Photos

If you're interested in seeing photos from my trip feel free to check them out on Facebook with these links:

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The Notes from my Presentation at Knoxville Mennonite Church

The service was divided up into several sections framed by Bible verses and put in between songs and other parts of the service.  

These are the notes from those little sermonettes:

Isaiah 12:4: And in that day you will say: “Praise the Lord, call upon His name; Declare His deeds among the peoples, Make mention that His name is exalted…”

There are few things more important in Ethiopia than greetings.  You greet often, you greet every one, you greet excessively.  Often you ask a series of questions without really waiting for a response: “Danah-walsh?  Salam-no? Endate-nish?” “How have you spent the day?  Is everything peace? How are you?”  But when you finally get to the response, the answer to most greetings is the same, “Dana-ng exhabhier yimeslken,” “I’m fine, thanks be to God.”  Often, once they have exhausted each other with greetings, both people will say simple “Exhabhier yimesklen,” “thanks be to God,” an affirmation of their gratitude for both their and their companions continued life and presence.  Ethiopia was declared a Christian nation the fourth century, and right now over 60% of the population is Christian (44% Ethiopian Orthodox, and 19% other denominations).  Christianity is deeply engrained in the culture.  Orthodox people bow to their churches as they pass by and have high respect for their priests.  Protestants churches are extremely active and their members spend many of their evenings at one church event or another.  Whether they were Christian or Muslim, people in Ethiopia had faith in a powerful and unquestioning way. Being in a place of such deep and engrained faith was refreshing for me.  To talk about God and not wonder if I was offending any non-believers or implying any political agenda was a rare and surprising gift, and I thank God that I was able to join with Ethiopians as they openly and easily “Praised the Lord, called upon His name; Declared His deeds among the peoples and made mention that his name is exalted.”

Matthew 19:15-17: The little children were brought to Him that He might put His hands on them and pray, but the disciples rebuked them.  But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” And he laid His hands on them and departed from there.

 It was something I looked forward to everyday day.  As I would walk down the cobble street past minibuses and little cafes and finally near the school gate, I could see them approaching too.  Finally, my students would look up from where they were walking and their faces would just light up. “Nahomi!” one would scream, and they all would come running to give me a hug and hold my hand as we walked into the school.  One student who always greeted my with a huge hug and a shy smile is this little boy.  His name is Johannas, he’s about 6 years old, and he attends one of the school’s Lower Kindergarten classes.  He is such a sweet boy, and so obviously needing attention.  He would come over and hug me, and then stand next to me, start leaning on me, and eventually end up sitting on my lap.  Johannas was born near the school in one of the city’s poorest areas.  His mother was a prostitute and his father is not known.  When he was very young, his mother brought him to the house of an elderly local woman, who made her money by providing child care for the children of local prostitutes.  For a time Johannas’ mother visited the house regularly, providing money and milk for her child.  Eventually, however, she stopped coming to the house and disappeared from the area, leaving Johannas in the neighborhood woman’s home.  The woman allowed Johannas to live with her, but as she has aged she was no longer able to care for other children, and thus lost her only source of income.  Now she, her daughter, and Johannas have to survive on the small income earned by her daughter.  Thankfully Johannas has the school to come to.  As the only free kindergarten and nursery school in the city, it provides not only education, but a safe place for the children to come during the day time.  Through the school Johannas has a place to learn and play, and through the excitement, love, and joy that he and the other 193 students showed me, I got to experience a multitude of ways in which children reflect the kingdom of heaven.

 John 12:3-8: Summary: Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with oil and dries it with her hair, Judas, motivated by self-interest, asks why the money for the oil wasn’t given to the poor instead, and Jesus responds “Let her alone; she has kept this for the day of My burial.  For the poor you have with you always, but Me you do not have always.”

