An Unexpected Thank You

A friend told me that we had been mentioned by an HCN on Ethiopia's US Embassy Facebook page.  I just managed to find the comment, so I wanted to repost it here for posterity:

Sometimes it's the little things that make you smile.

Harar Trip #2: The Black Kites

Jessie feeding the black kites:

I think one of those universal truths of humanity is that everyone likes to feed the birds.  I’ve seen people doing in in parks in Venice, on the beaches of South Korea and everywhere in between.  It’s just something that we all do.  However, the people of Harar have a slightly different take on it.  Instead of feeding the pigeons or the sparrows, they like to feed the kites (hawks).

If you ever find yourself in Harar, ask someone to take you to the meat market.  There you can buy yourself some camel meat, which tastes amazing raw (and is the subject of a later post).  Above the unrefrigerated butcher’s shop, there are inevitably dozens of black kites perched, waiting to be fed either unintentionally by a local who is just trying to buy their lunch or on purpose by the tourists and travelers who flock to the market for the express purpose of hand feeding these birds of prey.

It’s unnerving.  There you stand in the middle of the square, surrounded on all sides by large, sharp taloned hawks who all have their equally sharp sighted eyes trained on you, just waiting for this oddly pale creature to make a move.  In your tightly clenched fist you hold a wad of sticky, raw, slightly warm camel meat.  The dry and heated desert air wafts over you, carrying with it the scents of the sand and the market and the metallic, animal smell of the butcher’s shop.  It should be easy.  Just hold your hand up and keep your palm flat.  It’s the same theory as feeding a horse a sugar cube.  Just try not to give it anything that it could accidentally try to rip off, like an outstretched thumb, for example.  It just wants the meat, not your hand. 

One deep breath, and up shoots your hand.  Eyes shut because you are ever the coward, you hear the sound of birds on the wing, the swooping sound and their ruffling feathers as they dive bomb you from their rooftop perch.  In an instant, the meat is gone.  There’s no blood as you look at your palm.  The kite was precise.  You smile, elated.  Never has feeding the birds been such a rush! 

Afterword: Funnily enough, after returning from Harar, I found out that this is something that happens in my town (Fiche) as well, though it’s far from intentional and certainly not billed as a tourist attraction.  On a few occasions, we have been sitting outside at the Anbessa/Abdi hotel on the outskirts of town when someone else sitting on the patio has decided to order tibs (fried meat).  Well, there are always some kites hanging around in the trees out back, and some of them have gotten into the habit of terrorizing the waitresses by swooping down and stealing hunks of meat off of the trays.  Unfortunately this is such a random and fast occurrence that we have yet to get photographic proof of it.

            ~Jessie

“Wet Dog Smell” is a Misnomer

Our current house has but one caveat, and that is that bathing has become an even more trying task than it was at our last house.  We get water an average of one time per week, normally very late at night on Tuesdays.  If we can fill all of our containers, we have about 85 liters that have to last two people the entire week.  That means 85 liters to drink, cook, wash our dishes, wash our clothes, and bathe with.  This list is written in order from the most to the least important, meaning bathing is often stricken from the list.

Oh, sure, we do still get to bathe in a limited sense.  We both make sure to wash our hair a few times a weeks, and wet wipes have become a very necessary purchase whenever we go to Addis.  Still, no matter how hard you scrub yourself with a scented baby wipe, it’s only going to get you so clean.

This, in turn, leads to a rather unpleasant phenomenon.  When you finally get the chance to head into your hub town (Addis for us) and take a real, hot, water having shower, you’re going to come to a gross realization.  The second that that beautifully hot water hits your head and your body, the smell that comes wafting up to your nose is going to be utterly rancid.  If you have ever bathed a dog, the smell is instantly going to flip a familiar switch in you brain, and you’ll find yourself thinking, “Wet ‘dog’ smell is a misnomer.  A more accurate phrase would be ‘wet mammal smell.’”

And on that putrescent note, I’ll leave you with one final Jeff Foxworthy-esq thought:

You know you’re a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia when you look at your arms and legs and think, “Hey, I’m getting a pretty nice tan” only to have it wash off when you FINALLY bathe.

            ~Jessie

The Sunday Ritual

After breakfast, which normally consists of hash browns or pancakes with a side of coffee, I prepare the most important thing for the next week of my life: more coffee.  Here you can buy your coffee pre-roast or even pre-ground, but I didn’t join the Peace Corps to keep acting like an American.  No, here I have to do things the right way, the old way, the local way. 

I buy my weekly half-kilo of coffee beans green and raw.  I scrub them off, pull out the debris, and rinse them at least once more for good measure.  Even at this stage, that faint aroma of this divine substance that I’ve been addicted to since I was 15 years old starts to leech into the air.  I take the first few handfuls and toss them into my non-stick pan that’s been preheating on my electric stovetop.  Then I sit back and continue whatever book it is that I’m currently working on on my Kindle.  Hey, there’s nothing wrong with adding a slightly modern touch!

