I have posted a lot of photos for you today--because a lot has been going on for Jim and me.  I already described for you the feast members of the Anuak congregation put on for us, but here are the photos. You can see the food--which was really delicious, nicely spiced and tasty--beef and ox dishes to put on the quan (which I spelled wrong last time) plus cabbage and rice.  But now you can see this food and these people, and can note that the men and women eat separately, and are equally comfortable on the floor or on a chair. The last photo shows me holding a beaded gourd they gave me, and wearing a beaded necklace they put around my neck. It is ecsquisite workmanship using tiny beads. And you can see the group gathered with us for a photo. Did I tell you the female pastor of this church, who is studying theology at present, but only has a 10th grade education and no English to speak of, was sold by her older brother when she was about 10 years old to an older married man. She was to work as a maid in their house, but ended up being a sex slave to this man.  She bore a child to him as a teenager. That child is now about 20 and lives in Kenya.  The church found out about how she was being treated, and negotiated for her release. She has been living a life of thankfulness and praise ever since and it certainly reflects when you are around her. She is a very strong woman. You can see her in green sitting on the floor eating.

Then you see a fun photo of a market stall selling chrome parts for cars. They seem to be every size and share and really gleam in the sun!

There are several photos of the garden of a hotel we visited yesterday. A Swedish woman, Karen, whose husband is also teaching a course here at the seminary, has lived here for about 15 years, and now she and her husband, having returned to Sweden, return every year for about three months. Anyway,. she took me and another Carolyn from the school here around the city yesterday. We saw pottery and  rugs and furniture and artwork and jewelry and lots of Ethiopian things for sale, and I was able to buy a few things. Then she took us to visit a Swedish friend of hers, also named Karen, who is a designer/architect married to an Ethiopian. After working for an NGO for 30 years in Kenya, they retired here in Addis and decided to build a house, which she designed. Actually they did this the year before they retired, their last year in Kenya.  They found a builder recommended for his quality, signed a contract, paid money to him throughout the year, and when they came to check on the house after a year, they found that he had built it not according to the plan, but in the way he thought appropriate for the site.  It was two stories tall and about five times bigger than the specs called for.  Long and short of it, they decided it wouldn't work for a house, and so they would build a hotel on the site, and a house next door.  Also, she said, almost every angle in the place was NOT 90 degrees as it was supposed to, so a lot had to be ripped out.  But she showed us the house and the hotel, used a lot by the British Embassy only a couple of blocks away, and it is all beautiful, extremely Swedish like in use of white walls and lots of windows, and flowers all over.  But the best part was the grounds. This Karen is a wonderful gardener, and she said things grow incredibly well. She had a 20 foot fence about 50 feet long totally covered with vines, and she said it was at most two years old, more likely one and a half.  There were flowers blooming everywhere and lots of cozy quiet nooks among the plantings.What a wonderful quiet place to spend time together drinking coffee and eating pastries.

From the roof of the hotel I took a photo of women washing their clothes next door. You can see the colored wash pans and women crowded around., You may have to double click to see it close-up.  Women work very hard here.  More about that tomorrow.

We had a wonderful day today, Saturday too and I am very excited about what we did. But you'll have to wait until tomorrow to see and hear about it. Jim needs the computer to write a lecture.

I am so happy to hear your comments about how you are enjoying reading this. It is good for me to write down these great experiences before i forget them. I am going to enjoy going back and reading them again. Love to all!

Carolyn.

Good morning. It is Thursday today, and most of you are sound asleep.  You will awaken in about 6 hours.  Again, we are greeted as we awaken with sunshine peeking through the trees and the sound of Orthodox chanting. That is piped by loudspeakers and continues for a couple of hours, from about 5:45 a.m. to about 8 a.m. It begins again about 5 p.m. and continues until 8 p.m. or so.  About 6 in the evening there is a sermon that is piped out into the neighborhoods. It is funny how this sound becomes part of the fabric of life and, though we don't understand it, it doesn't bother us, but rather is part of the life we know here. That's what Ethiopians tell us, that they hear it and don't hear it at the same time.

We had a wonderful evening last night, and I will post photos of it later today or tomorrow. The Anuak group, the elders of the congregation we have attended twice, prepared a feast for us at the home of another teacher here, Carolyn Weber.  Their staple food is made from corn, and is a sort of thick cream of wheat called Tchon.  Atop that they put various sauces/stews. We had two different ones with beef, one chunks of beef and one ground beef. The spicing was wonderful-noticeable but not choking. Also they served grated cabbage with carrots and rice.  I was worried that I wouldn't like the food but it was wonderful.