So I was sitting their on the couch, feeling content, if slightly awkward, and trying as hard as I could to pick up little bits of the Amharic conversation and respond in my halting and limited way. Finally I heard some Amharic that I actually understood.  The hostess was offering me food.  “Yes!” I thought, “I know these words.”  “Aye, minum alfelligum, ammasayganallo, bella-hu” “No, I don’t want anything, thank you.  I ate.” I was feeling pretty satisfied with myself until I saw the hostess leave the room and come back a while later with a plate of injera (their staple food, which is a type of flatbread) and a bowl of wat (kind of like sauce or stew) to top it with.  I trotted out my Amharic again.  I really wasn’t hungry.  I had just eaten lunch.  She set the food down in front of me. “Bee” she commanded, “Eat.”  Ok, I thought, I won’t be rude. So, I ate.  Before I had even finished my plate it was full again, despite my protests.  Now this was getting ridiculous.  I didn’t want the food, and I knew that she didn’t really have it to give.  I was eating beyond what I could really handle, and she was giving beyond what her family could really afford.  She was force feeding me food they needed much more than I did.  What kind of messed up and impractical culture was this?  What I realize now is that I was thinking like Judas was in the Scripture I read before.  I had my mind on the practical side and I totally missed the important part.  Her giving me food, even giving up food so I could have more, was her way of showing me hospitality and love.  She was praising God by sacrificing for those around her.  Whether or not that sacrifice was actually practical for my stomach was not important.  As my time in Ethiopia went on I got better at figuring out ways to avoid food I didn’t want or couldn’t eat, but more importantly I got better at understanding the beautiful blessing of Ethiopian giving.

Psalm 66:1-2: Make a joyful shout to God, all the earth! Sing out the honor of His name; Make His praise glorious.

Services at the church I attended are two hours long…on a short day.  Although it was rare in my church there, I had my first experience seeing casting out of demons and speaking in tongues in Ethiopia.  The church was almost always packed.  I had a wonderful translator for the sermon itself, but that still left over an hour of singing and prayer time in which I understood an average of about 5 words per week.  So, basically any Sunday I was in Nazret, I spent over two hours sitting on a hard wooden bench with about double the occupants it should have had, listening to things I didn’t understand, as the church slowly heated from the baking sun and the body heat of about 1,500 attendees.  And it was great.  The reason is simple; joy is contagious.  Ethiopians love God and they love worship.  As Nathanael said when he came to visit, “the freedom in this church is so cool.”  People in my church were free during the church services to express themselves with passion, pray with heart-felt fervor, and literally jump with joy as they sang about the glories of our God.  Their worship style will never be my style of worship, but what a wonderful blessing it was to join with the congregation as they made their “joyful shout to God” and sang “out the honor of His name.”

Zechariah 2:10-11: “Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion! For behold, I am coming and I will dwell in your midst,” says the Lord. “Many nations shall be joined to the Lord in that day, and they shall become My people.  And I will dwell in your midst.  Then you will know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you.”

 

Have you ever heard that expression, “we’re all the same on the inside?”  I’ve heard it many times, I’d say I pretty much believed it.  We look different on the outside, black and white, skinny and fat, tall and short, but the inside is what matters, so the saying goes, and inside we’re the same.  Well, I know longer believe that to be true.  I still think it is the inside that matters, but I now believe that is actually the place people are the most different.  I believe that the ways in humans relate to the things by which we define ourselves—faith, gender, family, work—vary more between cultures than skin colors and waist-sizes.  But, what I discovered, the beautiful revelation of my year in Ethiopia, is that differences don’t mean division.  When the passage from Zachariah talks about the unity in Christ, it says that many nations will be joined to God and become God’s people.  It never says that they’ll all become the same.  We are all made in God’s image, and we are all so different, inside and out.  So, the gift I was blessed with this year was learning about the largeness of God, the depth, the width of God, by getting to know some of His people.  And I discovered that through openly, honestly, and respectfully seeking to engage with people different from me, I found a familiarity that I believe could only have come from our shared role as God’s children.  My co-workers became a community.  My students became my children.  My host family became part of my family.  Ethiopia became my second home.  And I gained a new appreciation for the magnitude of our Lord.  There are no words to thank you for a gift like that.

Michaels Worku

The following is a story that I wrote about a student at the school for an MCC quarterly update:

 As Remember the Poorest Community’s 194 students line up to sing the national and regional anthems every morning, Michaels Worku stands at the front of the Upper Kindergarten boy’s line.  Michaels, or Mikki as he is called by his friends and teacher, is a small boy with a gentle face, intelligent eyes, and a ready smile.  In class, he is always ready with an answer and eager to use what he is learning.  He takes great delight in meeting a new academic challenge, and accepts any mistakes he makes with good humor and a willingness to try again.  Yet, some days Mikki’s focus is not in class.  He comes to school hungry or tired and finds it hard to pay attention to his lessons.  On those days, the difficulties of the small seven-year-old’s life spill into the childhood sphere of learning and playing.

