Reflection on Week 1

On being uncomfortable.

I have been trying to process the feelings I had last week when we arrived. I wish I could chalk it up to jetlag, but although a lack of sleep will exacerbate any feeling whether happy or sad or angry or frustrated, I think there was more to it. I have been in other countries among different cultures many times, but this was the first time that I arrived at a destination without an American or westerner meeting me and showing me the ropes for a couple of days. Even though I’ve been to Ethiopia a couple of times, I had never been to this part of the country. The discomfort was surprising to me, and I will say that it wounded my pride of self-sufficiency. I will confess that.

What a difference a week makes! At the hospital, I have made friends with the other students. I know most of the faces in the gyne ward, and they even come looking for me if they have a teaching conference or a procedure. Once, they even took the time to search at the fistula hospital before finding out that I was outside the door to the conference room. This made me feel very included, and I look forward to the next weeks of learning together. Secondly, we have become familiar with the location of our house. We are not near any other ex-pats or westerners as most of them live at the other end of town (about 2-3 miles away), but we are not far from a busy intersection which is lit at night, hotels, and the lake, and we feel fairly safe even walking together after dark for short distances when there are a lot of people around. Third, while walking around, we no longer keep our gaze averted so people don’t bother us. We have found that if we look at them and greet them first, they usually break into a smile and pass us without asking for anything. Usually, if someone starts a conversation next to us, we have found it to be very enjoyable. Fourth, we have met many other ex-pats/westerners, most from Australia actually. We now have a few people to call when we want to play games or go to dinner in the evenings. Lastly, the cooking. Ha.



On cooking in Ethiopia

We have come to really enjoy restaurants here. They range from the most cheap (less than $3 for 2 people to be stuffed) to the most expensive ($10 a person). But, alas, you are looking forward to another story about my cooking. Many of you wrote emails to me to say you would like to come over for my tomato paste pasta- well, I do love to entertain, but I would certainly like to see you have a smile instead of a smirk when you eat at our house. I will practice, and Ryan will need to be the bearer of many smirks before I get it right. Berhanu asked his sister to come over and teach me how to make a proper tomato sauce. I laughed when I saw how much garlic she bought me (about 12 whole clumps!). I tried to explain to her that 1 clump will last me a month at least in the US. Then, I saw her make the tomato sauce.

1 tomato, 1 whole clump (over 10 cloves!) garlic, and 1 onion about the size of the garlic, and oil. It WAS tasty, but good thing we both ate it- otherwise our garlic breath may have driven the other to sleep in the next room. Apparently, Ethiopians put garlic in random dishes. One Australian explained that he had found garlic beneath his custard. Eww. Another told me her mango juice tasted like garlic because they used the same knife to cut the mango. I have become proficient in cooking eggs here. You natural cookers will laugh that it took me a week, but there can be an art to egg-cooking too. It’s not just like the commercials, “This is your brain on drugs,” with a perfectly white fried egg. No! My eggs could be any organ system on drugs… the lung, the liver, etc. For instance, you can fill the kitchen with smoke from the oil if you are washing dishes instead of putting the eggs in on time. You can look like a good tap dancer, albeit with jerking and ungraceful movements of the upper extremities, if you put too much oil in the pan. (It can really splash and hurt when you drop the egg in.) You can get stringy crispy pieces which are about as tasty as shoestrings if you put too little oil in the pan. I have not tried garlic on eggs, but since we have so much…. hmm.



On our weekend

We had a wonderful, restful weekend. Dr. Browning invited us to go birdwatching down by the lake with he and his two young sons. William is 4 years old, and he knows many of the birds including the sounds they make. His 5 month old brother will, no doubt, learn very soon. He can already coo. (Sorry for the corny joke.) San Antonio may have a riverwalk, but Bahir Dar has a lakewalk! It is a nice meandering path paved with cement “tiles” which is about 8 feet wide. Along the waters edge, there were many fig trees and abundant papyrus. Ryan will attest that I was a bit obsessed with the papyrus. Although I couldn’t figure out how they made paper out of it, I could see how they would have been able to hide Moses if, indeed, the reeds mentioned in Exodus were papyrus. We enjoyed our walk with Dr. Browning, especially talking about how he feels about raising his family in a foreign country. We returned to have breakfast with his wife at a hotel which is on the lake. I hope to do this many Saturdays.

Saturday evening, we joined one of the families which Ryan is working with at the church where Compassion International site is located. (Ryan already blogged about them, so this may be redundant.) Trudi and her husband Anthony are Australian and have 3 kids. Their church in Australia did not just adopt a Compassion kid; rather, they adopted a Compassion church! Various members of their church will come to Bahir Dar to volunteer for a few months at a time. It is very inspiring. We went to a “Resort and Spa” for dinner. Imagine that! It was very pricey, and we at first declined their invitation, but we decided that the fellowship would be very sweet, so we shared an appetizer and main course, and Trudi ended up paying for us “poor students.” The resort was like an upscale restaurant in the US, and it was located right on the lake. I suppose you can see this kind of business in the most unlikely places in the world.

Sunday we attended the protestant church which Trudi and Anthony attend. The service was in Amharic, but a bible school teacher was present to translate the main points for us. When the children left for Sunday school, they gathered at the front of the church, and the pastor prayed over them, not only that they would learn and grow in Christ this Sunday, but he also prayed for them as the future of the church. My favorite part of the service was the singing. At one point, the guy who had been translating for us went to get a big drum which he put over his shoulder with a strap. Then, as the congregation was dancing, he joined them in the front, banging on that drum. The kids had come back from childrens church and were jumping up and down in the front. It was very moving, pun intended!

After church, Trudi asked me to look at one the bible student’s eyes. I took a few pictures, hoping to email them to professors in the US for confirmation, but it looked like a benign tumor to me. It had been growing for over 10 years, and he did not even have light perception in that eye. We are hoping to give him enough money to have the “tumor” removed so that his work in evangelism in the remote areas of Ethiopia will not be hindered by an eye infection. I expect I will have many more of these “consults” during my time here.