Fiche Town

J-I know most of you have probably already seen this via Facebook, but Donovan and I just got word about our final site placement about 2 days ago at this point.  We’ll be living in a place called Fiche, a town about 2 hours north of Addis Ababa with a population of about 30,000 people.  We haven’t been there yet, but we’ll be visiting for the work week starting this coming Tuesday.  To prepare us for this, Peace Corps gave us a brief description of the town that we’d like to share with you (though apparently a lot of this can be Googled).  Here’s our info:

“Found along Addis Ababa-Debre Markos Road, Fiche is a small, densely populated town sitting nearly 2,800 meters above sea level in the central highland plains; it is located 112 Km northwest from Addis Ababa in the north Shewa Zone of Ethiopia’s Oromia region….”

So far so good!  I’m glad that we’re in so close to the capital because we occasionally have to hop down this way for trainings, and I know that’s going to be a two day+ journey for a few of my fellow PCTs.  It also means that travel, both domestic and foreign, will be pretty convenient because the largest airport in the country is in Addis.  Anyone feel like meeting up in Africa or Europe during summer 2015-ish?

94% of the population is Ethiopian Orthodox, and the remaining 6% is divided between Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, or other.  There are 6 Orthodox churches, 3 Protestant churches, and 1 mosque.  I look forward to visiting a handful of each from time to time, even though I won’t be able to understand what’s being said.

The local languages are Afan Oromo (otherwise known as Oromifa/the language we’ve been studying for the last month) and Amharic (otherwise known as Amerenia/the national language of Ethiopia/not the language we’ve been studying for the last month).  We’re interested to see how that’s all going to work out, though a lot of the more seasoned volunteers tell us that we probably won’t need either to get by in our site, seeing as so many people speak English.  The thing is, I already know how it feels to live in a place where I can’t communicate with the locals, and I really don’t want to go through that again.  In short, it looks like I’ll be learning the Amharic Fidel after all!

The part of the document that got me really excited (from an air-quality standpoint) was that Fiche has no factories or commercial farming.  People living there mostly work in different governmental sectors or administration/service.  The part that made me laugh the most was that our paper said that bars, and tej/tella bets in our town were “beyond counting.”  Again, this is just some of the information that we have on the front end and does not reflect any personal experiences that we’ve had there yet.  Still, it sounds like a pretty ideal post!  We’ll let you know more once we’ve actually spent a few days living at 9000 feet!