We’ve been in our new home for one week now! On the 19th we flew into Axum (1.5 hour, two bus rides away from our new home town). We spent one last evening with three other volunteers eating pizza and drinking beer (sigh) and stopped in Adwa on our way home to purchase a mattress (our town doesn’t sell big ones). Luckily, our host mom’s brother in law, Hailu, lives here and helped us.
We also bought two pillows, a small electric stove, a cooking pot, two plates, four pieces of silverware, ketchup, oatmeal, snickers and Mentos there, you know, the essentials….
Mattress + public transportation is quite an experience. After we paid for the mattress we went to the bus station and Hailu convinced the mechanic (who seemed to be in charge) to make a pit stop on the main road where the mattress shop was to load it.
Sometimes I am amazed at how these types of circumstances/transactions take place…it is pretty cool but sometimes they seem so complicated. For example, I think stopping at a store while using public transportation is pretty common practice…last time we took this bus ride someone else stopped to load something he purchased, but when Hailu tried to communicate our need it seemed to take forever and a lot of back and forth. This happens at shops, markets, etc. a simple interaction seems to take a lot longer than I expect. This is a mystery I hope to figure out as my language improves. I think that the beginning ten minutes of these discussions is the misbelief that Ethiopians have that we need to buy a mattress and that we live here now. Then after that they may negotiate a higher rate for us. Nonetheless, it is amazing how helpful Hailu was, we barely know him and he spent his entire Sunday helping us bargain and buy the essentials that we need. The hospitality is hard to describe completely.
SO, we get on and the bus stops ten minutes later. Hailu and Jimi run to the shop while I stay on the bus holding our backpacks and cooking pot. Everyone is staring at me. A couple minutes later I look out the back window and there is Hailu with a mattress on his back running down the street, and Jimi, hair blowing in the wind with bags in his hand. I wish I had a picture. Then there was a three minute rush to get the mattress on top of the bus and situate me and Jimi with all of our bags squished between a filled bus. The buses are quite crowded, but everyone helped us out and someone sitting next to us even held on to our pillow for us, no problem, no bad looks.
After about one and half hours we made it safely to town and even convinced the bus to let us off closer to our house instead of at the bus station in the local language, Tigrinia!! As soon as the bus stopped about ten people on the road gathered and some of them carried our belongings to our home. The mattress carrier was very happy to hear we would be teaching for two years here. Many teachers and random community members have already thanked us and said they are lucky to have us. It is a wonderful community.
One week in…it already feels like home, most of the time. We’ve been to our schools multiple times already and we’ve cooked, set up our home for now, shopped, and even went to a teacher’s conference in a nearby town. Other times though I feel a donkey at my elbow or see 110 camels on the side of the road or am told my first day teaching is not on Monday “maybe after 3 days.” It all feels very surreal.
Our home is really great, hopefully some day we will be able to upload a video for everyone.
To be honest, sometimes I feel guilty because it is a bit bigger than others but I also know that Jimi and I would kill each other if we lived in one room like most families.
We ate pasta, potatoes, tomatoes, canned peas, eggs and cliff bars the first week. We arrived on Sunday so we had to wait a whole week to shop at the market on Saturday. At the market we bought lettuce, some other green leaf, papaya, another fruit called zaytoun (guava), garlic and peppers. We also found rice, lentils and flour in the shops. It is so nice to cook for ourselves but we’ll have to get used to the limited variety. Still holding out for cauliflower…someday it will be at the market!!
Our landlord lives in the room next door. The father works in another city so we may not see him for a while; they have 3 girls and one baby boy. The 10 year old girl is like our mom. She came in with their charcoal stove the first day and helped me cook eggs, she took me to buy bread, and get my hair braided. She knows a few English words but her mom doesn’t, so sometimes it has been difficult talking with mom but we’ve had a few successful conversations in Tigrenya. We had to bring in a translator to explain that we need to use toilet paper (they use water here instead).
Things are pretty communal within our compound. Besides us there is a lawyer with his wife and two kids in another room and my school’s Amharic (Ethiopian language) teacher in another room. So there are about seven rooms, a water pump, bathroom, a garden, and three stone “rooms” (2 of them have injira ovens) in our gated compound. Our landlady/mom just gave us water because the pump stopped and yesterday the girls helped us with cook lunch (Jimi has to learn to share his kitchen). It is really great. Sometimes it’s awkward when you don’t know how to get them out of the room nicely etc. but we’ll figure it out! In this culture “alone time” isn’t a thing, people will think something is wrong, so doors are always open, TV is on (if the electricity is working) and if you are in a group and no one is talking there is a word to get people to talk!!! “itchawit” it literally means “play” someone will just say it! This was particularly difficult our first month when we couldn’t communicate much!! We are getting better but it is still too exhausting sometimes.