I apologize ahead of time for nearly every paragraph/day beginning “On **day**….” I am unoriginal.
Wow I have not updated this thing in forever. Sooooooo we basically did not have work to do on Thursday or Friday. They wanted us to test the computers, but the electricity was not working in the clinic. We made a really awesome dish called Peter’s Smorgasbord on Friday night. Yum.
On Saturday, we had a little Sabbath School with ourselves, then went to the church service (not translated) in the school’s library. We did recognize several of the words, though. Potluck. Ooooooh man. Injera and a bunch of other stuff. Hareg had us unroll the injera on our plates, and then we each sampled a small bit of everything on the table. It was a bit different than I expected. I was expecting something like pita bread. It looks like thin, gray sponge, and tastes a bit different. But it was good. I liked the green bean dish, and the potato and carrot dish, but my favorite favorite thing at potluck were the deep fat fried bananas. Ohhh those things were wicked good. Hareg says she will teach us how to make them—excitement. They also had soda and barley and honey drink. Most people had the latter. It was gooood. After potluck, we lolled around for a while, and then went to Pathfinders. Emmanuel explained something for a long time in Amharic, and then we watched part of a movie about Joseph—in English. Before dinner, Anisha and I went for a walk, and Maskarem, Thomas and Stephanos joined us. We talked a little with some of our neighbors who knew English, and one of the little boys, China, followed us home. They are so funny. After dinner, we played Scrabble. Cameron kept going where I wanted to go. Duba’s eye continued to be very infected, most of the time it was not even open.
On Sunday, we went with Abebe into Addis. He first drove us to the Hilton so we could exchange money. Then he took us to this museum with the first church in Addis, and the tour guide was really cool. Then this other guy showed us around the first palace from Menelik in Addis Ababa. It was surprisingly small, from what I know about European royalty. It was a few different buildings, but the King and Queen’s bedroom was smaller than our living room. I wished I had brought my sweatshirt, because it was very high up on the mountain. Then Abebe took us to an Orthodox church, but we could not go in because we had to have our heads covered, I think. On the way down the mountain I saw a goat dying on the side of the road. I think its neck had been slit or something—its head was all bloody. Unpleasant. Abebe drove us by several embassys (the US’s is a fortress compared to most haha) and we went to the “Royal Lion Zoo” or something. There were lions (but they were all sleeping) and tortoises, and monkeys, and kudu, and a New Zealand white rabbit and a Egyptian duck, and a guinea fowl. It was really cool. No way would any zoo in America ever let people get that close to lions. After that, Abebe tried to take us to one of his favorite Ethiopian restaurants, but they did not have anything on the vegetarian page, so we ended up going to a more American restaurant. Abebe got a hamburger, Cameron got stirfry with fish, and Anisha and I got pizza. It was thin crust, but it had oregano on it (we have been very spice-deprived with cooking here :-)). Apparently, Coke and Pepsi are actually different things here. Cameron ordered a Coke, and the waitress was confused because she did not know if he wanted the big bottle. The Pepsi was in a smaller bottle. I do not think they generally do doggy bags either, because we had to explain that we wanted to take the rest of our pizza home—they were really big. We tried to pay for lunch, but Abebe did instead. Then we were heading back and we were like, “wait a minute, we need food,” so after we picked up S’ike ,we stopped at a roadside stand and got some veggies, then went to a supermarket and spent 250 birr on foodstuffs. Abebe was surprised at how much money we were spending. 250 birr is 20 dollars. Yeah. We made Peter’s Smorgasbord for dinner, which was lacking in the okra department because we forgot to buy some.
On Monday we pretty much lazed around because the electricity was not working still at the clinic. We did meet Dr. Pearson (head of the orthopedic unit) and Mr. Kim (the administrator) from the Korean Hospital in town (the best hospital around). It is a Korean hospital—Myungsung Christian Medical Center. They were very nice, and even invited us to go there to have lunch and be shown their facilities on Wednesday. We were also supposed to have to go meet Anisha’s uncle’s ex-coworker in town because she is bringing us stuff from Anisha’s aunt. Buuut now it is Thursday and she is supposed to arrive tonight. TERRIBLE travel luck. Engine trouble over the ocean? Yeah. I made a fettuccini sauce thing for pasta, and it turned out SO much better than the macaroni and cheese I tried to make last week. I hope I can remember how to make it. We need to buy more cheese. And we played soccer, which was fun.
