First and very much foremost, welcome
to the world, little Dane Harris! Katie, you are a champ and a hero.
Wish I was there to give y'all a big squeeze. But hurrah!!
and from one side of the world to the other... five random observations on life here in Addis...
1. Ethiopia is the second oldest
Christian state after the Egyptian Copts, and it runs on
it's own calendar. When the rest of the world switched to the
Gregorian calendar, Ethiopian stayed the same, so it's officially 7
years behind, and the day starts at 7am with 1st hour, so
writing this at 4pm, it's really 10. Yes this makes things confusing.
And while Christmas for everyone else is Tuesday, here it's not til
January 7th. Toni and I are still sticking to our Western
roots and taking a little Christmas holiday in a lake 50 km from town
– everything in Addis is business as usual next week, and it just
felt wrong to have appointments and meetings and normal work. Even if
we can't be with anyone else and eat gingerbread or lebkuchen or hear
a Christmas evensong, it is still Christmas to us. So out of the city
we'll go. It's our present to ourselves :)
2. You can't buy sugar at the
supermarkets. You can buy lots of other things... good local yogurt,
beans and lentils and tropical fruit, even a Saudi Arabian version of
digestives (hurrah!), but no sugar. You get that from your kebelle,
or local governing district. Like a war rationing. So, no baking for
us until we speak Amharic well enough to figure out the system...
which may likely be never :)
3. In the meantime, just say 'ishi.'
This is the catch-all Amharic word. Our friend Yonatan once picked up
some food and had an entire conversation just with 'ishi.' “Here is
your food/ishi.” “thanks!/ishi” “Here's the money/ishi”
“Here's the change/ishi” “goodbye!/ishi.” It's a wonderful
trick to pretend you know what you're talking about here.
4. Addis is filled with people begging.
You can't avoid it, and it's crippling difficult sometimes to handle.
(But by no means the only aspect of the city or the country- I don't
mean to say that Ethiopia is only about poverty. That must be said.)
To get into town from where we live, we take a minibus to Mexico
Square, a big hub in the west of the city. You can get a bus to
basically anywhere from there, but are constantly navigating sidewalks of people selling and busking and begging. Many of
these people survive by buying “bites” for 50 Ethiopian centimes.
(less than 0.001 USD) Restaurants around the city throw their
leftovers into a bowl, and for 50 cents you can get a handful of it.
There is a great separation between rich and poor here, and everyone
is living right on top of each other. (Which, by the way, I like much
better than the ghettoization you see in other countries like South
Africa.) The insanely posh 5 star Sheraton is up the road 100 feet
from a shanty-town. It's a microcosm of the globe, really. But hard.
It's all hard to take, no matter what way you look at it.
5. There are chickens in our yard, and
the rooster cock-a-doodle-doos right on que at 6:45 every morning.
We wake up to that, if we aren't already awake from the 3am
loudspeakers from the nearby Orthodox church, which for whatever
reason feels it's necessary to blast its liturgy in the middle of the
night. (And all day too. It's just a bit more noticeable at 3am...)
Right. Christmastime is here, even if
no one else seems to think so :) Have a very very merry one, y'all.
I'm so happy to have seen our family expand, it's the best present of
all! That both Kate and Dane are healthy is just such a blessing. I cannot even say. It really makes me cry to think of it all...
Will return next week with pictures of the pretty lake – excited to get
some fresh air after the past weeks in this congested city!
Much love, and happy Christmas!
Jooj.
