Classes resume

Rec time.

School

After missing a Saturday class due to the Easter holiday, we got back into full gear with class on Wednesday and Saturday. Wednesday was a dramatic day! Heavy rains made it hard for most of the students to get to class on-time, and then the power went out (for the first time in almost a week) just before our start time. Eventually everyone made it (the first time we had all 20), and we had a spirited discussion of a Jomo Kenyatta short story, "The Gentlemen of the Jungle." The story for Saturday was from Zimbabwe, "Why Don't You Carve Other Animals" by Yvonne Vera. Saturday class runs from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and the students have been impressively focused and productive. They are motivated to learn, to engage each other, and to improve their English. They also really like the clean, open, uncrowded spaces of the college campus; it is, unfortunately, a contrast from their regular schools. (The picture to the left is the courtyard of one of these schools, with 1,400 K-8 students.) 

Other ILAE News

Last Monday, May 6th, was a big day for the school. There was a fundraising event at the city's oldest hotel, the Taitu (built for Menelik II's wife Empress Taitu in 1888 E.C.) that, despite heavy rain and subsequent snarled traffic, drew a large, supportive crowd. Also, an on-line magazine for Ethiopian diasporans, Tadias, came out with an article featuring one of ILAE's founders. It's exciting to see so much enthusiasm for the school and to hear that this program is helping to fill the gap between potential and opportunity for the students it is serving.  

Field trip to Adama

The landscape along the way (new highway in background).

Today we headed 100 km east to Ethiopia's third largest city, Adama (with a population between 250,000 and 300,000 depending on the source). Compared to the massive, sprawling capital, Adama seemed quite small and navigable. Adama is also known as Nazret (or Nazreth). The city was given this Biblical name after the Second World War by Emperor Haile Selassie, but in 2000 the city officially reverted to its original Oromo language name.

Our journey was meant to take under two hours, but we turned out to be traveling on the only major road out of Addis toward the east and one of the busiest corridors in the country. It goes all the way across the Rift Valley into Somalia and also links up with the major north-south route that connects Ethiopia to Kenya. The drive took over two and a half hours going and almost three returning. There is a new 6-lane express tollway under construction - and due to open ahead of scheduled April 2014 completion date. Reportedly, it will cut the distance between Addis and Adama by 20 km and reduce the travel time to 40 minutes.

Traffic!

The two lane road was packed with a steady stream of cars, buses, and trucks. We passed through a couple of towns and some significant industrial zones, and all along the way - in and between these developed areas - the roadside was full of people walking and waiting, livestock grazing, and small settlements.

The welcoming reception at Seeds.

 Our destination was a pre-K/kindergarten and after-school support program called Seeds of Africa, founded by a former Miss Ethiopia (2005) Atti Worku. Here is a Tadias magazine interview with her. We were there with staff from Changing Our World, a fundraising and philanthropy consulting firm that is helping ILEA raise money.

The environment rules posted at Seeds.

The students gave us an enthusiastic welcome and then put on some performances to demonstrate the learning that they are doing at Seeds. We were also treated by Ms. Worku's mother to a delightful traditional meal (and coffee) for lunch.

After the LONG drive back to Addis, we ran one last fateful errand and ended up caught in gridlock. At perfect storm of rush hour traffic, construction, and heavy rain, trapped us for another hour in the vehicle - which we finally abandoned and sought refuge in a restaurant for dinner.

I'd like to go back to Adama, but may need to wait for the new expressway to be done.

Weather

It was a busy Easter weekend here (essentially holidays from May Day through today's "Holy Monday" recovery day). I have pictures and some stories to post later, but we're off on a field trip this morning (Tuesday already) with some out of town visitors. For now, someone asked about the weather. It's not been as hot, sunny, or dry as I expected; in fact, it rained as hard as I've ever seen for about an hour early yesterday evening - and I'm from Seattle. Here's what the week ahead looks like:

Weather Update:

Okay, so it really rains here - and not in that endearing Seattle misty-drizzle way. It's not quite a monsoon (more like summer afternoon showers in D.C. or the Rockies), but when it starts, everyone scrambles for shelter. The dirt roads turn to mud, and the sides of the paved streets flow like small rivers. It's Thursday now, and the forecast above has been accurate.