On Tuesday we had a meeting with the principle, where he told us what he wanted us to do in the school. Monday-Thursday, Cameron will be doing a choir, I will be helping tutor English after school (for pronunciation, conversation, etc) for second (Monday and Tuesday) and third (Wednesday and Thursday) grades. Anisha is doing the same for fourth and fifth grade. Meck’adesk is in third grade, so that will be exciting to know someone already. We discovered that Duba really likes rice. Anisha made us Indian chick pea curry. I played with the little kids mostly, instead of soccer (Maskarem, Meck’desk, Stephanos, and China). First we played hide and seek in the grass. I expressed my concern of being eaten by a spider. Maskarem responded with “no, snakes,” but she was joking. Then we played hide and seek in the classroom buildings (kind of like hide and seek tag). When the counter finds you, you have to beat him back to the base and tag it before they do. After we hid for too long and Stephanos did not find us, we went to where they are building an assembly hall/library and played hopscotch in the cement dust/dirt on the floor. Their hopscotch is much cooler than ours. Once we got bored with that, we went back to the field and they tried to pay tag with me, but their tag is weird. It first involved EVERYONE chasing me, then I had to tag everyone? I am used to one person at a time. Anyway, I played soccer after that. I totally made this one guy wipe out.
On Wednesday, we ran a few errands (to the health department and investment office) with Dr. Gemechu, Emmanuel, and Abebe, of course. S’ike came too, but we dropped her off somewhere. S’ike, Anisha, and I got to sit in the trunk! Oh yeah, there are no seatbelts, except for the front two seats. We all reach for our seatbelts all the time but there are none there. There were two fold-down sides. Emmanuel tried to let us sit in the backseat instead, but we wanted to sit in the back. Fun fun. Abebe dropped us off at the Korean Hospital. We tried to call Dr. Pearson, but he was in surgery still. Then Cameron’s phone died, so we were like, fantastic. We decided to try to find him, but while Anisha was talking to some registration people, we saw him walking out with two of the Norwegian medical students. They have a close connection with Norway, which sends a lot of medical students there. We went back to where they live, and washed up in Dr. Pearson’s house. We met his wife, Barbara. She is super super nice. Then we went down to the kitchen area, where they had cooked food for the interns and doctors. A lot of the Koreans do not speak English very well, but I at least can say hello, how are you, and thank you (there was no need to count for them :-)). It was really good. Some of the kimchi was very spicy, and I let Cameron eat some of mine, but they had watermelon and SALAD!!! which Hareg told us not to eat but this was totally fine. The salad dressing was delicious (and it had onions in it yay!), and so was the banana thing they had and they had pink pound cake. We met Pastor Li’s wife, who was very nice, and Mr. Kim’s wife, and Mr. Kim came and sat with us for awhile. Dr. Gemechu said something about him not being terribly friendly, but he totally is! Really funny, too. We invited Dr. Pearson, Mr. Kim, and their wives to come to Kalaala sometime and we are going to cook for them then let them watch TV (they only get like 4 channels, two of which are in Korean). Well, Anisha and Dr. Gemechu’s wife, Azeb, will cook them Indian food. Then Dr. Pearson showed us around the hospital, to the ICU, OR, a floor of admissions, and their cafeteria inside smelt SO good. During the tour, Anisha said something about her wife knowing Dr. Gemechu. She, of course, meant HIS wife knew her family, but it was SO funny. I do not think Dr. Pearson got it, though. Mr. Kim has done so much work there. From little tent/awning things outside to eat under, to the pictures on the wall, to getting stuff out of customs—he has worked so hard to get it going. This November 24 is their 5th anniversary of opening. He has been here for 15 years, so the first ten were just getting things ready and stuff. He lived in like, two plastic containers while he was doing it! After the tour, we explained to Dr. Pearson that Cameron’s cell phone had died (and we did not bring ours since Cameron brought his…oops). We tried to call Dr. Gemechu, but it said his phone was turned off. We tried to call Hareg to get Abebe’s number, but we could not find her number. So we decided to just hang out outside—we knew Abebe would pick us up sometime! We waited about twenty minutes, and up drives Abebe!!!! And Hareg! We