lalibela!

We got a last-minute 5am ride to Lalibela from Bahir Dar in this guy's truck. The landscape between was stunning, loads of craggy mountains and farms, farms, and more farms. The road was quite decent except for the last 70 km on dirt/gravel, and you're having to slow down all the time because of wayward cows, donkeys, sheep, etc. It is farmland, after all!

Our car needed a tire change - lots of gravel roads! Meet our fellow traveller: this super nice American dude (from Ventura!) who has been backpacking straight for 7 years. !!!

Lalibela! We made it in the evening, then were at the churches 7:30 am the next morning. This is how you enter the first complex (there are 3 main complexes, all connected by underground tunnels and passageways). The church pictured is by far the largest of all 12 in Lalibela, and the largest monolithic church anywhere in the world. Look at it! All carved direct down into the stone sometime between the 11th-13th centuries by King Lalibela (thus the town's name). You can see that honking lip of stone to the right, between the two main courtyards. Locals say it took 25 years to carve them all with the help of angels. Archeologists say 125 years, with up to 40,000 people. Ai ai ai.

The stone is a very pretty pinkish red, contrasted best by all of the priests and locals walking around draped in the typical Ethiopian white gabi.

One of the many carved passageways - madness!

There we are looking so cute in front of another of the churches, Bet Maryam (dedicated to Mary): the most popular with worshipers. These massive metal pillars are used to support new roofs built by UNESCO to protect the churches from erosion. Ethiopia gets 3 straight months of heavy rains, and the ceilings are starting to show it!

The inside of Medhane Alem church (again - all carved into the mountain! c'mon!). Priests in the middle chanting - gorgeously surreal. The whole thing is more transportive than most anything I've ever done.

Mary's church again - priests are ALSO chanting outside as well. To become an Orthodox priest, you have to memorise loads of holy books of the Bible, and the way they do it is through sing-chanting en masse.

Me in one of the caverns between 2 churches. Gorge - in both senses of the word.

Bet Giorgis is the only church that hasn't been covered by UNESCO roofs because it's drainage system is quite good - you can see the gutters on the roof! So it makes for perhaps the most impressive of all the clusters. It's incredibly precise, and seriously too beautiful to creep up on as you walk through the town.

There we are again on the lip of Giorgis - the guide we had was super rad, and also a stellar photographer! :)

Man reading the Bible in the door to some of the monk's homes.

The yellow gabi is for a monk or hermit in training. He's also carrying what looks like a thermos of tej, the local honey beer.

This church they think was originally carved as King Lalibela's palace. Check out how deep it is!

I loved this one - only partially monolithic as the mountain was still attached to the roof, but it was carved all around, and of course inside. But it was so pink! Like a Sadie or Stella church :)

This last picture is from a cliff 3 hours' hike from Lalibela where we visited the very first carved church, Ashete Maryam (I instagrammed it!). These priests live in these homes carved direct into the rock behind them to the left - you can see steps entering in. Mind you it's about 3000m+ too! It's just such an amazing place. None of these pictures can capture it fully!

there's much more than instagram can say!

Toni and I have been traveling across the historic northern route in Ethiopia the last weeks - as evident from instagram feed - and it has been incredibly interesting, eye-opening, and all around gorgeous. I can't limit sharing to instagram! There's too much - and I want it documented for posterity.

First I'll blog about our first stop, Bahir Dar and Lake Tana. This is the lake with loads of medieval monasteries clustered about the shorelines and islands.

We were actually there for work - we are still doing research for our phds and all that! Here's the proof: Toni on his laptop, in this cool house we stayed in before we were booted out to live behind a (loud) restaurant without running water. Such is life! No biggie.

When we were on the lake, this utter flotilla of the local papyrus boats came towards us - you can see them dotted along into the horizon. They were all filled with wood - destination Bahir Dar or the monasteries or both. Super surreal!

Toni looking pensive in our boat - passing island monasteries and more papyrus boats.

 

You walk from the shore through wild coffee groves (the short trees) and Acacias (the big trees). Gorg.

Exterior of the monastery - looks quite "plain" from the outside. Toni taking off his shoes to go in.

The first layer of the monastery once you enter, representing the Holy Spirit - the next level in is Jesus Christ, and last the Holy of Holies is Heavenly Father. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church believes the Trinity are 3 separate beings. Neat, eh?