Playing tour guide

 

A quiet Monday at the market

Funny as it felt, with my mere two weeks on the ground in a city that still confuses me, I got to help show around some visitors from New York today. With the necessary help of a driver, I took them to visit the En Toto market and the shop where the former women fuel wood carriers sell their baskets and fabrics. It was great to get out of the car, and I was much more comfortable wandering the street market having seen it before. I also decided to just ask when I saw a picture I wanted to take. People got a kick out of seeing themselves on the camera's little screen, and it made me wish that I had brought an old instant Polaroid camera or one of the new instant digital ones. When it was lunch time, I was also able to take the visitors to a restaurant that I had already tested.

The boy on the right, an outgoing 3rd grader with good English, helped me negotiate a reasonable price for two pineapples - one for our group, and one for him and his friends.

These fruit and vegetable stalls are everywhere.

Plastic sandals. Economical footwear, if they lasted.

Overall, after two weeks, I feel like I'm moving into a more reflective state of mind and beyond the reaction phase of culture shock (and, if there is such a thing, setting or location shock). The again, I may just be in the "Surface adjustment" phase of the classic model (see graphic) and headed for "Confronting deeper cultural/personal issues." Uh oh.

Life in a developed country, especially a place like Seattle, offers so many comforts and amenities - parks, garbage and recycling service, paved streets with sidewalks, well-stocked grocery stores, vacuum cleaners, home postal service, street signs, etc., and I certainly appreciate and miss all those material luxuries. At the same time, I am impressed that people here persevere and make life work, despite all the challenges and deprivations. Providing basic services to the people here is the government's biggest challenge, and I can't help thinking that the wealthier outside world could be doing quite a bit more to ease that burden.   

Religion, photography, and sleep patterns

5:30 am. I'm up - not my customary schedule at home, but increasingly normal here. With all due respect to early the risers I know (Daniel, Jill, Sean), my morning routine is designed to let me get up as close to when I need to leave the house as possible and still get my bowl of cereal eaten and be on time to work. Here, a combination of factors is getting me up -without an alarm - by 6:00 on most days. One factor is that the sun goes down relatively early here, setting by 7:00 most evenings. The evenings are dark (even more so when the power goes out - although it's been quite reliable for a few days...) and relatively quiet.

Another factor getting me up early is the noise from the low-flying jets who pass over on their way into Bole Airport. I've given up trying to determine a set pattern, but there always seems to be a cluster of 3-5 flights arriving between 5:30 and 6:30 am, sometime in surprisingly quick succession. (My brother's used mini van came with an "I Love Airplane Noise" bumper sticker. I'm not there yet, but I have gotten used to it enough that I don't jump at the sudden deep rumble anymore and can even sleep through the din if I'm tired enough.) There goes another one...

My most conspicuous encouragement to wake early is the amplified religious chanting that echoes daily from two nearby churches, starting about 5 am.

Since this is Easter weekend here (see Sunday, April 28th post for a calendar explanation), I have yet to find out if this is a year-round custom or something special for the period of Lent (observed here for the 8 weeks prior to Easter). I have met many Orthodox Christians (the majority religion in Ethiopia) who have been fasting during this build-up to Easter, avoiding meat and dairy. The markets have also been full of chickens, sheep, and goats - all candidates for the fast-breaking feast menus. Religion infuses this society in both overt and subtle ways that I have noticed but am still sorting out.

I'd love to be documenting so much of what I see here, such as the daily stream of religious worshippers and pilgrims heading to the nearby church out on the main road, but it feels obtrusive and disrespectful to turn their piety in an object of curiosity for my camera. Or, in other cases, their culture, customs, or poverty. This reluctance keeps my camera in my pocket a lot - or limits me to taking rushed photos from a moving car. I was quite conflicted, for example, about trying to take a photo of the fuel wood carriers on the way down from En Toto (see last Wednesday's post). This has become a common refrain among the Westerners I've spent time with here; we find a person or scene compelling and want to capture it for memory and sharing, but what right do we have to do so? It also doesn't help that we are so often experiencing street scenes from a moving car, yet another barrier (along with our obvious foreignness) between us and the people we're observing.

