Road Rules

Despite ridiculously high car prices due to import taxes, Garrett and I broke down and bought a car a couple months back.  We bought a 1992 Suzuki Vitara that had been nicely dressed up by the previous owners in a Mercedes costume.

While it hurt to shell out the money upfront, I think it was a good investment (and as long as they don't drop the import tax we expect to be able to get our money back).  The car has allowed us to take a few trips outside of Addis and now provides me with daily transportation to and from the hospital, which is about a 30-40 minute commute depending on traffic.  It has not been as stressful as we thought it might be.  There is only one group of intersections where traffic regularly gets backed up.

At this intersection, I try to do my best to relax and listen to my podcast or music and not get too irate at the taxis or drivers that are trying to make 5 lanes out of 3 then cutting back in front of me.  Some days I am more successful than others.

In fact, before today, I would have said that there are no traffic rules in Ethiopia.  If you want to creae lanes, turn left from the right lane, drive the wrong way down the street or go around a traffic circle backwards, you are free.  Unfortunately, it seems the one area they really stick to their guns is the new No U-turn signs on Bole Road.  Good news, the fine is only about $7.50.  Bad news, what they lack in terms of monetary penalty they make up for in inconvenience.  Forget online or mail-in payments, payment can only be made at one traffic office in town.  And only after that is paid can I retrieve my confiscated driver's license, which of course will be at a different office.  Although to be fair, I cannot complain too much since after returning home, I just gave money to Tsegaw to sort it all out tomorrow.  And despite the frustration, I have to begrudgingly appreciate that the police followed the law strictly without any of the "wiggle room" that you often encounter in southern Africa.

Krempt Is Upon Us

Krempt is one of my new favorite Amharic words.  It is the local name for the rainy season that lasts from June until August.   I don't think it would be considered an onomatopoeia (although English was never my strongest subject), but the one word for me seems to encompass every description I have heard of the rainy season as cold, damp, muddy and a bit depressing.

That being said, the first few weeks have not been as horrible as the anticipation and descriptions.  While there have been some heavy downpours and rain almost every day, there have also been dry and even sunny times during most days.  If the downpours increase in frequency and length though I can see how things might get miserable quickly.  Below is a picture of the access road/river to the hospital where I work after only a brief heavy rain. We will see how it is holding up by the end of August.

Luckily, it seems our landlord has successfully fixed the indoor water feature we had in front of our fireplace for the last few weeks.  Every day we came home with our fingers crossed that the ceiling tiles had not fallen and converted our living room into an indoor swimming pool.

Now we just need to buy some wood for the fire place and we are ready to wait out our first krempt (at at least until we get to escape in August for our trip home).

A Little Party Never Killed Nobody

Garrett and I have decided we want to try to entertain at our place at least once every couple weeks.  It has been more difficult since I have started working, but so far we have managed to meet this goal.

The last two gatherings included:

1. Barbecue on the Downfall of the Derg Day, the Marxist regime that ended in 1991. We found out the day before that it was a holiday so it was a very last minute decision to have the party.  Garrett insisted that we needed a tent, which I initially thought was a bit extreme, but for $30, including delivery, set up and take down, how could you refuse a circus tent in your yard.   It was the perfect setting for our new Ethiopian tiki torches and my imported World Market lanterns.  Next time we will have to look into hiring the Addis Ababa circus.

2.  A brunch, inspired by Philadelphia Cream Cheese I found at the store, complete with a delicious egg scramble, pancakes, homemade bagels, fruit salad and an assortment of pork products, imported by our Irish friend Peter.  It took us all day to recover from that food coma.

Working 9 to 5 (and Saturday mornings)

I apologize for the long break in posting.  Gary and Sherry recently gave me an incentive to start again, so here goes.   We have a couple of months to catch up on so hopefully there should be a few more posts coming out over the next week or so.

The biggest news since my last post is that I am officially employed!  I am about to complete my first month at Bethel Teaching Hospital.  Unfortunately, I have failed to take any pictures so stay tuned.  Everyone from support staff to nurses to doctors have been really welcoming and while I have been working long hours, it has been great to get back into clinical practice.  I am hopeful that as I get used to the systems here that I will be able to get myself out of the hospital at more reasonable times.  Currently, I am primarily doing adult inpatient medicine.   It has been a great refresher considering I did very little adult medicine while in Swaziland.  In addition to the clinical responsibilties, I have also been named a visiting assistant professor for the medical school.  The first year clinical students started a couple weeks ago and we are just completing a short course in basic history taking and physical exam.  Next week they will start on their hospital rotations.

