8+ cups of tea or coffee a day, falling asleep to the sound of the hyenas, or straining to catch a glimpse of a monkey while hiking behind the town after class: just some of the reasons I’m beginning to love Ethiopia!
It’s been a little while, (three weeks maybe?) So let me go back… There’s a lot to go over, from host family, to training site, to language lessons, to site placement and new counterparts, it’s hard to remember that I’ve only been here for a short few weeks.
The first time I met my host family (my new home for the next two and a half months) I immediately felt at home and welcome. I have a great ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ who both speak excellent English, two older ‘brothers’ who I’ve met one, but both are in University and living in the city, and a younger ‘sister’ whom I joke, tease, and argue with like either of my sisters in the states. When I first arrived, they had spread grass on the floor, a tradition of welcoming someone into the home, and a coffee or ‘bunna’ ceremony performed by my new host mom. The Bunna ceremony begins with fresh coffee beans, roasted over a fire right before your eyes, and then passed around the room to enjoy the aroma. Then, the host grinds the beans using a mortar and pestle and begins brewing the coffee in a hand-made clay coffee pot, or ‘jabana’. The ceremony ends three cups of very strong coffee later (all with liberal amounts of sugar) usually accompanied by popcorn or roasted barley. One important element I’ve forgotten to mention is the incense- placed on the fire at the beginning, the room is filled with heavy clouds of coffee and perfumed smoke by the time the ceremony ends.
The training sites (3 towns hosting 6 or 7 trainees each) are roughly 30, 45, and 60 K outside of Addis Ababa and surrounded by beautiful scenery. We’ve spent countless hours after class and on weekends hiking up and down the mountain sides, over the rivers to watch the wildlife, see the waterfalls, or the old churches on the tops of the hills. The saying for Ethiopia is ‘13 months of sunshine’ and here in our training site it’s also the perfect temperature- (especially compared to those trying times in West Africa with 47 degree C. heat) cold at night, and comfortably warm during the day, and, as I mentioned, hearing the hyenas at night brings a smile and a reminder of where I am.
Language lessons… oh where to start. Amharic (the language everyone studies for the first few weeks) is both incredibly difficult (to pronounce) and easy (grammatically structured) to learn; I would say the hardest part about it is the alphabet; I’m not sure I could say how many characters there are, but enough to be really confusing. Each phonetic sound has its own character, which, with numerous consonants and 7 different vowels, that’s a lot of characters… after a while however, I realized there is a pattern and rhyme and reason to the writing, and I can proudly say I’ve learned almost all the letters. HOWEVER… I have recently found out I will be switching languages and learning Tigrina, the language spoken in the Northern Regions of the country. Lucky for me, the alphabet is the same.
So, about a week ago, we had our site placement announcements and at the time, I was really hoping for lush, green forest area with maybe some monkeys hanging around (that’s what I’d pictured in my head anyway). But alas, I seem to be destined for the dryer climates; my new village is the furthest north of any PCV- In the Tigray region, it has been described to me as dry and semi-arid. Oh, and it’s only a stone throw away from the Danakil depression- the hottest place in the world! (Which, sadly, we’re not allowed to go for security reasons) Luckily, I’m up in the mountains at close to 2,000 Meters elevation, so it stays relatively cool. At first I was a little disappointed of my placement, but everything happens for a reason and I really am excited for my site. Plus, there are a number of old rock churches surrounding my town that will be fascinating.
So that about sums up the past few weeks- we fly out tomorrow to our sites for a week of site visit (that’s one of the pluses of living so far north- peace corps flies us to and from our regional capital) and then we’ll be back in training for about 6 more weeks. I’ll try to get pictures up eventually- but for the current internet connection, just uploading a webpage is hard enough!
Awesome! Your host family sounds really great, particularly your interaction with your "sister". I think learning a new language would be difficult enough, but to have to learn an entirely new alphabet (though I imagine they're very pretty characters!) would be very hard. So, no more having to walk for 6 hours to get to a bush taxi that drives for 12 hours before catching a bus for 4 hours to get to the capital?
ReplyDeleteLove you! ~Mom