 

This is what you see when you walk in - amazing! The paintings circle all round the Holy of Holies, which only priests and monks are allowed into. They keep a replica of the Ark of the Covenant in each one - the real one of course is in Axum, Northern Ethiopia :)

The doors were almost the coolest part - huge and from one solid piece of wood. Original from the 15th century. !!!

One of the monks at another monastery we visited showing the various 800+ year old books and crosses (and menorah!) of visiting Kings. Rad.

...next stop Lalibela...!

being laughed at in Bahir Dar

Look Mom! An Ethiopian Annunciation on our bedside lamp :)

Hello dear all!

Toni and I travelled north from Addis early this morning, landing ourselves in Bahir Dar, a sleepy little town on the edge of Lake Tana, which happens to be one of the principle sources of the Nile. Toni's here for a conference, and I've hitched myself along because

a) 3 weeks apart when I was in Nigeria was just no fun
b) Lake Tana has a number of medieval island monasteries to explore - RAD!

In the meantime I'm writing up my report from Nigeria work - I was there hired by Save the Children to do interviews all round the country in hopes of identifying barriers to scaling up health interventions for mothers and infants, i.e. why with all the resources and potential Nigeria has are maternal and infant mortality rates so shockingly high. Leslie has kindly offered to edit this beast of a report (thanks, sis!), so if you want more information you can ask her in a couple weeks when I send it over :)

Otherwise, Toni and I explored Bahir Dar a bit today on foot, and were laughed at heartily for our "betam tinnis Amarinya." You see, very very few non-Ethiopians speak Amharic, and Ethiopians are absolutely taken aback when you can understand what they're saying about you, or ask a question/respond in Amharic. Especially outside of Addis, where there are fewer and fewer foreigners, it just becomes hilarious to people to hear us attempt the local tongue! It is admittedly quite funny because our accents are atrocious, and we're not nearly fluent enough to actually have a decent, complex conversation. The laughter is more a gesture of endearment than anything else, but still, it's a bit disconcerting to have people erupt in giggles at everything you say, no?

In other news, we're staying at this lovely little house which operates 2 rooms as a B&B. We were originally booked in for just 2 nights, and then had to go to another hotel for the rest of the week we're here because there wasn't vacancy at the B&B. We happened upon our other hotel on our walkabout, and they miraculously have NO idea what happened to our reservation, and because this massive conference going on, every other hotel in town is absolutely booked out. But alas! Ethiopian hospitality rescues us! The woman who owns the hotel has a brother who has a restaurant with rooms in the back, and they've offered us to stay there, essentially in their family home, for about $4 a night. Private room with proper bed and all. So kind! And staying with an Ethiopian family = leaps and bounds better than a boring hotel anyway. Maybe our Amharic will improve enough to where people stop mocking us... or maybe not :)

Toni and I are trekking for a month around Northern Ethiopia - will drop in with some more posts every now and then, because the history and grandeur here is out of this world. This country! I tell you. Wish you could all visit.... bewalha?

loves,
jooj.

excuse the random soapbox, and hello again

“It used to be about doing something, not being someone.”

This was a quote I lifted from the movie “The Iron Lady,” from Meryl-Streep-as-Margaret-Thatcher’s mouth. I bought a pirated copy of the movie off the street for a buck the other day, because we had never seen it, despite living in Thatcher-land last year. (Oh the Brits would hate me for calling it that!) In any case, I really really liked this quote (movie = meh), said in the context of women’s “roles”… whether it was invented by the screenwriter or said from old Maggie herself.

You see, when you live in a developing nation with very-much-touch-and-go internet connection, the times I actually do happen online and connect with the rest of the world, I’m so grateful for instagram and blogs and all the rest that remind me of what everyone out there is DOing… but I also see so many people who seem to have become sucked into this malicious appearance-based world of projecting who you are, via the clothes you wear and size of your body and food you eat and cuteness of your kids, and that so much that is posted up there is only about crafting a self-image, not about doing anything productive. What are we all doing? I mean, really doing with our time?

Not that I’ve done much of anything the last two weeks in Addis except pop immodium like candy. (argh digestive tract! Get with the program!) There are some days when all the best laid plans fall through: where my paperwork for various projects are stuck in seemingly-never-ending ethical review processes, where doctors I’ve been working with are momentarily outside the country, when every single interview and meeting I schedule is postponed or cancelled last minute. Blah! So I feel I’ve done a whole lot of nothing the last weeks, just continuing to try and learn Amharic, plus plodding through endless archives and reports… if I stacked everything I’ve read for this PhD in the last 18 months, page to page, I swear it would reach the top of the Empire State Building by now. At least.