So far the thing that has made the biggest impression on me in my short tenure is the family support.  It is unlike anything I have experienced in the US or Swaziland.  In the US, you often had one, maybe two, visitors at a time and the visits were short.  In Swaziland, there would be a caretaker, often a female member of the family, who was there 24 hours.  In Ethiopia, every patient is surrounded by family from morning until night, including young and old, men and women.  It is not unusual to have to ask 5-6 people to leave the room so you can even get close to the patient.  Even when the patients have been hospitalized for weeks or months, there is not a day where they do not have multiple people at their bedside.  It is quite a testimony to the importance the culture places on family.

Fasting

Fasting, or self-restrictions, seem to be a common element among all religions.  The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is no exception.  In fact, it has a total of 250 days a year, which are supposed to be fasting, including every Wednesday and Friday. Currently, we are in the middle of a 55 day fast for Lent.  For the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, fast generally implies not eating anything before 3 pm and complete abstention from meat, fats, eggs and dairy products, basically a vegan diet.  

This seems, from my limited exposure, to be practiced widely and faithfully.  I have stuck my foot in my mouth a few times making what would seem to be very tempting offers, such as coca-cola before noon or birthday cake, only to be reminded of the fast.  This is such a large part of the culture that every restaurant has noted on the menu fasting and non-fasting dishes.  Luckily for Ethiopians, injera is acceptable during fasts!

House Warmed and Ready for Visitors

We have worked hard over the last two months to get our house organized and have finally reached a point where we feel like we can start to entertain again.  We have had a couple of dinner parties and last saturday we had our official house warming party.  Over the course of about 12 hours, we had about 30 new and old friends join us to celebrate our new home.  Tsegaw had the brilliant idea to rent tables and chairs.  So for less than $10, we got tables and chairs that we were able to set up in the lawn and enjoy the garden.  Now, we are getting ready to welcome our first official guest, Laura Plattner, a friend from Swaziland, who arrives tomorrow.  Book your trip now before it fills up!

Here is a quick tour of our nearly furnished house.

Our front patio now with grill and Garrett's great Mozambican chairs.

 Our living room with our Chinese couches, my little Baobab Batik chair and our Habesha coffee table.  This was made to order and a steal.  I did not even bargain, his first price was so reasonable.

The house was obviously built in the seventies so has a lot of character with its dark lacquered brick wall and lighting fixtures.  All of these little touches have become more endearing as this has become our home.

We found a young man, Nebiyou, in Piazza who crafted the dining room table for us.

We visited a number of different shops including one in a mud and stone workshop.  Where we saw first hand that all of this furniture is constructed with hand tools.  

Nebiyou was the nicest though and gave us the best price.  This has paid off for him as well because he did such a nice job and delivered on time that we have not only used him again, but gotten him other ex-pat business. 

Another Nebiyou creation are the cabinets below, which gave us much needed counter and drawer space.  We are still not sure what to do with that back corner, but we are discussing putting a traditional Ethiopian coffee table and chairs there. 

I am enjoying our new gas stove.  I have even gotten use to the big gas canister standing directly next to it.  It looks a bit excessive with six burners and a large oven, but the other ovens were tiny.  It was only after getting it home and having the delivery man run through the features with me, that I realized there is a rotating spit in the oven.  Who even knew this was a possibility?  Can't I just have another wire rack?  Guess we have some experimenting to do.

 Our bed and side tables were also made by Nebiyou.  It is the largest bed I have ever owned.  Garrett's feet don't even hang off the end.

 For our guest room, we ordered a bamboo bed.  This was our only bad experience with a carpenter.  It required multiple days of me calling and almost two weeks after his initial deadline for us to have the bed and both bedside tables.  The bed is fine, but the bedside tables are pretty crap and not at all what we agreed upon.  They were supposed to match the weaving in the bed and have a door below the drawer.  I paid him because I was ready to be done with him, but I kicked myself for it later.  We were happy to be able to get our mattress off the floor and it served us well until we got our new bed.

 Finally, our game room, which may some day be an office.

The house still needs some finishing touches, like hanging pictures on the walls and finding duvets for the beds, but it is already home!

Keeping Me on My Toes

I set out today to buy a blanket for our guest bed and a few more adapters for our electrical sockets.  This wasn't my first rodeo so I strode off confidently knowing exactly where I was going.  Only, since my last visit to this neighborhood, they had torn down an entire row of shops.  Because there were some stores already opened behind the original stores, it took me almost a entire block to realize that this large scale demolition had occurred.  I guess large piles of rubble on the side of the road no longer seem out of the ordinary so do not catch my attention.

This is a planned line on the light rail system that is currently under construction in Addis and scheduled to be completed in a couple of years.

Welcome Back, Mid-Twenties!

Normally, I feel like getting a new driver's license adds years to your life.  But here, although it was a multi-day, multi-stop process, in the end I left 8 years younger than when I went.  Birthday stayed the same, but according to the Ethiopian calendar it is 2005!

