Home sweet home.

Home sweet home.

Ginibot Isra and St. Mary's Day

On Saint Mary’s Day I found myself being driven around the muddy town in the ambulance, going house to house of co-workers to eat kidney beans in mitmita, a spicy powder, and to drink suwa, the local home-brewed beer. Holidays in Tigray are something else, and although definitely not what I expected for my Peace Corps experience it is quickly becoming my favorite.

Ethiopians are some of the most hospitable people I have met; evenly matched for the incredible welcome I had when I lived in Jordan. Even if they have only a bit of injera to eat, people will happily share it with their guests. When there is a christening or wedding, a family will pull out all of the stops for their celebration. S’iga, the goat or beef stew, and injera are prepared in huge quantities for guests. Suwa is brought in jerry can after jerry can. An entire neighborhood will sit on benches in the family’s compound eating, with the women of the family bringing around more injera and s’iga to eat, insisting you have more; and the men doing the same with the suwa. Everyone eats and chats, and it is an excellent time. Nearly every week I have been here there has either been a holiday or celebration, so I have had a surplus of s’iga in May.

One of the biggest government holidays happened recently: Ginibot Isira, May 20^th ((May 28^th in the Gregorian calendar)), the celebration of the Downfall of the Dirge. The Tigrawa were instrumental in the defeat of the Dirge regime, so the holiday is a big deal here. The Health Office and Health Center employees, plus some of the neighboring health centers and local officials, met in the concrete shell of the new hospital that is being built for a celebration. As expected there were tons of s’iga and injera to eat. Clearly the organizers of the event wanted to impress because instead of suwa throughout the night there was a constant influx of crates of beer.

After everyone had been drinking and eating for a while the, music went on and nearly everyone was dancing in the traditional way. People move in a circle and kind of pop and lock their shoulders and chests. I would highly suggest youtube-ing it to get an idea of what it looks like. I constantly begged off, and people let me, but I got the message that I would not have the same luck next year.

Next came the speeches. Supervisors and different employees spoke about what had been accomplished in the previous year and what would be accomplished in the next year. Ginibot Isira is all about success and winning so everyone related their speeches back to the same spirit. Then there were awards for those who had done particularly well that year. And then came the bidding.

It’s hard to describe what happened next. To pay for all of the festivities people offer either certain amounts of birr, or injera, or crates of beer to be paid for. At this point everyone has had more than a few to drink, and end up trying to top how much the last person gave. To me this seems like a great way to fundraise, but I get the feeling that it would not work in the US for a whole variety of legal reasons. But let me tell you, it works well here!

I always leave these events feeling like I have taken another few steps to integrating or showing that I am a part of this office and this team. Even if I only have a token sip of siwa, people seem to understand that the ferengi will just do things different, and seem to be mollified when I tell them it’s very good, and that I just do not want a himam rissi, or sick head.  My female coworkers do a lot of sticking up for me in these situations too, once even telling off a drunk guy to leave me alone. I must be doing something right if I have already acquired some wing-women.

 
When I left the event, being escorted back by my liaison so I would not be eaten by a hyena, I could see Venus and Mars shining in what I think of as the winter sky. The next day I would be turning 23. In two days my niece was due to arrive. All of these things will be dates I look back on in my life when I remember Ethiopia. Isn’t that a trip? 

The Edega//Market

My friends and family back home often ask me what my life is like, how different it must be to live in Ethiopia, how hard it must be to adapt. Honestly my life here follows some of the same routines I have at home: I wake up at 5:30AM, I do yoga, I wash, I make breakfast, I go to work by 8:30AM, I go home for lunch ((which to me is a luxury)), I go back to work until 5:00PM, I walk home, I make dinner, I clean up, and I go to bed. At work I sit at a desk or the computer and keep busy. We all wear business casual and have meetings or surveillance visits in the different k’ebeles. Weekends I clean my clothes and do errands. Sometimes I take a bus to the closest city to shop and relax. Most of this is exactly what I do in America, with some differences: I wash my clothes by hand, I have bucket baths instead of showers, and all of my food is prepared from scratch. If I had to pinpoint one aspect of my life that I was unprepared for it is the market.

