ሪሑስ በዓል ልደት! (Merry Christmas!)

So, I just discovered the Amharic keyboard setting on my computer, needless to say I was very excited- and so impressed it was on my computer.
Christmas time is here! And for those of us Ferenjis living among the Habasha, we get to celebrate twice. Because Ethiopia is on a different calendar (similar to the Julian calendar), Ethiopian Christmas is two weeks after our December 25th, which means one celebration with the Peace Corps volunteers, and now one celebration with my Tigray family and community (which seems to be turning into a three day long celebration), then, stick new years in between (Gregorian calendar New Years- Ethiopia celebrated their New Years back in September- happy 2004!) and it’s been a lot of festivity…
For the first Christmas, most of us Tigray volunteers decided to meet up for the weekend in a town called Wukro, just a bit north of Mekele, the regional capital. Saturday was a lot of traveling and one big shopping trip in Christmas prep, and Sunday, between the 14 of us there, was an amazing Christmas dinner of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, salads, cookies, pies, and so much more. I don’t know how, but in some way, the food tastes oh-so-much better when you’ve spent all day cooking it. I’ve decided an American Christmas and an Ethiopian Christmas seem to share one major element: Food. These past few days of Ethiopian Christmas celebration have come with just as much, and just as delicious food. Christmas morning was started out with a beautiful coffee ceremony (the floor lined with leaves and grass with a small tea-set laden coffee table and matching coal stove and incense burner, surrounded by bowls and bowls of traditional bread ‘hambasha’, popcorn, and fruit.) and breakfast of (My favorite!!) Sabahi Doro (a spicy chicken sauce eaten with injera). After breakfast, then coffee (three cups), two hours later, lunch (this time Sabahi Siga- a meat sauce made with the ram we had tied in our compound for the past few days), and again, coffee, an hour later another lunch (impolite to refuse), and, yes, coffee, I spent half the day eating and the other half sitting around too full to do anything productive (but too awake to really relax). The other typical Christmas refreshment is the home brewed beer, ‘Suwa’, and we had numerous people over to our compound throughout the day to enjoy a glass, or two, or four… There were the certain ‘you don’t speak Tigrinya!’ ladies that became even more boisterous, though more enjoyable, as the day wore on. Then, into the night I could hear drumming, singing, and dancing through the streets (which I was a little to lame to go watch) making it a very different but very fun Christmas experience.
In between all the celebrations, I’ve also been taking time to get to know my new town. My site is definitely much larger than it was first described to me, which has both its ups and downs; good because I don’t feel like I need to know and greet everyone in town (nor do I think that could be possible), but bad because the kids (oh are there a lot of them) just see me as a rich, white, ferenji and I get a lot of harassment. The kids in my immediate neighborhood are great and are used to seeing me daily, but when I venture outside my neighborhood I still get a crowd of 30 or so yelling “ferenji! Ferenji!”, “you! You! You!”, “Money! Money! Money!”, and an occasional rock thrown at me. I’ve found it’s hard to get too excited about working with environmental education in schools when walking into a school feels like walking into the lion’s den… I have a feeling it’ll get better once I’ve started working with them and they see me every day.
My host organization at the Natural Resource office is great and so helpful and friendly so far- each time I walk in (which, regrettably, hasn’t been as often as I should) they are eager to talk, discuss the environment of the area, and I almost always get an invitation to have coffee or tea. I have also ventured out to the more rural areas around my town and spent some time with farmers, to better understand the area, the crops, and, of course, to practice my Tigrinya. As I had prepared myself, work has been very slow starting and often times frustrating not knowing specifically what my job is or what is expected of me; I know my main focus should be Tigrinya and a community assessment right now, so I’m trying not to get too ahead of myself!