My eyes are tired.

Also I’ve been using the time to prepare for my next consultancy gig: I never wrote about Zambia, did I? It was fab. I loved it - I loved the work, loved the team I was working with (THET, an organization that trains key medical specialists in low-resource settings - I designed a monitoring and evaluation strategy for them to use to improve programming over the next 5 years)… and now onto Nigeria to work on a project identifying barriers to government health service delivery for mothers and children. If anyone has been seeing the news of late, we’re now on a count of nearly 20 foreigners killed or kidnapped in northern Nigeria in the last month alone. Half of those were health workers. So… original plans to do work in health clinics of the northern state of Jigawa have been cancelled, and I’ll stick to the main central/southern cities of Abuja and Lagos. A pity, because I know the north of Nigeria is very similar to areas I worked in in Niger back in 2008 - it would have been nice to “go back” in a way, but alas. Another time…

Anyway. Think about that invented(?) Margaret Thatcher quote the next time the world gets you down. In the end it really doesn’t matter at all what organic kale you ate that day, or new patterend frock you wore, or that you’ve lost or gained whatever many pounds. (Fyi, in Ethiopia it’s a GOOD thing to be ‘overweight’ and considered a compliment. Food is a blessing, truly, wherever we live.) Surely we can all get beyond these superficial markers, no? I know we all do a lot more with our days than we can show on the outside. I still wish we focussed on that more, and looked up more to people for what they’re doing than what they’re taking pictures of.

Soapbox done!

I’ll try and post something from Nigeria - to let you know at least my kidnapped-status. j/k :)

Beijos, as ever,

Jooj.

ps this was not said as a guilt-trip, and believe me I really am not doing that much - I took the quote as an inspiration to change myself more than anything!

gelbet yellem.

It's still the holiday time in Ethiopia – the coup d'etat of the season is Timket, or Epiphany, falling this weekend. The streets will be thronged with crowds and processions. And holiday season means frequent, lengthy power and water outages... bless the fact that when you turn on a tap and water comes out! The luxury I say! Right now I'm typing this at 8pm in a power outage (Toni and I bought a 100 buck used EEE netbook that has 9 hours of battery before leaving the US for this exact reason!)...  I notice so many things typically drowned out when the electricity is shut off. You see, the Orthodox church here loves, LOVES to project its services by loudspeaker so everyone in a 3 mile radius can hear every chant and prayer and scripture. This is all very well and good, except this LOUD chanting is not for just 30 minutes or an hour – oh no, it drags for full days sometimes, and is typically turned on at night – it comes on around 1am, doesn't stop till about 5 or 6. Prime time to have blaring church services in your ears, no? We were lucky enough this last weekend that they didn't stop for about 40 hours. 40 hours straight! I tell you! And then the local evangelical church likes to compete, and so puts on their loudspeaker too. Rather than chanting, they have a more emphatic preacher 'yelling' his sermons.

Anyway. Tonight the power outage must have extended farther than normal, because there's no church loudspeakers blaring, and all these sounds and smells become more pronounced... the smell of an open-fire coffee ceremony nearby... this is a near daily routine for Ethiopians, the originators of coffee (comes from the Kaffa region – Kaffa...coffee..)... for women it's a key social event, usually around 10am (or 3 Ethiopia time), after all the morning chores are done. They take fresh, green coffee beans (did you know they were green?), roast them in a little pan over hot coals till they turn nice and black. They let everyone in the circle smell them, then after pounding them down and placing them in clay coffee pots, pour water in, let it all boil up, then pour everyone little cups. It's always accompanied by some sort of snack – I can smell the coffee roasting but also that some neighbour of ours is making 'abeba kolo' ('flower corn,' or popcorn :) to go with it... I hear crickets, and rats scattering on our roof... but mostly it's very very quiet....

In other news, Toni leaves for Kenya on Wednesday, and me for Zambia on Sunday. We both have some consultancies in the different countries, and will both be back in 2 weeks. Handy that our times away overlap... but kinda wish it was to the same place.

And in further other news, I've been hired by these people: anthrologica.com ...i.e. a truly truly ideal job for me. I'm going to Zambia on my first assignment, helping a health education organization there (THET is it's name) design a proper monitoring and evaluation strategy for a new DFID grant they've been given, so as to ensure that what they do with this great deal of money is actually effective. I'm thrilled, THRILLED to be hired by the organization, only a bit sad to know I'll be spending time away from Ethiopia. (After Zambia will be a month in Nigeria.) We love it here – power outages, water shortages, rats on the roof, all aside. These things really don't matter in the end – we have much more than we could need, and it's just such a wonderful place to be, I can hardly say enough.

