Christmas with the tortoises...

...no gingerbread or snow or family except each other, not even in a country where anyone else was celebrating, but still- for Christmas we had three days in a treehouse by Lake Bobogaya, just 50 kms south of Addis. It was quiet. The food at the resort was delicious. We kayaked, swam, and read multiple books cover to cover. (Neal, I can finally return 'Midnight's Children' to you, which I yoinked from mom who had yoinked it from you.) It was very beautiful and tranquil, but next year we are determined to not be alone on this day of days!

Toni kayaking...

View from the top and main part of the little lodge.

You can see our room on stilts peeking out to the left....

  ...plus the resort had no less than 11 tortoises of all different sizes just wandering around. The Horns would've loved it :) 

5 things out of Ethiopia, and 1 way better thing out of the OC!

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 1^st 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 7^th. 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.

In Ethiopia

(forgive poor ipod quality photo!) Toni walking along Old Airport Road, one of the main roads we live off of – you can also see this blue ‘minibus taxi,’ which is how we get around town. The fares are between 1-3 Ethiopian Birr, (so about 10 cents) and they go everywhere in the city, you just have to master a bit of Amharic to understand where in heavens name they are actually going… they’re on an informal system, with routes determined by landmarks and neighborhoods, street names are utterly ignored… needless to say we are still learning :)

We are living in a self-contained bungalow in the back of the house of Dr. Nardos Giorgis, an Ethiopian doctor who lives most of the year in Geneva, but keeps a house here for when she’s in town. Our bungalow has it’s own bathroom, with shower and toilet and hot water, and a nice double bed, desk and bookshelves filled with Nardos’ library. Nardos is away, so we share the house with two 20-something young women, Selaam and Zemzem. They come from the Guraghe region of Ethiopia, and are here in the city so they can go to school (and avoid early marriage). They look after the main house, and like to laugh at my and Toni’s poor attempts at speaking Amharic :) They’re utterly kind and helpful, and I’m so happy they’re here. They can help us practice the language, and we can feel a bit less isolated as two ferenji (foreigners) in a bungalow!

We arrived Wednesday, and I immediately started work at Black Lion Hospital, the main teaching hospital in Ethiopia, in the only cancer ward in the whole country of ca. 90 million inhabitants. It’s a small ward, just 1 radiotherapy room, 1 waiting room, and 1 consulting room. (Truly imagine what that means for such a large country!) With Dr. Nardos’ help, I’ve been granted a desk in the office space they have, in exchange I’ll help them where I can. It’s an amazing opportunity to be at the heart of Ethiopian healthcare, interacting face to face with doctors and patients and soak in as much as possible. Starting Monday I’m tasked as documentary filmmaker for the ward: the doctors want to raise funds to build a proper cancer centre in Addis, since thousands of patients come each month to this tiny ward, almost all in very late stages of cancer, so mostly receiving mere palliative care until they pass on. The patients are nearly all very poor, and have nowhere to stay when they arrive in the city. They sleep on the streets and are robbed and looked down upon: cervical cancer patients for example omit a strong odor, and they are easily cast aside. The centre would be a place where they could receive the dignified treatment human beings in suffering deserve… treatment that ideally would have come earlier so they wouldn’t have had to spend years in pain as the cancer slowly progressed. I’ll film and edit a short documentary, shoot photos and put together materials for distribution among potential funders abroad. Fingers crossed something can be done…

At the same time I’m conducting loads of interviews for my PhD research (with doctors, midwives, health auxiliaries, and many others…), starting Amharic lessons, getting settled in with Addis Ababa University, and trying to coordinate another project with the Gandhi Memorial Hospital, the main maternity centre in Addis. There are heaps of things to do, and I’m so happy Toni and I have so much time to do it. We feel like we’re truly settling in- meeting older friends we already knew, being introduced to others, establishing more connections and contacts and hopefully planting real roots in the country that we can return to later on… We both already have grander plans in mind for things we could do here on a longer-term basis… ah! We shall see :) In the meantime, I’ll write more stories I gather as work goes on. We’ve been here merely 4 days, and already the time has been so rich. Can you imagine what 10 months will bring? I mean, I had to start blogging again, right?

beijos,

joojie.

a (timely) love list...

i'm in love with...