Mikki, like many of the students at RPC, has a difficult family life.  His mother was unmarried and still in high school when she became pregnant.  His father has not been involved in his life or provided any assistance. Seeking to give Mikki a chance at a good education, Mikki’s mother sought out RPC as the only nursery and kindergarten school in their city of Nazret accessible to low-income families.  So that he could be near the school, Mikki moved in with his aunt who lives very near the RPC building, though he returns to see his mother on the weekends.  As the primary care-giver for not only Mikki, but also two of her own grandchildren, Mikki’s aunt sometimes struggles to provide for the family.  They live in a house own by the neighborhood government, and to make money the aunt sells onions and other vegetables on the street. Often that meager income is not enough to meet all their needs.  Mikki sometimes comes to school without having eaten breakfast or without a lunch.  The life he shares with his aunt and cousins, whom he refers to as his brother and sister, is not an easy one.

Nevertheless, the chance that Mikki’s mother and aunt have provided for him in his attendance at RPC is an important one.  As the only free kindergarten and nursery school in the city, RPC supplies its students with crucial preparation before they enter the public schools in grade one.  RPC has given Mikki a beginning foundation for his further education, and his has thriven in school, earning second rank in his class of forty students.  Mikki says he wants to be a doctor when he gets older so that he can help people in need, and that he enjoys school and likes his teacher because he likes to learn.  Those may sound like standard student answers, expressed more for the gratification of those hearing than out of true feeling.  To observe Mikki answer a difficult question in class and then look up at his teacher smiling with pride, however, reveals the deep truth in his answers.

Teaching

One of my hopes for this year was that it would help me figure out how I felt about teaching as a possible future profession. It has not. In some ways I really enjoy teaching. I like being in class. I like the game of trying to keep the kids attention, make them laugh, challenge them, keep them engaged. I’m crazy about the students. I find it so rewarding when I know I’ve planned a lesson well and it actually turns out well in class.

But my time at the school here has also shown me down-sides of teaching. Most of those difficulties are practical: it is such a challenge to come up with new and creative ways to teach, and I only have to prepare two or three short lessons for a day. Lesson planning is always difficult and tedious. I don’t have good ways to evaluate how much the students are actually learning. I know I am not reaching all the students and I don’t know how to find or help the students that aren’t learning without boring or excluding the ones who are.

Teaching is stressful. I’ve relaxed into it a little bit, but at the beginning I felt like I was constantly preparing for a performance that I was never going to be ready for, but was going to happen anyway. For hundreds of practical reasons, teaching is hard and I am not sure I am cut out for it.

But, now as I get closer to the end of my time here, I’ve also realized a non-practical, or even impractical, reason why I might not be cut out for teaching. I have a great impulse (or more like a great need) to know to as many small details and as much of the big picture as I possibly can. It’s what makes me love history. And (negatively) it’s what makes me love to hear gossip. I want to know why things are the way they are. I want to know how they will turn out. I want to know what makes people who they are. And I don’t want to have to ask (which may be what makes me more inclined towards history than journalism). I like to see people in different circumstances and see how they vary. I like to see how choices impact people’s lives. I like to see if I can piece together stories.

I like to see if how I think things are going to turn out is actually how they are going to turn out. That causes a problem for me with teaching. I have fallen in love with my students. My little interactions with them make and break my days. Even when I get so frustrated, fed-up, or angry in class, I am almost always excited to see students run over to me during the break afterwards. We don’t speak the same language; I don’t even
know all of their names, but I am head-over-heels, crazy in love with my students.

Here’s the problem: I don’t get to know the end of their stories. Even if I were to stay or come back to Ethiopia, the chances that I’d get to know how their lives will turn out would be slim to none. Once this year is over, I will have no way to see them again, no way to reconnect. Perhaps also connected with my love of history is a constant fear of anything being lost for ever; any avenue being permanently closed, any item being
irretrievable. And now these beautiful children, these students whom I am so enamored of, are going to disappear, not from the world, but from my life. They are going to go on living their simple or heart-breaking or amazing lives, but I’m never going to get to know anything about them. They are going to have great stories, but I’m not going to hear them. How do teachers deal with that? I don’t know if I could do that year after year.