were so happy. Hareg stayed at the hospital—Yared, her son, was going to pick her up. We picked up Dr. Gemechu at a Jamaican shoe store—random, right? “They have a very good selection here—they are really getting nice!” SO funny. Then we stopped off at a supermarket to get some things, we ended up spending over 300 birr, and tried to pay for it, but Dr. Gemechu said he was going to! The generosity of these people is outrageous! We tried hard, too. Golly. We got some baking goods too!!! And applesauce!!! All we need now to make cookies is eggs (Dr. Gemechu said it was probably okay that we eat them, as long as they were cooked (which means no cookie dough BOO)) and shortening and baking soda. I hope they have it—Anisha said she did not see it. Dr. Gemechu tried to give us the thing Hareg had given us for the birthday cake, but S’ike had taken it, apparently. Whatever—we’ll figure it out. Worse comes to worse, we will bake cookies in glass bowls in the oven—you can do that, right? I made potato soup last night, and it turned out awesomeeee! Soccer was fun too. I accidentally scored a goal, and I had a really good steal which was promptly unstolen by Anisha. Pooh.
And today is Thursday. The lady with our stuff from Anisha’s aunt STILL has not arrived—poor her!! The electricity is finally working in the clinic, so we tested all the CPUs, mice, and keyboards this morning. This afternoon will be our first day of tutoring/music class.
Duba died today. I knew this morning that she was going to. She was acting all wrong, even for being sick. When we came back for lunch, she was in our courtyard all stretched out. We did not know what to do, so we just shooed the dogs away and shut the gate. Anisha told Bekeleg later that day, and she was unceremoniously disposed of. We will miss her, even Anisha and Cameron, who were not thrilled at the prospect of having a cat.
There has been a SERIOUS miscommunication. The principle made it seem like we were going to be helping some kids who stayed after class with their English. You know, with a couple kids and the teacher there and stuff. Not so much. I go in, the teacher had left, and the ENTIRE class of 40some students is sitting there (well, they stood when I came in, but I made them sit down), not counting the 30+ kids hovered around the window and door... I kind of blundered ahead for the first few minutes, “I am uh going to be teaching you English and uh are you sure your teacher has left for the day? I will be right back.” I went to go find Anisha and scream or something but her teacher was still in her class and so the principle was there so I went to him and was like, “Uh I have no idea what I am doing—we thought there were just going to be a few student and whatever,” so he came with me and basically told the kids that I was going to teach them spoken English and he left. He did say their English was too poor for “what is your favorite English word?” and that, yes, body parts would be fine. And he shooed away the kids at the door and window. I got as far as throat, and decided that they could not say “th,” so we worked on that. Do you know how hard it is to say “th” for 45 minutes? Most of the kids say “f” or “fl” instead. I tried to teach them the Winnekeag “clap clapclapclap clap” “clap clap” thing, but they totally did not get it. At first they just all kept clapping, then they just did not clap at all, but at least they were quiet after I did it. I went around the room and every kid said “thumb” to the best of their ability. Some were pretty good; others just were not. They have to learn to stick their tongues out. After we did that, I tried to get them to think of other English words with “th.” I got some “throat”s and some “thumb”s, but no one could think of new ones! The kid with the stick kept saying them. I eventually gave them “throw” and “throne.” FINALLY, one kid said, “that.” I was SUPER excited until I realized that it was a slightly different “th” sound. Whateverman. I used “think” instead. I thought of “Thursday” and “thirsty” and a bunch of other “th” words AFTER I left the room. *headesk* I dismissed them, but no one really left—I eventually figured out that in order for them to leave, I had to leave. I went right to Anisha’s classroom, where she was surrounded by students and said, “They won’t leave until you do!” We went back to the house and flipped out. We were pumping water when Cameron came in, and we both yelled, “CAMERON!” Then we all told our sob stories about our disastrous first efforts as teachers. My experience won. So we took a half hour or so to emote and desquish our brains. Now we have to go play soccer until 630ish. MLIA.