 Somehow we have really clicked with these people and they seem to be genuinely happy to have met us as well. Contrary to what we hear from almost everyone we meet, that is, requests for financial help, we have heard none of that from these people, but rather that we remember them, and their land, and their tribe and their church, because they are experiencing difficult times and many are being displaced from their land by the Ethiopian government, which is forceably removing them from their villages to build new housing, and from cattle rustlers and child kidnappers, each bent on stealing from them.  They ask that we remember them and pray for them.  They make beautiful beaded bowls and vessels and jewelry, and presented us with a wonderful carafe with beads around it, and for me a beaded necklace.  These are real treasures for us!

The photos, the first three, are intended to show some of the deference still afforded to Haile Salassie.  I may have already shown the second photo, of his throne. It is about 12 feet tall, much to high for him, because he was only 4 ft. 11 inches. So they had to have steps up to it for him, and I am sure he was almost lost in its size when he sat in it. The first photo is touching. It shows a prayer of the emperor for the people of Ethiopia. Perhaps it shows a bit why the people still revere the emperor.  Of course, his downfall came, when he was 82-83 in the 1970s when there was a huge hunger among the people of the North, the Tigrians, and he tried to hide it rather than take care of them, so somehow that prayer wasn't followed up with direct physical help.  The third photo shows the costume of a Ras, or Lord. Look especially at the sword, which is curved. We are told that such a curved sword can inflict real damage to the organs, because it spreads itself widely!

And the final photo is of a lovely girl I met on the campus while walking home. We had a nice chat in English. She is just beautiful--with a hundred braids in her hair.

The internet is working today!  So I may have a chance later in the day to add more.  Love to all.  Carolyn

Good morning from the sunny slopes of Mount Entoto, or the city of Addis Ababa!  First, I want to let you know that if you double click on any of the photos in my blog, they enlarge.  Then you can see more clearly some of the detail. Perhaps you have already figured that out.

Today I want to tell you about the role of shipping containers in this country--and I think in much of Africa.  The President here told us that he buys containers whenever available. He said containers (perhaps only those shipping certain things, perhaps all) can only be used for shipping by sea once. Then they are sold. So he buys bundles of 20 containers at a time and uses them to build buildings.  The first photo is of music practice rooms build of containers. We have just watched another practice room module be build in the last week and a half. They cut out windows and doors, lay a concrete foundation in front, plaster the inside, put on a sloping roof, paint, and there you go.  He told us they aren't cheap to build, but are about half the cost of a similar building built from scratch.  I'll take a few more photos, but faculty offices here are built of containers, though faced with brick, as is the cafe, the bookstore, and many classrooms. African ingenuity, I saw.  Because the climate cools off every night, and of course there is no heat or air conditioning, the rooms are cool until afternoon. Then I think they get warm, especially the practice rooms, which are small, because the windows and doors are the only source of circulation.  But they look quite nice and often you would never know their interior construction.

The other photos are from the National Museum. As I mentioned, Lucy herself is on tour in the US. But there is an assemblage of her bones, or similar bones, which we saw. You can take a look at them above and read the explanation of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"! The museum has many many such prehistoric bones, of both humans and pre-humans, and animals. I found it very interesting.

Then there is an icon of Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus attached, as well as a painting in the typical Ethiopian style. The icons are, of course, stylized, but what I find interesting is they are Ethiopian figures in skin color and hair. I like them a lot.  As to the story painting, I would liken it to oral history. It is a sort of story board of the history of a certain tribe and area in Ethiopia. The figures are stylized, there is great detail, and the many frames tell many stories.  One of the concerns in this country is that people will lose their oral history now that their native tongues are being written down.  We were told that Oromofe, the language of the Oromo, which make up about 40-45% of the population, was written down only within the last 60 or so years.  In certain parts of the South of Ethiopia, Oromos still keep their oral history back many generations. In other words, they can recite their geneology back hundreds of years, and they know stories of many of the people in that geneology. What a marvelous thing! How many of us can do that orally very far back from our grandparents?

This evening the Anuak people who have been going to church with are putting on a feast for us. That is a real privilege.

Around the House

As I was walking home late yesterday afternoon after class, there were about 5 kids in our yard. They were the neighbors and had been playing kickball or soccer.  But they were watching the turtle that had been their pet for the last week, which had awakened and walked into our yard.  As you can see, this is not an ordinary turtle, but probably a tortoise, given that we are far away from the sea or any water except for the small river nearby. Our neighbor, Dr. Belai, told us it had wandered into their yard last week and that they had been feeding it and giving it water. He guessed its age at 300 years.  The tortoise moves remarkably fast. I was taking a photo of it and it was coming towards me, without apparent fear, in an inexorable way. I dodged aside! You can guess at its size from the hose. It is big enough for a child to sit on.  Ella, would you like to do that?  They are not too unusual, I gather, because I spoke to another woman about it and she said she knew of another one on the other side of the campus. But it is pretty fun for me to see in our yard.

