A Day in the Life of a Peace Corps Volunteer

People often ask us what it's like being in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia.  The question is genuinely hard to answer in words alone, so we decided to do something a little different to capture a typical day in the life over here.  

Thus we are happy to bring you a video starring and directed by Donovan Gregg, filmed and edited by Jessie Gregg, and featuring the lyrical stylings of Frank Sinatra!

~Jessie & Donovan

Laundry Day!

I can't quite call this the bane of my existence, but it comes pretty darn close!  Point is, I hate doing laundry, no matter where I am, but here I enter a special level of you know where.  Enjoy the hyper sped up and edited version!

~Jessie

Christmas Conversion

“Really?  You want me to cook a fillet mignon until it’s grey on the inside?  Jessie, why do you always have me ruin these beautiful steaks?”

I honestly can’t even recall how many times my stepdad Greg and I have had this conversation over the years.  What can I say?  I just like my meat well-done.  No one else in my family is this way.  They’re all on, over, and out bloody rare types, my husband included, but not me.  Somehow, just like my steaks, I turned out wrong.  I think some part of me still holds onto this childish idea that well-done steaks, like well-done pork or chicken, are simply healthier and more hygienic.  That’s the closest I can come to a good explanation about why I like the meat I eat cleansed with fire.

Needless to say, especially for those of you who read Donovan’s blog “Actually, I’ll have my steak raw,” there is a cultural norm here that is the well-done steak lover’s nightmare: raw meat is a delicacy.  I’ve had a few timid samples, a bite here and there, most notably the raw camel that I tried in Harar, but the mere idea of chowing down on a big, raw, bloody plate of beef has historically been enough to make me a little squeamish.

Well, this Christmas (of the Ethiopian variety), we got invited over to one of Donovan’s coworker’s homes to celebrate, which was really nice because we ended up spending that one at home on our own last year.  We arrived and, within moments, had some farso (unstrained, homebrewed beer) in hand and were comfortably seated in the family’s living room.   

I like my farso like I like my life: gritty!

Then our host proudly declared, “My wife is out seeing some neighbors right now, but don’t worry.  She and I have a very equal relationship, so I will cook for you!”

Now, this statement was pretty shocking, but also pretty awesome because most of the men that I’ve met around here would never even consider cooking if they had a wife to do it for them. 

Then he happily declared, “I will make you gorid gorid!”

“Oh, god, please no,” I thought to myself, though my polite smile did not betray my inner terror.  “Not gorid gorid.”

Gorid gorid is, simply put, bite sized chunks of raw beef, often served with either chili powder or a spice sauce.  Soon enough, he had finished slicing up the meat, and the two of us had a plate with at least a kilogram of raw meat chunks on the table in front of us.  As is the custom here, the family had already eaten before we got there, so this kilo was entirely for the two of us.

Then he said, “Sorry that it is not fresher.  I wanted to have you over when we slaughtered the bull (at 1 AM the previous night), but I knew that you were asleep.  Now it is not so good.  It is cold.”

It was only maybe 6 PM.  This raw pile of meat in front of us had literally been mooing about 17 hours before we ate it, and our host considered that regrettably past its prime.  Oh boy.  Still, I can’t stand the thought of turning down the hospitality of anyone who has been kind enough to invite me into their home for a holiday, so I dug right in.

OK, so maybe I didn't "dig right in" from the first bite.

Oh, wow, seriously?  Dang this stuff was good!  I honestly couldn’t believe it.  This was the most tender, melt in your mouth piece of meat I have had in country.  Normally the beef here is extremely tough, like eating a stale hunk of jerky tough, but not this.  I wound up holding my own against my carnivorous husband and ate about half a kilo of gorid gorid.  More to my surprise, it’s been about 4 days since then, and I’ve felt perfectly fine.  No gastric distress to speak of whatsoever!