Will write from Zambia – I was last there in 2010 with Toni on our grand Southern Africa World Cup tour – memories! hurrah!

Loves,
jooj.

Zemzem + Injera!

Zemzem is a wonderful woman who lives here in another part of the house with us, and today made a whole heap of injera, the local staple food. They make these big sour pancakes from teff, a grain that only grows in Ethiopia, then put loads of delicious sauces on top that you grab with your hands. It's so so delicious, and super rich in iron so pregnant women in Ethiopia rarely have anemia. (All things come back to maternal health :)

And.. here we go!

Zemzem in our lovely, sunny kitchen - normal stove and special injera stove behind her.

Getting some of the fermented dough...

Spreading it on the injera stove like a crepe...

Cooking!

Putting them in the special big injera basket...

...eh voila!! ahun billou! ameusegenallo Zemzem!

disconnect.

It is New Year’s Day everywhere outside Ethiopia, but just another Tuesday here. The Ethiopian calendar prevails, and they already celebrated the entry to 2006 back in our September. Seeing photos of celebrations from friends and family in Europe and the US is like dreaming – you sort of recognize it, but it doesn’t register with where you are when you ‘wake up.’

Ethiopia is a country of over 80 million people. It’s not in any way some random place, but very much it’s own society, with it’s own character and richness, however ‘separate’ it may seem from all else. But recognizing this ‘disconnect’ becomes increasingly important in understanding that there is no standard way of living, nothing that is universal. While everyone seemed to celebrate the entry to 2013, 80 million people didn’t, but went about their own lives just fine. Life continues within it’s own parameters, regardless of what others are doing elsewhere. To understand this fully is to be empathetic – to see that other ways of being are just as legitimate as your own, and are not merely waiting to be appropriated into your own sense of the way things are. The way things are here is different, and that’s just fine – how critical to look outside ourselves and realize that the world operates on these multiple planes!

I mention this out of frustration when I see an attempt to simply transplant one set of interventions or values from one place to another with no sense of adaptation to local realities. This is the main crux of my PhD thesis, really, and even though I’m working historically, the lessons continue to ring true today. The world of maternal health is particularly divided right now: the US and Europe are swinging towards a push for home birth, whereas 90% of Ethiopian women already give birth at home. The iatrogenic effects of hospitalized birth in the developed world are not to be discounted, but are a drop in the hat compared to the continued morbidity and mortality seen here. Avoidable deaths left and right solely because women give birth without skilled attendants in remote enclaves. To take the advocacy for home birth in the US – where you are a 911 call away from an emergency room – to an Ethiopian context is simply irresponsible. And it frustrates me beyond measure that we are blinded to the luxury that is home birth in a developed country: yes, intervention is the exception rather than the rule in childbirth, but it is still necessary. Where would Katie be, or Dane, if they lived in rural Ethiopia? The best trained doctor or midwife in the world could do nothing for them at home without essential medication. The clinical model in Ethiopia is deeply flawed, there are severe limitations because of poor facilities and failures of health staff, but that doesn’t mean the answer is to revert away from that imperfect clinical model. 

I met with an incredibly energetic young midwife today who is working to strengthen the clinical system through sweeping reform and more concerted training. He was so talented and intelligent, so devoted to improving the system where he could: making clinics more appealing to an Ethiopian context, i.e. allowing women to give birth in any position they choose (mostly squatting), performing the essential coffee ceremony in the clinic immediately after the birth, a key feature women seek when birthing at home. I mean why not? Why not have a birth that embraces Ethiopian values within a clinical setting where misoprostol is at hand? Why can’t foreign birth advocates see that this is exactly the path forward? We can’t expect women to give birth at home when it takes 8 hours to get to the nearest operating theatre or medicine cabinet. If something goes awry – placenta praevia, ruptered uterus, obstructed labour – that woman needs care immediately. You have to be in the vicinity of proper facilities. There is no 911, there is no ambulance. Would you be comfortable in that scenario? Truly? Empathy! Think on it!

Sigh. How’s that as an update for ya? :) I’ll end it there. And despite languishing in 2006 over here, happy 2013 to all you out there! Kisses to everyone, the little ones especially, as ever :)

I will try to post photos soon, since those are way more exciting than these long posts.

Loves,

Jooj.

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.