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.