Site Announcement

Coffee ceremony before site announcement

Our language instructors doing the native regional dances



The PCVs joining in the fun...not me!



My site info...my town is listed, whoops!! Wasn't supposed to show you that



Where my town is located in the Tigray region of Ethiopia



A couple of PCVs that trained w/ me in Menagesha (Kathryn & Bridget)



My counterpart & supervisor. The taller one is my counterpart Gebremedeem. Kiflom is my supervisor



My friend Wayne having fun in Addis

What’s up guys! I know it’s been forever since my last post, sorry about that. I had no internet access the last 6 weeks of training. Then the 1st few weeks after training were very hectic, so I didn’t have time to post. I currently have wireless internet, so I can post anytime I want now. At least I thought. I had no luck for over a month trying to post on blogspot. I did keep a journal the past few months, which I’ll just copy & paste the next few days w/ the corresponding photos until the blog is caught back up to current. I hope you enjoy it, I’ve experienced a lot the past few months.

Before I start on the post topic I want to acknowledge a few things from my last post that have improved.  My host mom FINALLY started serving me more than cold shiro & potatoes for lunch & dinner.  It happened by accident, the last time she served it I ate just a little & told her I wasn’t hungry.  She thought I was sick & started preparing different dishes the next day.  The meals are still cold, but at least it aint shiro.  They cook outside w/ a very primitive coal stove, & it’s cold at night & in the mornings, so by the time I get the food it’s cooled off.  I get hot tea & macchiato every day, so that makes up for the food a little bit. Also, I’ve found a solution to taking ice cold baths…sponges.  I soap up water in a pitcher, dip a sponge in & lather, then I use another sponge & dip it in clear water & rinse.  It’s still cold, but no where near as bad as pouring ice water directly on me.  I can now officially wash my whole body w/ 2 very small pitchers of water.  I can wash more than twice a week now, which is good since I play soccer every afternoon after language training.  Menagesha is a nice town for the most part.  It’s rocky & on the side of a mountain, which is rough on your feet and ankles, but the residents have been fairly nice so far.  Some of the other PCVs had a few harassment issues in one of the other training sites that is more than twice the size of ours.  Menagesha has a little less than 15,000 people, so it’s fairly rural.  They don’t see foreigners much so we get a good amount of attention.  Especially the white volunteers.  Children will holler “FERENGIE!!” all the time, which means foreigner.  They say “you, you, you” or sometimes they call them “china, china” as well. A good amount of Asians are in Ethiopia doing construction, so it’s a blanket name for foreigners. In our case they’re just trying to get our attention & want to meet us & shake hands. When you shake hands here you shake w/ your right & hold your right elbow w/ your left hand as a sign of respect. When you get to know someone well, you shake w/ the right & bump right shoulders lightly. It’s the Ethiopian version of the American bro-hug, where we shake & hug w/ the opposite arm. Really, there are TONS of cultural things I can talk about, but I feel like if I keep writing about my experiences so far, they will gradually come out & after a while this fully formed picture of Ethiopia will develop. One more quick note on hand shakes. Children want to shake & hold our hands ALL the time. Which is cool, until you look at their faces & they all have mucus mustaches & snot bubbles permanently lodged in their noses. The elders aren’t much better. Nose picking is an art form here, & they don’t just hit the front tip of the nose, they go knuckle deep. I watched my host sister scratch her brain the other day, which turned my stomach b/c she also prepares my meals. Anyway, all that being said, the other volunteers & I have incorporated fist bumps instead of hand shakes, to keep our hands clean. It’s actually taken on quite well.

OK, now on to the post topic.  The PCVs were excited & on edge all week b/c of site announcement.  It’s when they tell each volunteer what town in Ethiopia they are going to serve for the next 2 years after our training is completed.  I didn’t stress it at all.  My strategy was to not have any expectations, that way I wouldn’t be disappointed. I didn’t even study up on any of the regions, so I wouldn’t develop a preference for any particular area.  The landscape, climate, & environment of Ethiopia is very different depending on the region.  I’m currently in central Ethiopia just outside of the big city, Addis Ababa.  It’s warm during the day, mid 70’s, and cold at night, mid 40’s.  There is a lot of agricultural & cattle farming in my area.  My host family has cows & chickens of their own.  The main crop, not counting coffee, is teft, which is used to make the injera that’s served w/ every meal. It looks a lot like wheat, which is grown here as well. Another difference in the regions is language.  The national language is Amharic, but in the southern region of Ethiopia Oramifa is spoken most, while in the Tigray region up north, Tigrinya is the common language.  This means that depending on where we get placed, we may have to learn ANOTHER language as well as Amharic. This was one of the main concerns of the other PCVs b/c Amharic is already tough.  On the language scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the easiest & 5 the most difficult, Amharic was rated a 4.  Oramifa is supposed to be easier, while Tigrain is tougher than Amharic.  The site announcement process was pretty cool. All the PCVs were brought into Holeta, which is where we all meet for group training, since the 20 of us are spread across 3 towns.  It’s only about 10km from Menagasha.  Seven of the PCVs are already staying there w/ host families, while the last seven are staying in a town called Addis Salym. Before the announcements we had popcorn w/ tea/cofee, or in Ahmaric, shai/bunna.  Then the language instructors played music from each region of Ethiopia & did that regions native dances. The PCVs joined in, which was cool. We actually had a crowd of Ethiopians peeking in the windows checking us out. They were laughing w/ a “wow, these are some no rhythm having ferengies” look on their faces. After the dancing our sites were announced.  I was assigned to, drum roll please… ok, here‘s the deal. I recently discovered I can‘t actually list my site location on a public blog for security reasons. Sorry guys, Peace Corps rules. I‘ll email the town name to whoever wants to know. For now, we‘ll just say town T! Which is in the Tigray region. It’s a midsized town by Ethiopian standards, about 34,000 residents. That also means I have to learn another language. I have since found that Tigrinya & Amharic are fairly similar, w/ a lot of the same words & alphabet. They say Tigrinya sounds like the cookie monster speaking Amharic. It’s definitely not a romance language. The sounds are in many ways similar to Arabic, which is cool since I have some experience w/ that language. I also will only learn Tigrinya from now on, which is a relief that I don’t have to study 2 languages at once.  The only issue is I’ll be living in Menegesha for the next 2 months where everyone speaks Amharic. My host family speaks Amharic & Oramifa, so I had to explain to them as best I could that I was finished w/ Amharic & now moving to Tigrinya. That was tough b/c I currently speak Amharic like a caveman, “ME AMHARIC DONE, SCHOOL TIGRINYA NOW!” I think they got the point though. Since Tigray is up north, it’s a warmer & dryer climate, similar to Arizona or Texas in the states, which is cool w/ me b/c I like warm weather. Not far east of my town is the Danakil Depression. I was told it’s the lowest elevated & hottest land on earth. There is an active ground level volcano there as well. That should give you an idea of how warm the climate is. T is a little cooler b/c it’s over 6,000 feet above sea level. Since this post is running long I’m going to talk about my site visit in another post.  After the announcements, 2 days later we were sent to Addis Ababa for training w/ our site counterparts…our counterparts are local residents in our sites that are basically going to be are coworkers for the next 2 years.  I’ll get more into them in the next post too. We stayed in Addis for 4 days, then went to visit out sites for a week to get acclimated to our new homes. I'll post that experience soon. Buhala! (later)