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Here is the start of a blog post that I began sometime in November 2011:




I’ve been asked it more times and in more ways then I can possibly repeat here:



“How do you like Nazret?”

“What do you think of Adama?”

“Nazret endate-no?” (How is Nazret?)



Of course there is only one response. As the director of my school said one time, when some one asks you “Dehna-nish?” (are you fine?), the only response, whether you’re sick, unhappy, or who knows what, the only response is “Dehna-nyn” (I’m fine). So, of course, when some one asks me how I’m liking my new home, the only real response is “Areef-no” (It’s awesome), “It’s very nice,” “I like it.” It is just what you say.



But what do I really think of Nazret? It is much easier to give the automatic response than to actually think about and explain how I am adjusting to all the changes, challenges, and differences I’ve been experiencing during the month since I moved away from Addis Ababa to my assignment.



My assignment is in a city of about 250,000 people, arguably the second largest city in Ethiopia. The city, the capital of the Oromia region, is officially called Adama, which is the name in the Oromifia language, but under previous governments it was known as Nazret, named after the biblical Nazareth, and most people I’m around still call it that. Nazret feels to me extremely different from Addis Ababa. It is brighter, sunnier, flatter, cleaner, and more open. It feels a little bit more how I anticipated Africa would be; it is hot and incredibly dusty. Every day I come home with my feet caked in dust and everything in my room is covered with a thin coating of dust. There are more flowers than in Addis and even the buildings tend to be painted in brighter colors. It has a more relaxed, laid-back feel than Addis, and I think is really more my kind of city.



But, that is not to say that it easy to live here. There are not nearly as many foreigners here as in Addis Ababa, so I get even more comments and attention than I was used to there, though, to be fair, it is a different type of attention. There is still a type of people want money or something or who just want to point out that I’m a “fereng,” but there seem to be a lot more people who just feel it necessary to say something to me. I guess because I am more of an oddity. I also think a lot of the difference comes from the fact that often I am in town alone here, and that happened only rarely in Addis. I guess I didn’t realize how much sharing almost all my activities with Ben protected me from a whole genre of comments and hassles. Being in town as a single white young woman is a challenge. There seem to be some expectations of and limitations on women in this culture, but I am having a hard time really getting an understanding of what those are here, and how I ought to relate to them. Having that uncertainty makes me feel even more like I have to be on my guard, which is not a feeling that I really want to have when I am trying to be open to a new culture.



I am also feeling even more the limitations of being a “fereng.” I know travel the same routes most days. I stand out so much that it feels like every interaction I have on the street will be remembered, which makes it feel like even the smallest exchange I have on the street will affect my days in the future. I am sure that is an overreaction and not really true, but the feeling still changes how I react to things on a daily basis. For example, Ethiopian culture does not look down on begging when there is a real need. Ethiopians often give to elderly or disabled beggars. But, because I am white and stand out so much, I feel like I can’t give without marking myself for the future. My host brothers have even told me, “don’t give any money, or you will never be left alone.” At the very least, I feel like my actions are constantly being judged against expectations and stereotypes of white people. Everyone from my host family to people on the street compares my actions with the other “ferenges” with whom they have had contact. It is a very strange situation to feel like you’re always representing a huge and extremely diverse population about which you really only know your own experience. I guess that is maybe what it feels like to be a minority. I’ve only experienced that in small ways before, like being a Mennonite in Tennessee or from the South in Minnesota, never anything as big and obvious as race. When I fist moved down to Nazret I read the book Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver. In it I found this quote, “Since her arrival in Oklahoma, she had felt color as a kind of noticeable heat rising off her skin, something like a light bulb mistakenly left on and burning in a roomful of people who might disapprove” (page 318). That is a little bit what it’s like to be white here. Only it is not a light bulb. It is a huge megawatt searchlight that has previously been used to illuminate money or success or cultural insensitivity or any number of things that I don’t necessarily want associate with myself, whether they really apply. It is really an experience like no other.