After a while, I hear and smell the beans beginning to change.  Like most cooking, after you do it a few times you don’t really need to use your eyes as much.  I put down my book, currently the Sherlock Holmes anthology, and stir them around a bit, maybe adding a splash of water if it feels like it needs it.  Then back to the book.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

When at last the beans have taken on the medium roast qualities that I favor, I shake them loose from the pan and pour them into the old powdered milk tin that I store them in. Sticking your nose into that can, you’d think you’d died and gone to coffee addict heaven. 

In the background, I hear the soundtrack of Fiche.  Maybe today it’s the cock’s-crow of the Orthodox church’s priest blasting over those crackling speakers.  Maybe it’s the repetitive, washing machine “duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-dun” of some Ethiopian music playing at one of the cafés down the street.  Maybe it’s a few sheep grazing outside of our compound wall, bahing  in a way that sounds less like a sheep and more like somebody impersonating a sheep.  If I’m lucky, it’s the melodic drizzling of the rain on the metal roof of our house, and the rain has silenced all of the other sounds by driving everyone in town indoors.

On go a few more handfuls.  Down go a few more chapters.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

After four or five repetitions, I’ve normally eaten half of the day and roasted the entire half-kilo.  My repurposed milk can smells so wonderful that I normally spend a few minutes with it glued to my face at the end.  Then the lid goes on, and I know I’ve spent a productive day in the Peace Corps.

Don’t worry.  I promise that I’ll bring you some, and we can do this ritual together when I’m home this summer.  Goal 3 all the way.

            ~Jessie

ADDIS ABABA: I hate it....and I LOVE IT!!!

Ahh Addis Ababa… Whether you love it or hate it, you pretty much end up doing both in drastically manic phases from one minute to the next.  Addis, after all, is a city of extreme dichotomy. One minute you are drinking a liter of delicious German beer in a delightfully nostalgic German beer garden, and the next you are being a accosted by a crazy naked man or dodging herds of cattle on what were supposed to be the streets of Addis Ababa’s posh district (relatively speaking).

I believe I can speak for the moral majority of volunteers when I say that upon arriving in Addis for the first time, your first thought is something along the lines of “Wow, what a dump, yet somehow not as bad as I had imagined.”  Then you go to your training site, which in our case was Butajira. Then you adjust your previous impression and settle with “Ok, Butajira is a dump, and Addis ain’t all that bad.” THEN you go to your site, and your impression is readjusted yet again to “OK, my site is a dumb, Addis is beautiful, and Butajira ain’t all that bad.” However, we feel generally quite smitten with our site, and despite the fact that Butajira had more in terms of Western comforts, our site is actually a much more pleasant place to live.

Still, once in a while, most people based in the Addis area (this includes any site up to 4 hours away) feel that they just need a weekend in Addis to get away and decompress for a while. After weeks of chronic water and power outages, you need a least one night to scrub layers of dead skin off of your arms and use the internet. The city actually does have many of the staples befitting any modern city. It has chaotic but reliable public transportation, a decent cheeseburger, a modern movie theater, and several affordable options in terms of accommodation that have hot showers and possibly even wifi! For volunteers with deeps pockets or those who simply just need this regardless of the price, you can even go to the Sheraton Hotel which hosts a Sunday brunch complete with cheese, sausages, bacon, and limitless champagne. Addis has just about anything within reason. A taxi ride almost anywhere in the city won’t cost you more than about $10 with the so-called “white-price.” There are numerous restaurants serving all kinds of decent international cuisine such as Indian, Thai, Chinese, German, American, French, Korean, and even some of the best Mexican food I have ever had outside of Mexico.  Then again, I am no Mexican food coinsure.

Perhaps the worst part about Addis is the arrival and the departure, as we must go through the infamous Mercato bus station, which is something on which to be elaborated in another post. Addis Ababa is the most disgusting, wonderful, grotesque, shocking, awful, exciting, and extremely frustrating place I have ever been. I love to hate it, and I hate to love it.

-Donovan

Advice to Anyone Who Wants to Send a PCV a Care Package

I must start out this post by giving some credit where it is long overdue.  My mother, Shirley Hauge, is unequivocally the official winner of the unofficial care package sending contest.  Sorry to other PCVs, but this point is beyond arguing.  My mom rules, period, end of story.  Now, the point of this post is not to brag about how awesome my mom is (because she is).  The point is to give some sincere advice to people looking to send packages to their loved ones overseas.  If you pack your packages as well as my mom does, you will maximize the happiness that you are shipping to your beloved expat.

Tip #1-No Empty Spaces

This is the cardinal complaint of most PCVs I talk to.  You go to the post office, most likely expecting that it’s going to be another “nothing day” only to find to your extreme delight that there is a box waiting for you!  It’s suddenly a beautiful day, no matter how bad it was going before.  There are few sights as welcome before your eyes as that beautiful, red-white-and-blue flat-rate packaging.  Now, you know that no matter what’s in that box, you’re going to be doing a happy dance when you get it to your house/hut and tear into it.  Short of it being full of nothing but packaging peanuts, there’s no way that you’re actually going to be anything other than sincerely grateful when you tear it open to see what’s inside.