               

Walking into a market is a real wake up call to living in a different country. My town’s market happens every Saturday and everyone from the surrounding villages comes to buy and sell. The market has everything from plastic goods ((jerry cans and pitchers and basins)) to vegetables, fruits, and spices; to livestock; to things like fabric and shoes. Whatever you want can usually be found here. The market is composed of rows and rows of women ((and a handful of men)) sitting down with umbrellas selling their goods in piles on burlap or plastic sacks in front of them. Every person has a different quality and price, so you have to mill through these tight rows, asking the sellers how much their onions or tomatoes are. 

Being able to navigate the market requires you to 1) know how much everything should cost, 2) being able to haggle the price down when they try to overcharge you, and 3) getting a good idea of what a good onion or tomato or potato is by sight and feel. In America you do the same, but because the range of quality is much larger here, you end up sifting through the pile of vegetables on the ground, trying to find exactly what you need. The market is loud, hot, and packed with people. Because the women here carry around umbrellas to stay out of the sun, and because I happen to be exactly the right amount taller than most Ethiopian women, I have to duck and weave around umbrella spokes. 

Luckily most times I have my neighbors to help me to get the right price, or the good vegetables. I get lead around like a baby duck ((yellow hair and all)), clutching my orange plastic basket filled with plastic bags for my purchases. People are generally shocked to see a ferengi at the rural market, and more shocked that I eat carrots and tomatoes just like everyone else here. Who knew that the ferengi eats the same food! 


Learning how to navigate the market is a point of pride for me, and as I get more comfortable going it will mean that I am more comfortable in my community. Plus when people see me in the market they understand that I do live, eat, and cook here just like everyone else. When my coworkers see me picking out potatoes, or paying for my garlic; they are enthusiastically proud of me. When they find out I cook it myself they are even more pleased. Admittedly it is a strange thing, as I started making food for myself as early as Kindergarten, but it does show that people have a different interpretation for how ferengi live and eat. All I have to do is exist to show a different side of the story: that I may be from America, but I still can buy my own groceries and cook my own food, and that this is what nearly all Americans do too. It is probably the easiest ways I have of accomplishing Peace Corps goal two: educating host country nationals about Americans. It does make you question what American movies and TV are teaching people though.
 

Like bunna, going to market is one of the cultural touchstones that I am learning to navigate and accomplish. It’s funny to think that in two years after spending 2 birr ((or 10 cents)) on half a kilo of tomatoes, or 5 birr ((or 26 cents)) for half a kilo of potatoes what my sticker shock will be in America. 

Betami Tu'um

When I walked out of the Health Extension Worker ((HEW)) training with a crowd of women chattering in Tigrinia around me, the young women I was walking beside turned to me and asked, "Bunna tisati?" For the first time I felt like, well, this all might work out.

The coffee ceremony, as I have described before, is the doorway into friendships, work, and social capital. It also reveals a number of dimensions of Ethiopian culture and life. Every step in the process is done from "scratch," from roasting the beans to crushing them to powder to boiling it over charcoal. The role of women as the sole preparers of coffee show how women's work in the home is expected and realized, even in the low stool women sit on to prepare it. Women make and do everything in the house through painstaking effort. From washing clothes by hand, to the hours of cooking over coal, to the bunna ceremony; women here do it all with children strapped to their backs. They are remarkably good at it, and are rightly proud of their strength and skill in managing their households.

This particular bunna ceremony was being performed by a HEW I had just met. The HEW program in Ethiopia is relatively new, and so far quite successful. HEWs are all women, who have completed the 10th grade, and have a year of training. They can do some clinical care, like vaccines and some medicines, but primarily work in a preventative healthcare role, like I do! HEWs work in pairs out of health posts, which ever k'ebele or town should have. The Ethiopian government prefers that the HEWs live in the community they work in, but that is not always the case. The HEW program is one of the ways Ethiopia is working to increase health care coverage. Because the HEWs are all women, it allows for greater access to the people that tend to get the least healthcare: women and children. Women know who else is pregnant in the community, whose kid is sick, and have credibility among other women. In short, this is exactly the kind of work I want to do, so these ceremonies are important! 

It was, as expected, awkward, strained, and full of my broken Tigrinia. But it was the first olive branch I had by a stranger, and an important one at that.

I'm a real girl! Er, PCV.