Donovan keeps telling me, “Now, just because you liked the beef that way this time, it doesn’t mean that you have to start eating your steaks rare when we go home.”

And I keep replying, “Oh, I agree with that!  I still like my steaks cooked, but when can we go get some gorid gorid and beers at our favorite butcher shop?”

~Jessie

Why the Wanderlust?

Explanation: The following blog post is the first of a six-week long blogging challenge that we have decided to take part in via "BloggingAbroad.org". Generally, these are co-authored but penned by one of us. We will take turns over the coming weeks. 
This post is in response to a question along the lines of “Why do you live abroad and how did you get there?”

“Why am I here?” It seems that no matter where we are located we find ourselves asking that question. “Why are you there?” This is a question we almost exclusively get from people back home.  However, it is the question that drives us from one corner of the world to the next, because the simple answer in all its complexity is… we love traveling! When I first met my wife, the first thing I learned about her was that she had been to Egypt, and the first thing she learned about me was that I had just returned from Norway. Did we meet at a "traveler’s anonymous" group, sort of like an AA meeting? No, but we should probably go to one at this point.

Two years after we met we embarked on our first yearlong stint abroad in 2008 on a study program in Tübingen, Germany. One thing you learn in Germany is that they often have single words that sum up concepts that most often take entire sentences to say in English. One of my favorites is Wanderlust, a word often appropriated to English that essentially means "travel bug" or to have "itchy feet." It is safe to say that we discovered our Wanderlust in Germany, and in a special way we found Heimatgefühl, or a sense of home.

Venice during the semester break.

The true potency of the wanderlust that we had acquired in Germany didn’t fully bubble to the surface until about August 2011, just before we got married.  We both have slightly different versions of this story, but for the sake of brevity I’ll just speak for myself. I graduated from university in March of 2011, which was still a bad year for the economy. When I finally hit the American job market I was baffled and dismayed at the uninspiring options I had to choose from. I was working at a call center before my German professor sent me a link to a corporate job that needed German speakers. “Oh wow, an office job that will let me use a foreign language and gain experience working for an international company!!!” I thought with the most naïve excitement.  The old timers attribute this attitude to a sense of entitlement that only a so-called ‘Millennial’ can sport, but I really expected a lot more on the other side of the walk at graduation. Instead, all I found were the sour words of encouragement that often went something like “Just feel lucky that you have a job!”

I had a job all right! Forty hours a week plugging away at a computer and getting screamed at by Germans over the phone between my all too frequent trips to the break room stocked with M&Ms and free Starbucks coffee. And thank god for the coffee as I was supposed to report to work by 4am for the European workday. I think I was supposed to love this but all I thought to myself after three months on the job was “THIS IS IT?!?!?!” “This is why I got a… I mean TWO degrees?!?!?” I know that you are supposed to start at the bottom and work your way up, but still. To cheer myself up I started looking around the room for something to aspire to, or a sort of goal to keep me motivated in the morning. I looked at my boss and thought to myself “Hmm, if I do a good job and stick with this long enough maybe I will be like my boss. Do I want that? No. Hmm, or maybe I could be his boss? No, don’t want that. Oh, or maybe I could run this whole center someday? Oh, please god no!” However, in that economy, simply wanting to leave and actually leaving was easier said than done, and only a fool would even say it anyway. It took months to complete what my wife and I still refer to as the “Paperwork Gauntlet,” but in February 2012, just 11 months after graduation, we were on our way to our first adventure abroad since we left Germany, in South Korea.

We left for Korea with four objectives:

1. Move to a foreign country we know nothing about and kickass at it.

2. Travel to other countries in the vicinity of said country.

3. Pay off student loans.

4.  Try all kinds of food most people would prefer not to even look at.

Making kimchi with our best friend in Korea.

We accomplished all of those objectives in spades! Korea was often a frustrating place to live, but we both felt that we had overcome the challenges and all we wanted was more. Now that we had more work experience, we applied to join the Peace Corps, something Jessie had wanted to do since before we met, though she herself often says that she can’t quite explain why.