Still, there is something so sad about getting a 10 pound under the weight limit flat-rate box with lots of unfilled space inside.  These things are crazy expensive to ship (I believe the largest flat-rate costs $80-90 to send to Ethiopia).  PCVs understand that, and I think that’s one of the things that makes it so extra endearing and appreciated whenever we get one.  The point is, you’re spending money to send the empty space too.  Why not cram a few extra goodies in there to fill up the gaps?

One brilliant thing that my mom always does is that she takes stuff out of the original packaging.  If she’s sending us pasta with a sauce mix or some spices that we can’t find in country, she always takes them out of the boxes and locks them into two plastic baggies.  The double bagging ensures that they won’t spill and has the added bonus that you can then reuse the baggies to store stuff in.  It also makes it so that you don’t feel bad for producing a lot of extra packaging waste when you use your goodies.  It saves space and provides something useful and reusable.  As I said, BRILLIANT!

Case in point, here is a 19 pound package that my mom sent us.

Tip #2-Listen to What They Ask for

Another complaint I hear from other PCVs is that they often get items that are “off by one.”  Stuff like they tell their parents how much they’re missing dark chocolate and they get a Hershey’s bar in the next package, or they ask for hand-sanitizer and get antibacterial soap, which’d be great except for the fact that they only get running water at their site two times per week, so they really can’t waste precious water washing their hands, which is why they wanted the hand-sanitizer in the first place.  Don’t get me wrong; no matter what you send your PCV, it will be appreciated, but just keep in mind that when they ask for specific things, there’s probably a reason behind it.  There’s nothing wrong with asking them to send you a detailed email of things they need.  They’ll love whatever you give them, but they’ll appreciate it extra if it’s exactly what they wanted.

That being said…

Tip #3-Always Throw in Something Unexpected

Care package days are like a mini-Christmas, especially for Peace Corps volunteers.  As much as you want people to send you exactly what you asked for, there’s nothing better than the hidden surprise at the bottom.  Now, you know your PCV a lot better than I do.  Just think about it for a second.  What is that one thing (especially food item) that he or she has been missing but would never even think about asking for?  What’s that thing that’s going to drop his/her jaw and cause him/her to go dancing around their room for five minutes when they see it at the bottom of the box?

Here are some of the best surprises that my mom has sent us:

1) CHEESE!

A lot of people get sent Velveeta because their families assume that real cheese isn’t something that you can reasonably send them.  In the 2-4 weeks that it takes to get there, surely it will spoil.  Well, the time that my mom decided to send us literally 4 pounds of cheese, it took us about 4 weeks to get the package, one week of which it was probably sitting in the warm post office in Fiche during the height of the hot/dry season.  It was absolutely fine when we got it, not moldy, dried out, or spoiled in any way.  The key is to send hard cheeses that have been aged about a year.  It makes sense if you stop to think about it.  Cheese is already rotten from a technical standpoint, and we were making it for centuries before we came up with refrigeration.  My point is, if your PCV likes cheese and is in a country where you can’t really find it, they will LOVE this for a surprise.

2) Collapsible Kitchen Equipment

I have no clue where she found this stuff, but my mom found measuring cups and a full sized colander that are both made of silicone and collapse down into nothing.  I’d never even heard of these before I got them, but they are wonderful.  They are compact, and I can pack them anywhere.  I love baking, so kitchen equipment that makes it so that I don’t have to do the math to convert my recipes into metric is a godsend.

3) Chocolate Chips (a Costco sized Bag)

As I said, baking is something that I love to do, so these little guys (all four pounds of them) have been greatly appreciated.  They wind up getting consumed at a much slower rate than chocolate candies, so they keep the care package joy alive for longer.

4) Nerds Rope

There’s been one in every package.  It’s something I eat maybe one time per year when I’m home, but I turn into a giddy 6 year old whenever I get one.

5) Bacon Bits

We’re in a country that doesn’t do pork at all, let alone the nectar of the gods that is bacon.  She sent us a Costco bag of bacon bits that were consumed in less than a week.  ‘Nuf said. 

As I said, you know the things that’re going to make your PCV’s day.  Don’t hesitate to send them just because you think they might be a little past their prime when they get there.  Believe me, most of us already do highly questionable things when it comes to our food sanitation.  We’re probably eating three-day-old spaghetti that’s been left out at room temperature in an improvised tuperware container on the counter.  Topping it off with some shredded parmesan that’s been living in the same conditions is not going to hurt us.  It’ll just make the spaghetti that much more magical and delicious.

So, there is all of my care package related advice.  The number one thing to keep in mind is that you know what’s going to make your expat, whether they are a PCV, a member of the military, or any other foreigner living abroad for an extended period of time, happy.  That is, above all else, what you are shipping us: love and happiness, and we all love you for it.  Take care, and happy packing!

            ~Jessie