Getting out of the city

Today is a holiday here in Ethiopia for May Day, and we took a short hike in the En Toto Hills. Addis Ababa is ringed with hills, mostly covered in fast growing eucalyptus trees (an imported species that has crowded out a lot of the native land cover).



The drive up took us through a crowded market of people shopping for Easter (this coming Sunday here), and then past a lot of donkeys and women carrying down loads of fuel wood. The women carried bundles that were both thicker and wider than they were tall, and it was difficult to see them so loaded down without likening them to the beasts of burden they walked alongside - and without wondering why this toil fell exclusively on them and not the men.




There is an ambitious organization working to give these women an alternative way to earn a living, the Former Women Fuel Wood Carriers Association. This group trains the women to make and sell fabrics and baskets, and we stopped at their small store on the way down the hill. The Christian Science Monitor published a story about these women and the project back in 2007. 

It was great to get out of the city and into the woods for some exercise. I was also happy that the boys who rushed over to our car (to offer to "watch it" for us while we hiked) were also interested in letting me kick around their soccer ball with them.

Taking stock

Where to start? Well, probably with the nearly daily power outages and resulting Internet service challenges that have made it hard to get all the resources aligned to write more posts. The power goes out most days - sometimes in the evening and sometimes in the morning (makes sense, as those are peak usage times). It happened just after dinner on my first evening in Addis, and by now I'm not fazed when I have to change my plans mid-stream, such as yesterday afternoon as I sat at the computer to "get some work done" and *poof* no power. It happened again this morning when the bread was already soaking for some French toast. And then again tonight, just before putting on the water for boiling some pasta. At least I have some peanut butter and bread around to fall back on.

Some things I'm glad I brought:

1. school supplies - like color markers, which I'm using a lot and are seemingly unavailable here.

2. an old, "dumb" cell phone - it may not have Internet access or a camera, but I've used the FM radio function (I have no TV and limited web access), the flashlight (during the frequent power outages), the alarm clock, the memo function, the calculator, and the unit converter (very handy for converting prices in birr to dollars at 18.5:1. Oh yeah, it also works to text and make voice calls (even to the US).

3. my headlamp - again, for surviving the near daily power outages.

4. the NWS frisbees - already a hit with the students

Something I wish I'd brought?

Besides innumerable books and teaching aids, a soccer ball! (I know, ironic. But who knew how hard it would be to find a good one here?)

A few things it's hard to get used to:

1. farm animals in the middle of the roads - horses, donkeys, cows, entire herds of goats! (yes, Jenn, I know you warned me)

Our regular driver, Biruk, and his trusty taxi, an '86 Russian-made Lada.

2. the driving in general (although I've only been a taxi passenger so far) - there are no traffic lights  (well, there are at least 4 intersections that have them, but only one set is working), pedestrians cross at their own peril, and horns are honked with abandon (when pulling out, pulling in, turning, passing, being passed, wanting to pass, sitting in traffic...). Bicycles are understandably nearly non-existent (I've seen 5, and 3 were in a training pack; all seemed in imminent mortal peril)

3. having to soak all my produce in bleach solution for 30 minutes before eating

4. eating cold bananas - they have to be kept in the fridge to protect them from the insects

5. the insects - did I mention sharing my apartment with hundreds of ants (they wear a daily path from my front door to the back door) and dozens of flies, crickets, spiders, and cockroaches?

Educational tidbit:

As I've discovered, Ethiopians use their own calendar and system for time. The twelve daylight hours start at 6 a.m., so 7 a.m. is 1 a.m., 10 a.m. is 4 a.m., etc. The nighttime hours are similarly counted, starting at what I'm used to calling 6 p.m.

By the Ge'ez calendar, today is 20 Miaziya 2005. As Wikipedia describes, "this calendar has twelve months of exactly 30 days each plus five or six epagomenal (how intercalation is done in solar calendars) days, which comprise a thirteenth month."

This, coupled with my ignorance of Amharic, has made arranging and discussing schedules and meetings both complicated and entertaining. Thankfully everyone has been quite good-natured so far.