The stress of driving might add those years back pretty quickly.

Happy Hunting in Addis

Circling Addis are probably hundreds of the bird of prey seen below.  I believe they are some sort of hawk, but I am not a birder so am not sure.  

Usually you see a one or two solitary birds slowly circling looking for prey.  Occasionally, though, there are a large number circling the same area and you know there must be some big treat waiting below.   

I have never lived in this large of a city before, but when travelling have never noticed this in any city.  This has spurned a few conversations about why they are in Addis.  My thought was that with poor garbage collection, stray dogs, herding animals, etc., that there is plenty of food to support them so they stick around.  Although I don't remember noticing this in India, which would also meet a lot of those criteria.  Another friend was wondering if it has something to do with the mountain location of Addis.  Any birders who can help give more insight?

Recycling Tires

These young men are burning tires for use in construction of this small local road.

Recycling is good for the environment, right?  And these young men's lungs! 

Won't You Be Our Neighbor?

We have posted a lot of pictures of Bole road and some of our house (more to come as we are furnishing), but we have neglected to show you around our neighborhood.  So here is a quick tour hitting most of the highlights.

I think we managed to find the best of both worlds with our house.  We are two blocks from the main road with all kinds of restaurants and markets, but once you walk off the main road you enter this relatively quiet neighborhood with cute cobblestone streets.

We will see how it is when the main road opens but currently most of the traffic is foot traffic with people walking to work and school, men selling various products (see man with brooms and mops below), kids playing and occasionally sheep herding.   

Interspersed with the houses are many small business including kiosks selling a wide assortment of random things from food to cleaning products, pubs where we fill Garrett's cases of beer, our local tailor, and of course, the 24 hour massage establishment.  

We are both still trying to convince the other to go first and establish whether this is a legitimate massage place or more. The woman on the sign looks pretty relaxed! 

Photo of the Day #2

Before we left, a friend of Lani's told us something to the effect of "you can find anything you want in Addis, but you have to know where to look or know someone who does".  

The bathroom graveyard, guarded by sheep, is where you look for a lid for the toilet tank when you accidentally break one. I don't know where this was, but I know the shop where we met the young man, Hashim, who took us there.  

Photo of the Day

Kids taking advantage of the road construction for a flat place to play soccer. The pile of rocks behind them ensures no traffic, and the curbs keep the ball in play.

There's always something interesting to see on my walk home from work.

Amharic Lesson #1

We got a few requests today to help with the pronunciation of Tsegaw's name, so I thought I would help.  Before I get into it, let me preface this by saying that you're probably saying it right just reading as it's written in English. Reading further might just confuse you.

Maybe it's easier to just read it in the Amharic:

ፀጋው

No? Not so helpful?

Let me try a different way.  The first part is "Tseh", The Ts is really easy, like the "ts" at the end of "Mets" or "Jets." The "eh" is not "ay?" like a Canadian, just eh, as in "meh."  Similar to a-ME-rica.  For a little added fun, the "Ts" is "explosive" meaning you put your tongue on your front teeth and hold in the sound for a second before letting it out.  To write it, I think you'd write it TSegaw, I'm also seeing TZeh- written on the internet, if that helps with the explosive part, but it's not a Zzzz sound, it's definitely an ssss.

The -gaw part is just as it's written.  Gaw. Rhymes with caw, craw, maw, paw, you get the idea. No special emphasis here, just finishing the word.

So, TSE-gaw.

To circle back to the Amharic (the characters are called "fidels") it's:
ፀ Tse 
ጋ Gah 
ው Wuh
The "uh" is dropped at the end so it becomes a two syllable word.  Tse-gaw.

Erin and I are pleased that there don't seem to be any names like "Gcinaphi" in Amaharic, the explosive sounds are pretty much the only complicating factor, and we're both already getting passing marks on those sounds.

Hope that helps!

- ገራቴ and አሪን

P.S. Joe, I think I just successfully disproved your bet that I'd never write with this one! What do you owe me?

Is that a lawn mower engine in there?

A quick road side tune-up for Kassahun's blue Lada on the way back from rug shopping one day.  We literally pulled up to the curb in the vicinity of five other blue Ladas being worked on and his mechanic ran over.

No need for complicated electronic diagnostic tests here just a handful of simple tools will do.  

Tsegaw--The Guard-ener and So Much More

Before signing the lease each time we viewed our house, we would be let into the compound by Tsegaw, who was introduced to us as the gardener.  When we were negotiating the lease, Ato Taye, the landlord, told us that Tsegaw has been living and working at the house for 20 some years and is very trustworthy, but it was up to us whether we wanted to keep him on.  No pressure at all, right?  So we hired him. From the viewpoint of my sanity, this is likely the best decision we have made since coming to Addis.  He also seems to be friends with just about everyone in the neighborhood so if we had kicked him out of his house it might have been a rough two years.