...cycling in london! the barclay's rental bikes are a mere pound for 24 hours, and since i'm now in the big city several days a week for research and/or conference presentations, i'm loving flying through the windy streets and grand squares.

side work projects like some research i'm doing for a professor of mine on this legal case. or working with them. and hopefully more things like it coming soon...

and our tiny oxford flat! and that i can deep clean the whole thing in a mere 30 minutes after a long ethiopian research/conference discussing/london commute/article writing day. it feels wonderful after all that somewhat abstract-ness.

but most of all, i'm in love with the fact that one year ago thursday we were here:




and to celebrate we'll spend this coming week there...





oh! i know i've been lapse in blogging, but i tell you... phd-life with toni in the UK is like moving from bliss to bliss. i have to step back and think - it happened! this is the ideal life i dreamt up for myself at 16. (ironically enough the age when i first went to florence, giorgio vasari as my guide, and was utterly reinvigorated with life). and it will only all get better. summer visits to family, next year in ethiopia, cool work opportunities, and continuing to learn and grow and meet more good, wise people. words are horribly insufficient to describe it all, one of the reasons i have been so remiss in the blog updating. but we are happy, that is all. the end. :)

German Christmas

the Nürnberg Christmas market was sprawling and filled to the brim with lebkuchen... toni's mom decorated the tree with bright red apples, golden walnuts, gingerbread cookies, and real candles... i absolutely fell in love and want to decorate all future trees in the same way... toni and his sisters played carols at night... le sigh... it was all so utterly calm and bright, just as it should be.

and now 2012! i can hardly tell you how excited i am for this year, and all the rest after. life is all more beautiful and bursting with bliss than i could have ever imagined. huzzah over and over again.

Christmas Christmas Christmas!

i made mom's classic gingerbread last night for a little dinner party at our place. oooh i bit in and felt like i was sitting in villa park or sundance. it was amazing.

it snowed! :) but didn't stick. :(

this is beautiful and makes me think of les and steph.

i have 14,000 out of 100,000 words written of my phd thesis. HA.

we leave for Germany a week from today. hurrah!

and! look what delights we got in the mail today! grammy sent toni and me these amazing little Christmas tree ornaments with pictures from our wedding, our very first ornaments! i'm totally in love.



Merry Christmas!

o magnum mysterium

i told you the last week of term was magical, and it truly was. it started out with seeing toni sing in a performance of mozart's requiem in the sheldonian theatre. here's a blurry picture of the choir and orchestra:



here's a less blurry one of the gorgeous 300+ year old theatre...



you know those moments when you sit back and realise - oh heavens i'm so happy i am married to this person? that gosh darn it they are so perfect for you? that was one of those nights. the whole thing was gorgeous.

then the last evening of term we headed to exeter college chapel for a "9 Lessons and 9 Carols" service. oh heavens! it was perhaps the most beautiful Christmas event i've ever been to. nine passages were read from the Bible progressing from the fall, to the announcement of a Redeemer, to the miraculous birth itself. interspersed were old english carols we all sang together, but then even better, stunning pieces sung by the choir. i was more moved than i can say by the spirit of it all. the setting (where we had our own lovely ceremony just months before :), the beauty of the old carols' words, the angelic voices, all centering on the story of the birth of Christ.

we went with our intellectual-doppelganger couple from sweden, anna and magnus - she just finished a masters in public health looking at maternal health in ethiopia (!) and he's just started a phd in politics with toni's same supervisor, AND they just got married this year. they're utterly lovely and we're so happy to have met them. after the service we had some minced pies then went over to the stunning old dining hall at exeter for a proper Christmas feast, paper crowns and carols and all! here's toni and magnus looking suave.




and toni and me. yay.




luckily enough the choir sang one of my all-time favorite pieces of music, lauridsen's "o magnum mysterium." here's a video i found of the piece sung at king's college chapel, cambridge - a bit of a grander scale, but it reminds me so much of that night we had at exeter... how can you listen to this and not feel the spirit and beauty of this Christmas season? truly, what a great mystery and gift it all is!



loves and Christmas well-wishes!!
jooj.

week 8, or end of term, or advent begins!

this week i was met with two pieces of truly sobering news from loved ones, and it's hard to take in. it makes toni and i look around at our little life here and remember again, it is all a miracle. our lives are miraculous, no?

in honor of that miracle, and to properly process it all - the end of the week, the term, the year! - we took a long long country walk on the environs of oxford this morning, our first day of term break/holiday. naturally, it was gorgeous. perfect.





seriously beautiful, right? sigh.

also. i really wanted to go off and forage for some Christmas ornaments. there are so many colorful winter berries around england that i wanted to make into a wreath for our red door:



:)

all things considered, this past week was actually one of my favorites in this ancient little town of Oxford - England does the Christmas season right, i tell you. will share more in the coming days. in the meantime toni and i are off to Cambridge for a conference on reproductive health. (ok ok I'M going to the conference and toni is nice enough to come along so we can stroll through more beautiful-ness together :)

much love to you all, and hurrah for the start of the most glorious season of the year!
jooj.

from one oxonian to another...

so, just preparing my Sunday School lesson for tomorrow (very first! totally pumped!!), and was reminded of this quote by dear old c.s. lewis. it's just too good not to share:

‘the practical upshot is this. on the one hand, God’s demand for perfection need not discourage you in the least in your present attempts to be good, or even in your present failures. each time you fall He will pick you up again. again He knows perfectly well that your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection. on the other hand, you must realize from the outset that the goal towards which He is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal. that is what you are in for. and it's very important to realize that. if we do not, then we are very likely to start pulling back and resisting Him after a certain point. i think that many of us, when Christ has enabled us to overcome one or two sins that were an obvious nuisance, are inclined to feel (though we do not put it into words) that we are now good enough. He has done all we wanted Him to do, and we should be obliged if He would now leave us alone. as we say ‘i never expected to be a saint, i only wanted to be a decent ordinary chap.’ and we imagine when we say this that we are being humble. but this is a fatal mistake. of course we never wanted, and never asked, to be made into the sort of creatures He is going to make us into. but the question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.’

hehe - don't we all just think we're simply "decent ordinary chap[s]"? the lesson is on "the chosen generation," based on 1 - 2 Peter, and dang. it's a goodie. i can't wait for tomorrow to share it with these lovely teenagers. we all need to be reminded of how divine our nature is time and again, no?

beijos,
jooj.

yay.

i love thanksgiving. it was always the best growing up in villa park - using the fancy silver, going to a matinee after, marie callendar's pumpking pie and mom's stuffing! aah! so this year i told toni we have to stay away from the libraries and seminars that day and celebrate proper: spend all morning cooking, then eat around 3pm. also planned: seeing the new "wuthering heights" movie later that evening. proper p* fam thanksgiving, right? :)

but in all honesty. i remember driving up to sundance at the start of january this year, with mom's leg in massive pain from her surgery, dad's knee swollen 5 times its proper size... we were returning from a stay in a hotel off the I-15, praying that by the time we got back to the house the power would indeed be restored after 48 hours+ black-out. both mom and dad were not in the best shape, and i just didn't know what we'd do if the house was still frozen over with no heat in sight. our house was the only one of a handful whose power was still off despite mountain repairs, and i have rarely prayed so hard for a miracle on that drive... it had been a stressful 3 weeks of SO MUCH SNOW and power outages and non-functioning roads and SO MUCH SICKNESS of every one of the visiting extended family (except me, miraculously). remember that, ya'all?

anyway. the miracle happened. the power was on. mom could rest and recover in warm peace. i vowed to pray for more miracles, big and small, this year. and by heaven! what a year it has been. miracle after miracle, and the prayer of gratitude to be said on thursday is going to be very very long... here's a quick list of the biggies:

toni moved to brazil to join me.
a quick 3 weeks later, toni and i decided to get married!
and just 6 weeks after that, toni and i got married!
i got into oxford (again).
toni got into oxford (again).
i got a full 3-year scholarship.
toni got a full 3-year scholarship.
we got to move back "home" to england, and found a lovely little flat all our own.
both sides of our families flew all the way here to celebrate with us in september.
that wedding seriously was miraculously wonderful.
toni and i got to go to ethiopia (already) and explore and learn.
we bake bread.
we get a bursting box of yummy seasonal veggies from the neighbouring farm every monday morning.
the oxford ward is wonderful and i have two perfect callings and some beautiful women in the relief society to be friends with.
there's really yummy chocolate in england.
we live across from a peaceful meadow with cows in it.
we have hot, running water and a lovely, clean kitchen with electricity.
we have grocery stores really close by that have everything we could need. (and more.)
libraries! seminars! lectures! professors!

ok i'll stop there. but really, what a year, no? what a life! it's too much. the too-much-ness is astounding. i had no idea the year would end up with so many miraculous things happening when we were driving up provo canyon that cold january night. i'm sad to be so far away from everyone on thursday, but i'm also so happy that this year i'll be celebrating thanksgiving with dear toni in our little flat as a little family. hurrah for that!

and hurrah for 2011! and happy thanksgiving to you all!

loves!
jooj.