KABOOM!

In advance of the election, we’d been advised that it would be wise for us to stay in our home the entire weekend, just in case.  After having been cooped up in our little mud house for two days straight, we’d finally had enough.   We decided to venture out to our favorite watering hole to have a couple of beers to commemorate the beginning of the last week of classes.  After all, this is Fitche.  Nothing ever happens here.  The streets had been dead calm and quiet all day.  One beer, what could it hurt?

We were walking back down the darkened street when suddenly BOOM!  We turned back and saw a series of small explosions lighting up the night in the exact spot we had been standing only moments prior.  It looked almost like someone was setting off some white mortars (the fireworks, not the other kind), except that they were way too close to the ground.  Suddenly people came streaming out of the shops nearby, running in panic down the street.  As the small explosions continued, the lights on that half of town suddenly shut off, leaving us all in darkness.

Turned out that one of the regulators on the power lines had just chosen that exact moment to explode.  The power came back on about 30 seconds later, and we continued walking home.  Like I said, nothing ever happens in Fitche.

~Jessie

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