Today is a busy day for Jim. He preached in chapel this morning, then went to his two hour class, then in the afternoon he gives an hour and a half lecture, and finishes the day with his text study on the internet, beaming it off to his class in the US. Meanwhile I will walk up to the post office to mail some letters, make lunch since Addis doesn’t come today, go to my English class at 1:30 for an hour, listen to Jim’s lecture, then go back to English class from 5 to 6:30.

I was going to take a shower and wash my hair this morning, but we had no water.  Fortunately there are buckets with saved water around the house so we could make coffee and brush teeth. Now I checked a couple of hours later and there is still no water here, though I saw the gardener next door watering flowerbeds with his hose.  I was told if the water goes off during the week, it usually comes on again soon, but if it is a weekend, it will probably be off for three days.  Let’s hope that isn’t the case today!

Addis makes coffee for us in the morning, if we are home, and then we drink it out on the front patio in the sunshine. She makes popcorn to go along with it, as is typical here. Don't know why, except that when she roasts the beans before preparing the coffee, the pan gets hot (the beans pop like popcorn) and so maybe they want to take advantage of the hot pan for popcorn.  So the photo of her and me is while we are having morning coffee and popcorn.  The last photo is of some little girls in the neighborhood on their way home from school.  They remind me of my granddaughters Ella and Willa, because I think these little ones are about the same age.

Love to all, Carolyn

Church service and other miscellany

Here are the promised photos from our church service yesterday, including a 20 second clip of the choir singing and dancing.  Just a small sampling of the happiness reflected in the service.  The members of the congregation were thrilled with the wooden crosses we brought and they were passed out very very quickly.  This people, the Anouak, are from the very most Western part of Ethiopia and also from the eastern part of South Sudan, across the border.  They are looked down upon here in Ethiopia because of their color (I think I told you that before.)  But despite their oppression they are filled with joy and kindness.

I just had a wonderful conversation with one of my students, a pastor who has come for a Masters degree in Practical Theology.  He worked for 10 years at a church in an area 98% Muslim, and then moved here to the city and established a congregation 5 years ago.  He said it is in a very poor area and that the congregation in working to help the people.  He said they began a kindergarten this year because public school is only available at age 7. Many families send their kids to kindergarten earlier than that to prepare them for school, so of course, the poor that can't afford to do so are behind the first day their child starts school.  So they notified the neighborhood that they were going to start a free kindergarten and had people sign up. They got the teachers, material and space for handle 40 kids. But 140 showed up. So they had the difficult decision of selecting 40 and turning 100 away. He also spoke of how he handled a beggar who came to him asking for money. He asked the man why he came to him, the pastor for money. The beggar replied that it was because he got all the offerings, so he certainly had extra money. This pastor said, Here, you do the math:  I earn 1730 birr ($100) a month. I pay 700 birr for rent, so I have 1000 birr for everything else. I have two sons and a wife, so we have food and clothing and school tuition and bus fare to pay (no car).  How much do you think I need, and how much should I have left over to help you?  He said the man walked away with a new understanding, having withdrawn his request.  Makes one think twice! And he said he has had several friends go to the United States to study, but they don't come back. They get seduced by the life there. He would go, he said, if it was God's will, but he feels that God wants him here in this place, bringing life and better living conditions and self-concept to the people here.

The standard of living here is of course lower than in the US. We just bought eggs, nice farm-bred brown ones, for $1 a dozen. We bought a package of cardomom for 40 cents and ginger for 20 cents.  We buy a big bagful of fruit (oranges, plums, limes, papaya and mangoes, maybe a pineapple) for a total of about $4. A macchiato at the campus cafe (the best we have had yet) is 20 cents.  Jim bought a kilo (2.2 pounds) of green coffee to roast for $6.  However, gas is expensive.  OilLibya seems to be the main company, though I have seen Shell as well. No one we have been with fills their tank. They buy $5 or $10 worth at a time.
 When we went to the Sheraton Hotel last evening, the oasis, it was an incredible contrast, including the prices in the gifts shops. Silk scarves for $50, gold jewelry for thousands of dollars. Apparently the majority of guests there are Arab sheiks and Americans.  Though it was full last week when the representatives of the Organization for African Unity met here in the city.

Enough for now. Hope the video works. Love to all.