This was one of those “back in the day” style Peace Corps assignments.  Starting from literally every group after us, you theoretically have some say in where they send you.  That was not the case for us.  We had to turn down a post in Mongolia on health concerns, and left South Korea to visit Jessie’s Not-Returned Peace Corps Volunteer aunt who still lives in the country that she was assigned, Palau a paradise in the South Pacific Ocean, having no idea if or when we would next hear from the Peace Corps about our assignment.  

Donovan standing on "Little Beach," the family beach in Palau.

About one day into the trip, we got an email, the preview of which said, “Congratulations on your invitation to serve in…” before promptly cutting off at precisely the point of interest.  We sat outside of Melekeok Elementary School, pirating a weak wifi signal and waiting with baited breath to see where this next step was going to take us.  The minute that the email loaded, I snapped up the computer, not letting Jessie read it (because me announcing important things like this to her instead of letting her read them for herself has somehow become a tradition for us).

Seeing the country name, I smiled to myself as Jessie animatedly asked, “Well?  Where are they sending us?”

“Guess!  What’s the most stereotypically Peace Corps country ever?”

After a slight pause, proving that she and I are often too much of the same mind, she cautiously guessed, “Ethiopia?”

Well, she got it on the first guess!  We quickly ran back to her aunt’s house with the news and were greeted with such responses as:

“Oh…well…”

“Is this a good thing?  Did you want Africa?”

And perhaps the most entertaining, “You know the old expression, don’t you?  PCVs who go to Asia come back more spiritual.  PCVs who go to Latin America come back more political.  PCVs who go to Africa come back crying, and PCVs who go to Oceania don’t come back at all!”

I can’t say that this experience has left us or will leave us crying, but I can say that it has been a good thing and one heck of an adventure at that.

Last day of school 2015.

In the end, I think that is what this all comes down to.  This is an adventure for us.  Be it studying in Europe (a move we hope to repeat), working in Asia (another possible repeat), or volunteering here in Africa, we view this as an adventure, and it’s one that we’re lucky enough to share with each other (and with those of you who follow our blog).  We’ve gone from an office with copious amounts of M& Ms, to the land of kimchi, and finally on to the land of perfect coffee.  Now, having entered 2016, the year in which we will end our service, with just 7 months until we “gong out” and leave, all we can do is wonder, “Where’s next?”

Peace Corps Swear-in at the US Embassy: The only time in service PCVs look this good!

-Donovan

The Mom who Saved Christmas!

We had such big plans for it this year.  After the last three years where we had basically not celebrated Christmas, we were going to go all out for it.  The plan had been to work very hard through the month of December, not go into Addis at all, and then celebrate big time.  We were going to go to Boston Days Spa for haircuts, go watch the new Star Wars movie, stay at our favorite hotel, and eat all the delicious foreign food that we wanted, ending in a fancy brunch at the Sheraton on Sunday that would included limitless champagne.  Granted, because of the fact that Christmas is celebrated about 2 weeks later here than it is in the rest of the world (see the post “Time, What is Time?” for an explanation), we would have to take a few days off of school for it, but we could hold a few classes to make up for missing those two days.  The point was that we really felt the need to celebrate this year, and it was going to be fantastic.

Unfortunately, due to some political issues in our region, we wound up spending the 10^th-23^rd in Addis.  Classes were cancelled during most of that time, but regardless it threw us badly off schedule.  When we were told that we could head back to site, most of the other PCVs decided to stay in Addis to celebrate the holiday together.  Still, we decided to forgo our plans and head back to Fitche, not able to stand the thought of missing even more school and putting our students even farther behind.  It was a really difficult choice, but in the end, we are really happy that we did it because…..