Being white also really affected my experience as I began teaching. The first couple days the kids all ran over to me as I entered the school yard. It is quite an overwhelming experience to have about 180 surrounding you and yelling to you.



And that is when I was called away from my writing to eat dinner and never returned to finish the post.

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Once again I have no excuse. I must once again apologize for not posting. I could try all the same justifications, and all the same reasons why they are not valid would apply. Please know that it is not because I don’t want to share my time here with all of you wonderful people who (through a wide range of types of invaluable support) have made my time here possible. I want to be able to communicate to all of you the blessings, difficulties, differences, similarities, funny stories, challenging moments, and ease of things here—all the little moments and details that make up my experience here. Unfortunately, that is impossible. Every time I have tried it has gotten a bit out of hand. I think a few of you that have emailed me with questions may have been a bit overwhelmed by the bulk of my (also very delayed) responses. It is then just that much more difficult for me to express myself on this blog that is so undefined in audience and scope. I tend to feel like in order to tell you anything I have to tell you everything, and that is, of course, an insurmountable task. So, more than seven month into my time here and only two blog posts in, here is what I’ve decided to do: I’m going to give you all a brief summary of what my life is like and then throw out an array of excerpts from emails and previous blog attempts. Once I get these things up I’ll try to post more frequent and less effusive posts. If you have questions you’d like answered or things you’d like to see a blog post about, let me know and I’ll try to accommodate.




Just so that you have some framework here are some of the basics:





I am living in Nazret, Ethiopia. I work at a nursery and kindergarten school run by a local NGO teaching English to each of their six classes, which average about 35 students. My work days go from 8:30am-3:30pm, but are filled with breaks, so that my actual time in class is only about two and a half or three hours. Tuesdays and Thursdays I spend half an hour of my lunch break at a small private (and affluent) nursery and kindergarten school. I really enjoy my fellow teachers, but language difficulties and different schedules have made it difficult for me to get to know them well.



My host family is wonderful. Living in the compound (a central house and more rooms outside) when I arrived were: two adult brothers (Eskinder and Danny), their nephew (Yonaton, who is about my age), and a female cousin who does the cooking and cleaning around the house (Melesech). Two more sisters live nearby: one lives just up the road with her family (Rahel) and one lives about an hour away (Roman, who is called Benju), but comes home nearly every weekend and on holidays. Since I’ve been here, one of the brothers (Eskinder) moved to a new job about four hours from here, and, just two weeks ago, Dagem, a sixteen-year-old female student, who was an acquaintance of the family and needed a place to stay, moved in. Several other members of the family live in North America (one brother, one sister, and the mother of the family in the USA, and one brother in Canada).



MCC arranged that for breakfast and dinner I eat what the family cooks, and I prepare lunch for myself. That has worked out well to give me some variety in my food, but also community with the family. I usually spend my evenings at home watching TV, reading, or preparing my lessons, but I also sometimes go to cafes or other places around Nazret with one of the family. On weekends I hang around the house with the family, go out around Nazret, or go to Addis Ababa and spend time with the other MCCers. When I am in Nazret on Sundays I attend the local Meserete Kristos Church (a member of the Mennonite World Conference) which is translated for me by a wonderful church elder who worked with the early Mennonites here and studied in America. I generally have found it difficult to find ways of getting to know people, particularly people with whom it is easy to communicate, in Nazret, but I have made a few friends outside my host family.





So, those are the basics of my life here. As I reread it, it didn’t really seem to reveal much of my experience or do justice to the wonderful people I have gotten to know or the fascinating face in which I live. Hopefully, though, it gives you some sense of how I spend my days, and a bit of a framework for understanding my other (hopefully forthcoming) posts. I will try to do better.