Carolyn

Sightseeing over the weekend

Hi again,

Here are some photos from our expedition around the city Sunday.  The first photo, though comes from a couple of days ago when we visited the Addis Ababa Museum withy a history of the city. Belete and Jim posed for me in front of a lion and a panther. Sunday we were chauffered around by a friend we met last year, and ran into last week: Million Retefe. She is a retired national TV newscaster and has many stories to tell of broadcasting the news during the time of the DERG, the repressive government. She was basically safe, one brother imprisoned and treated harshly, two brother fled to Nigeria, one came back and one has stayed for twenty years.  She is a font of information, a gragarious person you can't help but fall in love with. She and her daughter spent the afternoon and evening with us, driving us through the Italian parts of the city and showing us the main sites, and well as fulling us full of information.

So the next two photos are of us with her and her daughter Favel at a great coffee shop. You can see the types of roasts they offer. Coffee was great and we learned that they put a parsley-like herb in it to enhance the taste. Good. Then you see the barrista with the lion of Judah, Ethiopia's pride, on the wall.

Nest is a photo of the first Ethiopian hotel, built around the turn of the century, I believe. Then a photo of Emperor Menelik II, a national hero who reigned in the later part of the 19th century and was responsible for defeating the Italians at the Battle of Adowa, a very important part of their history. That happened in 1898. 

Next you see photos of a mosque and then of Holy Trinity Orthodox Church, the cathedral of the Ethiopian Orthodox.  It is surrounded by a park and all through the park are people praying, prostrate, or on their hands and knees, or sitting by a pillar outside. Very devotional and pious.

The final photo is of beggars who surrounded our car as we returned to it from the coffee shop. We gave each of them a small amount of money. Two of the women had babies on their backs. So sad to experience.

Next post I am going to try to put in a short clip of the music from the church service yesterday. We went back to the same congregation as the week before because they had asked jim to come and preach. It was wonderful, so full of joy. By the end of the service, there were people singing their lungs out and coming up to the front and dancing, all to the beat of those wonderful drums.  So I hope the video will load!  We'll see.

Love from Jim and me! 

Barbecue

Hi to all,


So last evening the coffee ceremony we were invited to, at the President's house, next door to us, turned out to be much much more.  We started sitting out on the lawn in the late afternoon sunshine drinking soft drinks, then moved to the patio for injera, wat of several kinds, all made with lamb, salad, green beans and carrots, all spicy enough to make you sit up and enjoy it.  Emma Bet, President Belai's wife, said, "Save room for barbecue" because that came next, cooked, as you see in the photos, on an open fire on the patio.  All this while, a young girl was roasting coffee beans, then grinding them in a mortar and pestle, then preparing the coffee, which we had after the barbecue, along with orange slices and then candies.  The barbecue was very spicy thin strips of lamb and was just delicious.

I just loaded four photos of this evening event, and only one showed up--can't figure that out, so I'll try again later with the other three.  Attending this event were the President, his wife (who lives most of the time in the US and is a nurse there and is standing in front of Jim), his two sons, a Finnish family with three children, two in the photo, an Ethiopian contractor and his wife, a banker, and Jim and me. Photo taken by Carolyn Weber, another English teacher here at the school.

Today was a totally different day! A Swedish theology professor, retired, who comes here every year (and lived here more than 25 years) for three months--in the winter of course--to teach graduate theology courses, stopped by for a visit and to invite us over for lunch tomorrow. He gave us about an hour and a half of background on the school, then tensions with the government, both during communism, during the 1990s when things here were very difficult, and also now, as well as some greater understanding of the layers of society which affect decisionmaking:  tribe, clan, family, spouse, intermarriage between tribes.  He said, so many layers make it almost impossible for a westerner to understand.  The longer we are here, and the more people we talk to, the more we understand that we know less and less of this culture.

We spent a lot of the day with Belete, a pastor we met last year who came to look us up and offered to take us around Addis Ababa. We toured the downtown, where we drove through Pushkin Square, Mexico Square and the largest, Moscow Square. Amazing contrasts between the tall glass and steel buildings and the lean-to souks, or street markets.  Then we visited the Red Terror Martyrs Museum, remembering the time when Haile Selassie was overthrown in 1978 and the DERG, a committee of military rulers took over.  They specialized in terror and indisciminately imprisoned and tortured and murdered Ethiopians.  Half a million people were killed, all without any charges ever being lodged againsst them. It was a very difficult place to visit, very graphic, and our personal guide, who spoke excellent English, was a man who had been imprisoned for 7 1/2 years. We found that our pastor/friend had known him in prison and he had been imprisoned for 2 1/2 years. There are many many scars here in people's minds. The museum had a photo of a women involved in the dedication 2 years ago. On one night militia broke into her house and murdered her four children. There is a statue in front commemorating those four children with a quote from her. We cannot even imagine