His primary responsibilities are gardener, which when you look at our lawn or the fresh flowers in our house there is no doubt he has a green thumb; and guard, which we think mainly means that he is on the property the majority of the time.

He has done so much more than this though to help us get settled.  Every morning he is ready with a smile to help me tackle the many new questions I have come up with overnight.  It is so handy to have someone who knows the area and speaks Amharic on the property.  I have handed the phone to him countless times to explain how to get to our house, since I still have trouble even doing it in English.  He has patiently helped me navigate the city on all sorts of missions including visiting a carpenter, hunting for power strips, purchasing cases of Coke and beer (I will let you guess which case is for whom), getting correct plumbing parts to connect our washing machine, shopping for the small and large household necessities, carrying said necessities back to the house, filling a gas canister for the stove, waiting for me to try on a dress at a roadside store (a spur of the moment stop that is probably not a part of his job!), and countless other errands.

We have walked together for hours in the last few weeks with him occasionally turning to me asking, "you tired?".  The only time we have fallen out of step is when it comes to tight areas where we have to walk single file.  We both have the tendency to try to let the other person go first so we slow way down as we approach the narrow passage, almost coming to a complete stop, willing the other person to go first.  Tsegaw usually wins the standoff, but as soon as we pass, he catches up and we fall right back into step together.  

I was nervous before moving that it might be awkward to have someone here all the time, but we really could not have found a better person to hire or share our compound!  

A Piece of Grandma in Addis

One of the treasures I found cleaning out my storage unit at the end of last year was an old umbrella that belonged to my Grandma Higgins.  I have always loved this umbrella and while it seemed a little excessive I decided to bring it, justifying that while I would not use it 9 months of the year it would be very handy during the rainy season.  I never considered that I might want it more to protect me from the sun than rain.  The combination of proximity to the equator and high elevation means the sun here incredibly strong.  Now the umbrella has become my companion on my long walks during the day to run errands.

I do not know if there was a story behind the umbrella, but I have to imagine it was at least my Grandma's favorite considering it made the cut when downsizing from their two-story house to their two bedroom apartment.  Either way, I know that while she never expected it, or me, to end up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, she is cheering us along every step of the way!   

Amharic Lessons

Our Amharic lessons are progressing well.  We have a teacher, Mewael, through Garrett's office who is very good.  In his spare time, he  is studying electrical engineering.

We are enjoying trying to identify the Fidels and sound out new words although we feel like five year olds again.  There are 33 basic characters each representing a base sound.  Each base then has seven forms which changes the vowel sound that follows the base sound.  An example is Coca-Cola below.  The co (long first leg) and ca (long second leg) are from the same base modified to signal the different vowel sound.  The base has the legs the same length and is 'keh'.  The l- is a different base, but the same modification as ca, long second leg, making it la.  There are some patterns to the modifications, but also a lot of irregulars that just have to be memorized.

While there are not clicks like there are in siSwati, there are new sounds to learn.  Amharic includes "explosive" versions of the sounds t, ch, k, and p.  Garrett has gotten quite good at these, but I still struggle with them.  They also roll their r's, which despite years of Spanish I am still not capable of doing.  If only our internet was faster I would you tube it.

While we have obviously learned a lot from Mewael, my favorite Amharic lesson came at the hands of our taxi driver, Kassahun.  He had taken me to Ethio Telecom to get a new sim card.  We had just learned the word for 'I want', efellegallehu, so while waiting I decided to practice on Kassahun.  I said, "Sim card efellegallehu".  He was very pleased with me for trying to speak Amharic, but said, "Let's try again, s-im ca-r(rolled)-d".  Although I thought to myself that that was not the part of the sentence I was looking for help on, I dutifully repeated after him.  In Amharic, each sound that is written is said so this principal is also applied to English words.  He wanted me to say each syllable distinctly.  I guess I will have to work on my Amharic English as well!  

Cars, Trucks and Things that Go

It has been fascinating living so close to the construction of the new airport road.  It is better than a living museum.  I really feel like we are a part of the team, supervising the progress made each day as we walk to work or go on other errands.  Every day they are undertaking some new task and I suddenly find myself stopped, mesmerized as they build the wall for the underpass,

or start to construct the scaffolding that will support a bridge,

or as the earth shakes under my feet as a road roller drives by,
 

or as I try to figure out the best way to enter our local supermarket around all the construction equipment.  

Of course, it was not as exciting when the only entrance road we knew to our neighborhood suddenly became a huge hole the day our stove and washer were to be delivered.

Luckily for us, they have pushed up the deadline for completion of the road to May 2013 for the 50th anniversary of the African Union.  While I am enjoying the lessons on how to build a road, it will also be nice to have a reliable entrance to our neighborhood.