Addis Ababa: The First Six Weeks

My first six weeks in Ethiopia (August 20th-October 2nd), my time in Addis Ababa studying the language of Amharic and trying to get a bit of a sense of the culture and history of Ethiopia, were basically one long exercise in feeling like a small and not particularly clever child, and enjoying it. Amharic is just one of many many languages used in Ethiopia, but it is officially the language of the national government, and it is, I think, the most widely spoken language. After six weeks of studying it more than 20 hours a week and hearing it much more than that, Amharic is still pretty much incomprehensible to me. There are four ways to say “you.” That’s right, four. You masculine, you feminine, you plural, and you formal, and all the verbs change accordingly. The verb goes at the end of the sentence, verbs roots sometimes change for feminine, there are over 200 characters in their alphabet, and some are sounds that I’m pretty sure my mouth is incapable of making. Someone once told me that Amharic is the 4th hardest language to learn in the world. I don’t doubt it. But, it is a beautiful language to listen to, and the written form is so cool looking that you can’t help but want to learn it. More than that though, because it is so difficult, foreigners usually don’t know Amharic, and Ethiopians always seem so surprised and excited when you manage even a proper greeting that it always makes me want to try harder. So, I was grateful all six weeks to be learning.
I was also grateful all six weeks for the multitude of new experiences. It is hard for me to say what my first impressions of Ethiopia were and are, but here are some things that I wrote after my third full day in Addis, “I have a really hard time knowing how to describe Ethiopia. In a way everything seems so different. As a white person, you stand out everywhere. To the point where kids stare at us and want to shake our hands when we walk by. Outside of language school and MCC functions, I’ve only seen other white people three times, and this is Ethiopia’s biggest city. The water smells strange here and is undrinkable without a filter and/or boiling. When we ride in a mini-bus the diesel smell stings my throat and gives me a headache, and the dust gets in my eyes and nose. People tend to have a ‘houseworker’ and potentially other employees working for them, and even when/though they’re well-liked and well-treated, it seems they often remain separate from the family and somehow distant. In many ways there is a lot of distance in the culture. Many people live in houses made of sticks and mud and/or metal sheeting, while people with money live in houses with huge walls with barbed-wire or broken glass on top and a guard on the premises almost all the time. I have never experienced class as strongly as I am experiencing it here.
And yet in some ways the Ethiopian culture has much more of a sense of closeness and life than most of what I’ve experienced in the States. Having houseworkers and guards, for example, brings into contact people who, in America, would probably never meet, and allows them to have important and even meaningful relationships. When you’re crammed into a mini-bus (think a medium-sized van or a VW bus) with like 14 other people, you don’t think so much about personal space or worry about the implications of accidentally touching someone, which in a way is kind of freeing. The streets are scary, and crazy, and dangerous, with people are cars and even some animals haphazardly criss-crossing everywhere, but in some ways it is almost nice to feel as though not everything is so perfectly cordoned off, separated, divided. Not everything is so isolated and independent, and that somehow seems more real and natural. Men hold hands or embrace or touch each other in conversation without it meaning anything but friendship and closeness. As I began my language training and orientation today, I started getting really excited for all the possibilities and changes and experiences this year could bring.” Now, more than seven weeks later, some of these things have faded into the background of my mind, while some of them seem more important or significant than ever, but more on that later.
I spent my time in Addis living in a house with three longer-term service workers and the other SALTer, and sometimes fourth service worker, who came in for the weekends. Living in the house definitely had its difficulties and its disadvantages, but for me was a really nice way to begin my time in Ethiopia. I found that everyone in the house was well-meaning and generally fun to be around, and having so many people around staved off most of my loneliness and homesickness. Plus they each have their own lives, which meant that most of the time there were fun and different activities that I could jump into if I wanted to. Mostly, it was nice to feel like it was OK for me to be the stupidest and most incapable person there, because I knew that if I tried and failed there would be someone there who could help me out. I felt pretty isolated during most of my Carleton career, so it was really nice to come into this new venture with a built-in community. Plus, I felt like my indecisiveness and sometimes problematic passivity actually added nicely to a household full of strong personalities. That is not to say that there weren’t problems with the living situation. Tensions sometimes came to a head in the house. My primary relationships there were with Americans, so my integration into the culture was not as full as it might have been if I were living with Ethiopians. But overall, the wonderful people I lived and worked with in that time shaped my first six weeks in great ways, and put me well on my way to loving Ethiopia.