When I went to the post office on Christmas Eve, I was elated to find 3 care packages from my mom waiting for us, totaling about 60 pounds worth of goodies.  There were the normal foodstuffs that we have come to adore over the last year, but then there was something special in the 3^rd box; it was Christmas!  She sent us stockings, battery operated Christmas tree lights, little ornaments, and even a fabric tree that I pretty much started crying when I saw!  There were even little air-freshener sticks in the package, so now our little mud house smells like a spruce tree!

So, because of my mom, we got to have this for breakfast:

Kept up the family tradition of eating a Christmas Eve pizza:

Note: This is literally the 2^nd pizza I have made in my life, and Donovan, who normally won’t even look at a homemade pizza, declared it the best in country!

We got to decorate our home:

And we even got a bag full of mini candy canes to pass out to all our favorite students, faculty and friends here in Fitche:

It was extremely hard choosing to go back and forestall our plans, especially because we had been looking forward to them for so long.  Still, getting these things in the mail and spending our last Christmas in Ethiopia so happy and in such a festive state of mind felt like a reward for making the right decision.  I just want to say thanks again to my mom, Queen of the Care Package, for managing to mail us a box full of Christmas cheer!

~Jessie

Camp GROW: Fitche-Selalie 2015

Peace Corps summer camps are often cited as one the most rewarding things that we get to do in country.  After having done one, I have to say that I can see why!

-Jessie

First Thanksgiving since 2011

One of the biggest drawbacks of living overseas is missing American holidays. Fortunately, we were able to catch the 4^th of July during our visit home last summer to catch up on some much-needed explosions, BBQ, and microbrew. Save for this one exception, we really haven’t celebrated any Western holidays since Christmas of 2011 just before we moved to Korea.

Now, this doesn’t mean we haven’t tried. On the topic of Thanksgiving, we once went to an expat bar on the beach in Busan that advertised a Turkey dinner special for homesick Americans on Thanksgiving. Oh, how it just wasn’t the same, though. It is hard to truly take in the essence of the holiday by only eating a modest and responsible amount of Turkey while perched atop a bar stool in a crowded pub with K-pop blaring in the background. Afterwards we would go back to our apartment and wish were back home as everyone’s Facebook photos of the beloved holiday would dominate our feed for days. For four years in a row, all holidays came and went in very much the same sad fashion…Until now… :-D

In the last few years the Peace Corps has worked with the U.S. Embassy to find embassy staff that are willing to adopt poor, starving, Ethiopian…Peace Corps volunteers for Thanksgiving. Now, there are about 260 Peace Corps volunteers serving in Ethiopia, so there really aren’t enough spots for everyone, so in order to place us they basically pull names out of a hat. Last year we weren’t able to enter since volunteers are not allowed to leave their sites within the first three months of swearing in. However, this year we were allowed to enter, and you know I wouldn’t be writing this if we hadn’t won!

We were invited to join Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Self and his wife Gaia for Thanksgiving in Addis Ababa. After battling the streets of Addis Ababa with only a picture of a map that I took with my IPod Touch, we found Patrick and Gaia’s compound in a nice little neighborhood occupied by other foreign diplomats. Immediately he welcomed us in and offered us a glass of wine, which I don’t think was ever given the chance to become empty all night long. 

Also in attendance were an Italian diplomat and his wife, and a Turkish representative for NATO.  At first we were nervous at the thought of being the only PCVs in a room full of military personnel, but we quickly found out that there was no need to worry.   We all got along fine, and they seemed very interested in Peace Corps and the lifestyle that we lead (or as one of them chose to put it, “Why do you torture yourselves this way?”).  We spent a wonderful evening eating, drinking, and being merry, and being very thankful to be where we were.

In short, the food and company were both spectacular, and it was the best holiday that we have celebrated in years.  Again, we want to thank our host and hostess for the wonderful time and for their generosity in inviting two ragged and wearied PCVs into their lovely home.  It was a Thanksgiving that lived up to its name.

-Donovan