Hershey’s Miniatures we can wait on the chocolate bar for a while. He also gave me a silver cross pendant, a very beautiful Ethiopian design. We need to buy a chain before I can wear it, though.¹⁰

We came into the office today to check e-mail and do a little work, since we don’t have language school. (The last Friday of each month is prayer day for SIM, the mission that runs the language school). My friend and co-worker Joy brought me a gift from Kenya, where she was for a conference last week – it’s a woven bag like the ones that were popular in high school, but this one has a drawstring at the top.¹¹ After lunch today we are planning to go to an exhibition on Women in Development. Some of the FH/E nurses are participating in the exhibition and have brought some handcrafts made by FH/E women’s groups to sell.

Learning Amharic has been challenging so far! Last week we learned the alphabet and this week we started on simple sentences like “My name is Sara” and “I am a student.” I’m sorry I can’t write those for you in Amharic on the computer, but I’ll send you a handwritten sample of fidel soon.

I hope you have a good time celebrating Mom’s birthday¹² this weekend. I think I sent her postcard too late for it to get there by Saturday, but it’s coming. Eat a piece of pizza for us! We will be eating pizza tonight with a group of friends in celebration of three birthdays – mine, J’s¹³, and Renate’s (she’s a German veterinarian working with the Southern Baptist Mission). We’re also going to the Hilton to play miniature golf, though I’m pretty sure it’s going to rain on us.¹⁴

Wow, I just found out that we have a package¹⁵ waiting at the post office. Guess we’ll have to add that to our list of afternoon activities.¹⁶

Enjoy yourselves this weekend!

Love, Sara (the old lady)¹⁷ and J

OKAY, WAIT! I just got your e-mail from earlier in the week, and sadly it is too late to reply. I was thinking of calling Mom and Dad today, but J suggested that it would be easier and cheaper to have you call us sometime next week. So, how about if we set a date for early next week? How about if I say call us at 6 am your time, 4 pm our time, on Tuesday? The problem with 8 am our time is that we have to be at school at 8:30, and it’s across town; we have school until 3 pm,¹⁸ but we can get to the office by 4. We’ll check our e-mail on Monday, so if you have an alternative suggestion let us know!¹⁹

**********

¹ Lisa.

² You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s. Including, I suppose, her doily.

³ We still have the doily.

⁴ Our first package!

⁵ It was actually my birthday.

⁶ Fruity flavors help you drink more fluids when you’re not feeling well.

⁷ I… have no idea.

⁸ My all-time favorite cereal.

⁹ He still does this.

¹⁰ Purchased chain, have worn, still love. A+ gift.

¹¹ Sorry, Joy. I still have a bag like this that I bought for myself, but I'm not sure what happened to the one you gave me.

¹² The day after mine.

¹³ Ten days after mine.

¹⁴ I’m pretty sure our miniature golf plans were rained out, as I have no recollection of that outing.

¹⁵ Our second package!

¹⁶ We had to pick up our packages in person at the main post office. More on that later…

¹⁷ Seriously? I was 26.

¹⁸ Nice to know, as we couldn’t quite remember the hours.

¹⁹ I do not miss being ten time zones away from my family, or trying to set up international phone calls by e-mail.

Monday Morning.

The morning of Monday, June 26, 1995 was as ordinary as any morning could have been for us, two months into our extended residence in the capital city of a developing country. J had returned home after his short visit to the north and we were starting our second week of language school. We were probably humming the little mnemonic tune that helped us memorize the characters of the fidel as we ate breakfast and prepared to leave the apartment. Once in the car and out of the gate, we turned south towards Bole Road, on our new morning route to pick up Joy.

We… didn’t get very far. Even from our gate we could see that Bole Road was blocked off, the intersection packed with people. So we reversed direction and headed north on our street, the route we would normally take to the office. We thought if we could reach a main road in that direction we could work our way around to Bole Road, and from there continue on our familiar route to the other side of the city. But that… did not happen. Try as we might, we could not find a way across Bole Road to the south and west of us. Police and pedestrians blocked every intersection; our Amharic wasn’t good enough to ask for details but the message was clear: get away from here.

Keep in mind that there’s no radio in the car to tell us what’s happening; there’s no app to provide us with an alternate route around the congestion. We had little to no concept of how the city was laid out and had barely even seen a street map, let alone have one with us in the car.

After about half an hour of trying to get across Bole Road, we decided to change tactics and head for the FH/E office. Once there, we thought, we could call Joy and tell her to find her own transportation to language school – we’d catch up with her later in the day. (Remember, we couldn’t call her from home because we didn’t have a phone at home, and we didn’t know anyone in our building who did. To be fair, we didn’t know anyone in our building). But even that plan was optimistic, because we also couldn’t find a way to cross Asmara Road to the north of us, to get into the Kazanchis neighborhood where the office was located. At one point, frustrated and dumb, we parked the car on a quiet side street and tried to make our way to the office on foot, only to be stymied by a small waterway – in retrospect, probably the Kebena River – that we couldn’t get around or across.

So, we turned around and went home. I’d like to think we spent the afternoon studying; I know we didn’t waste hours watching tv – because we had no tv; we didn’t goof around on the Internet – because there was no Internet; we didn’t even have a short wave radio to distract us.

On Tuesday morning, we got up as usual, and went to language school.

It is hard to imagine now, but our isolation was so complete, we didn’t know until we got to school  that there had been an attempt to assassinate the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, as he arrived in Addis Abeba on Monday morning for a meeting of the Organization of African Unity. The ambush had taken place on Bole Road, somewhere between our street and the airport, which was about a kilometer away. Though his car was riddled with bullets, Mubarak himself escaped unharmed; his driver turned around and went right back to the airport. By the time we were out in the car, the focus had turned to locating the perpetrators who were, presumably, contained in the same cordoned-off portion of the city that we were attempting to navigate. Two Ethiopian policemen were killed along with five gunmen; a Muslim militant group called the Islamic Group in Egypt later claimed responsibility for the attempt. For more information, you can read this vivid report of the incident from the Los Angeles Times.

I suppose that was our first experience with terrorism, and it was our closest brush in terms of physical proximity, and at the time we probably weren’t as freaked out by it as we should have been. We took it more seriously later on, when it became more personal.