Bunna and Bread

I woke up from my nap to the smell of yeast rising and frankincense burning. My host mom was baking bread, or ambasha, to go along with the bunna ceremony that would happen soon. It made me think of my father who often makes bread in our bread machine and fills our house with the smell of yeast and cinnamon. The smell of the frankincense brought me back to my Ethiopian family where we burn it during the bunna ceremony. I felt I was in my old home back in Jersey and my new home with my host family in SNNPR at once.

Bunna ceremonies happen at least once a day in Ethiopian households. The coffee is washed, roasted, pounded into grounds, and finally boiled over a small charcoal stove in a special clay pot called a jebena. Tradition dictates that you drink three cups and you say tu'um bunn, or sweet coffee, after your first sip. Ethiopians usually drink their coffee black with a few teaspoons of sugar in small coffee cups that look more like tea cups than anything else. They are undeniably pretty, and you can tell that a family invests in these delicate cups no matter their social-economic status. When you want to have a meeting, build a relationship, or ask for a favor, it all revolves around coffee. 

The coffee ceremony is my favorite part of Ethiopian culture so far. At once it seems totally foreign, but like the bread it is mirrored in my own life back in Jersey. I come from religious stock and a lot of my family does not drink alcohol. So what do we have during Christmas Eve brunch or birthdays or anniversaries? Coffee. Coffee is what greases the wheels of my family. Every time we have family over my parents make a carafe of decaffe and a carafe of caffeinated coffee. Sugar and cream is passed around and we all cradle our mugs, talking until we lose our voices. My earliest memories are of my mother sitting on the couch, her perpetually cold hands wrapped around a mug of black coffee, steam rising from a mug given to her from a birthday or Mother’s Day, and smelling just like home. Part of becoming an adult in my family is when you start drinking coffee. When I participated in my first bunna ceremony in Ethiopia I felt I could find a niche in this culture, maybe Ethiopia was not as far afield as I thought it would be.

The more time you spend abroad the more things you find to be universal, like breaking bread together and talking around coffee cups. I can hear my host mom cooking in the kitchen, the klink and klack of lids, the sliding of pots, the chatter, the murmur of television, the whispers between a mother and her children. When you hear all of these sounds through walls and doors it easy to pretend that you are not half a world away because as the cliché goes: some things never change.