On Saturday May 3rd, I blew my hair out, put on eye liner, and delivered a speech in Tigrinia at the US Embassy. On Sunday May 4th I rolled into my site covered in dust, hair in a braid, and a sleepless night behind me. Being a Peace Corps volunteer means your life continues to swing and shift between extremes: emotions, environments, and lifestyles. Within two days I had swung so much I felt dizzy.

I was picked to give the Tiginria speech at the Embassy during our official swear-in as volunteers while two of other volunteers gave speeches in Amharic and Afan Oromo. It looks like I'm starting to accumulate mileage in the speech making department! It was a thrill and an honor, and I was happy to make my teachers proud. After a speech from different Embassy officials, including the Ambassador herself, we were sworn in as official volunteers. We were no longer trainees and we had all earned the acronym PCV. I would be lying, though, if I did not admit that the best part of swear-in was the sushi, kebabs, cake, and diet Coke the Embassy provided after. 

The next day we were all out of bed by 4AM in order to catch our planes or busses to our new sites. We all seemed a little dazed. At that point I do not think that any of us had internalized what was happening next: we were saying goodbye to each other, and hello to our new sites with all of the privileges, responsibilities, and hardships that comes with it. 

By the time I got to site I was covered in dust, exhausted, but thrilled to see my neighbor again. I got my keys from my liaison, put my stuff down, and then recruited his help in finding a mattress. After winding through a neighborhood of closely packed streets and houses, we arrived at what looked like a hardware shop. We then entered the compound behind the stores and went into a room filled with foam mattresses. I picked one out, trucked it home, and then went back out in search of the plastic woven mats that people use on the floor under chairs or mattresses. 

When I walked down the road that afternoon, rug tucked under my arm, I got stares, looks, shouts of "ferenji," essentially everything that makes you feel foreign and separate. But as I walked past one of the restaurants in town I heard "Betty!" I turned and saw a group of people that I had met in the health office the first time I went to site a month ago. They shouted "welcome back!" I said my hellos and moved on. Some kids on the road close to my house tried to play soccer with me. A group of women and I exchanged greetings. Finally I made it to my compound, where my neighbor greeted me with warmth and a smile.

The swings and shifts of feeling like a foreigner to a resident will continue through the whole two years of my service. However after today I am glad to know that feeling at home in this place may not be so far out of reach.

Fasika!

On Good Friday I stood in the middle of the road surrounded by herds of goats and cows. People were walking around with chickens, bags bursting with onions, teff flour, eggs, and all of the other things they needed for the feast: Fasika.

Fasika, also known as Easter, is a huge holiday in Ethiopia. For the Orthodox Christians, the religious majority here, it marks the end of the 50 day Easter fast. It means not eating in the mornings and giving up all animal products. Fasika is the end of this vegan fast and people celebrate it with a bang. Neighbors will pool their money together to buy a cow in pursuit of a good feast.

My first holiday in Ethiopia was helped along by my host family. From buying me cultural clothes to explaining how and why certain activities happen they really made my day wonderful. My host sister Hannah was especially helpful in translating, guiding, and even planning our escape when the family became overwhelming. Without my host family I would not have enjoyed Fasika as much as I did.

There are certain cultural touchstones that are universal. Being told to eat massive amounts of food with your family is one of them. By noon of Fasika I had already eaten three times, and mind you, these are huge portions! The food was delicious but I was ready to burst. The big dish on Fasika is doro wat, or chicken stew. It's spicy and served on injera, the thin teff bread, with a hard boiled egg. In the region I live in now there is a special food called k'ocho. It comes from a tree locally named "false banana," which, as the name implies, looks nearly identical to a banana tree. Women shave the leaves down and create a paste. They then bury the paste and let it ferment. After baking, it becomes a thin, chewy bread. It is served with ibe, the local spicy cheese. Meals are eating all together with voices overlapping and overwhelming each other, mothers and siblings constantly calling out, "Bei! Bei!" or "Eat! Eat!" It is overwhelming, exciting, and makes you feel like a part of this new place.

As I start to count down the days until I move to my permanent site, I have thought more and more about the life I will be making for myself here. When I got my Ethiopian residential ID at the beginning of training I was excited, but I did not feel like a "resident" just yet. It was experiencing Fasika, a holiday, with the family I have come to know and love that has begun to make Ethiopia home, even in just small pieces.