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.