Because the individuals I spent my time with are really what I remember from my first six weeks here, here are some descriptions of those who made the time what it was:
The major players:
Me: I think you all know the basics: First time in Africa, first time doing extended travel, first time as a “service worker,” millionth time being more excited and far more nervous than ought to be possible.
Ben: The other SALTer here for the year. We traveled over together and, because of our common status as “the SALTers,” shared most of our activities and experiences during our time in Addis. I’m pretty sure that Ben was unanimously the favorite SALTer of everyone we met, but I can’t really begrudge him that too much, because he is genuinely a cool person. He likes sports (particularly soccer, which goes over well here), but also history, philosophy and religion. Plus, he’s a good cook and made us all laugh often. He is now teaching English at the Meserete Kristos College in Debre Ziet, which is about half-way between where I am in Nazret and Addis Ababa.
Megan (and Yenasaw): Megan is a service worker who has been in Addis Ababa for two years and will leave shortly before I do next summer. Megan is an extrovert the likes of which I’ve rarely seen. Within two years she has become nearly fluent in Amharic, which, according to pretty much everyone I’ve talked to, is basically unheard of. She seems to engage easily with pretty much everyone she comes in contact with and she made me feel comfortable in no time at all, which is not an easy feat. She is a great person to have to introduce you to the city and to people, as everyone whom she knows and works with seems crazy about her. Her boyfriend, an Ethiopian named Yenasaw, is a teacher at the language school I attended. Yenasaw has lived in or around Addis for pretty much his whole life, which is probably part of the reason that he seems to know and be friends with everyone. But, I think it really has more to do with the fact that he is kind, outgoing, and concerned about the well-being of everyone around him. Plus, his English is pretty much perfect, and he is a wonderful teacher. He had us over to his house for the Ethiopian New Year, which was such a fun way to celebrate. His family fed us and fed us and his father literally told us we were “not excused” until we had eaten some cake. Yenasaw and Megan are great to hang out with and were wonderful about including Ben and me in their plans.
Krista: Krista is a service worker who has been in Ethiopia for two years and will leave in the summer of 2012. Krista has been amazingly helpful in facilitating my time here. She started giving me advice before I even got here, answering many of my questions over email and Facebook. Krista spent her first year here in Nazret, living with the same family I’m living with and working with the same organization, although in the office rather than the school, so she has been great about giving me an idea of what to expect here, and she has been working with the family and with MCC to make sure all my needs are taken care of while I’m here-what a gift that has been! Krista’s pretty quiet and somewhat introverted, but likes playing games, going to cafes, and watching movies and TV shows, so we had a lot of fun doing those things.
Tamara: Tamara has been here the longest of any North American MCC Ethiopia staff member. She came over with SALT four years ago and she’ll be here at least another two years, likely longer. Tamara also got in touch with me before I came and was great at answering questions. Originally from the Twin Cities (it’s fun to have someone to reminisce about the Mall of America, the MN state fair, or the MN weather with), Tamara has a really strong sense of and desire for social justice, and is very committed to her work and especially to the people with whom she works. She likes to talk and she likes to argue, and she is good at both. Tamara knows a lot of the cool, less touristy places in Addis and has a great love for and understanding of the Ethiopian culture. She is a wonderful person with whom to explore Addis.
Doug and Wanda: Doug and Wanda are the country reps, which means that they and the wonderful national staff of Mekonnen, Solomon, and Yeshi manage all of MCC’s involvement in Ethiopia. Doug and Wanda were in charge of our orientation and so they made sure we saw everything we needed to see in the city. They both were pastors before they came over, and I think it is likely from that background that their deep interest in each of the service workers personal well-being comes. Maybe as part of that concern, they introduced Ben and me to all the nicest restaurants in Addis, so we know what to crave and go for when we’re back in town. They also have three daughters, Abby and Amanni (12-year-old twins) and Sophia (11), who are all really fun, and the family hosts frequent pizza and movie nights and other great gatherings.
Jalalie: My language school teacher. Jalalie is a slim and quiet, but kind and funny mother of five, who switched a few months ago from being the school’s cashier to being a full time teacher. She had the patience to deal with all my Amharic bumbling for six-weeks and still be encouraging and positive, so I think that alone deserves an award or something. I really didn’t get to know her much personally, but she was nevertheless a big and important part of my first six weeks.
There are definitely many many more people that should go on here: interesting students and teachers from the language school, people who worked in the house were Krista, Megan and Tamara (and for the six weeks Ben and I) live, the final member of the MCC team, T., who works in Debre Ziet at the MK College too, and so many others, but at some point I have to cut this off, and this is that point.