Of Christmas and Good Neighbors

Merry Christmas! We're sitting in our get-away house in Addis, enjoying the small pleasures of Space Cadet Pinball and the hit drama adventure Lost. Our socks still hang on the fireplace mantle, suspended by black electrical tape. And our ingenuity with the socks did not go unrewarded. Santa left us one birr, worth about a dime. We're hoping for another birr for his return on the official Ethiopian Christmas, Jan. 8.

The birr notwithstanding, it enough of a gift to rest after a long week in the Awashbuni village, the community about an hour south of Addis where we will spend most of our time. We played the part of second-generation homesteaders over the past week, tidying our mud house and drilling a well for our water.

 

Before we left for Awashbuni, when we first arrived, we spent a few days in Addis buying supplies and running errands, which sent us driving throughout the city. Our area of Addis appears to be under permanent construction. It's as though a construction crew began building an edifice a dozen stories high, and then said, decisively, "We should try to repair the street." Yet after immediately abandoning the building and ripping up the road, the construction crew - unburdened by logic and perspective - said, "Hey, we should build another building," immediately abandoning the road and starting a new building, and repeating the cycle. Thus incomplete buildings, dozens of stories high and with no apparent construction crews, grace every other block, and every other street is blocked off by construction crews ripping us adjacent streets.

Fortunately, Joe Stocker (our host and well driller extraordinaire, who has been in Ethiopia for a year now) has at his disposal a beaten Landcruiser with the gear power necessary to climb trees. Thus we were able to scale the piles of rubble and drive over what might, some day, be a road. Neither does the shortage of roads and abundance of construction hinder Addis' mass of people and vehicles. Cars charge and dodge each other like pedestrians running on a crowded sidewalk, and pedestrians on the actual sidewalks stand in front of street-side shoppes as though bumper-to-bumper.

Beyond those errands, we let our jet lag dissipate during our first couple of days in Ethiopia, at the Getaway house. Joe Stocker and a few others have rented the house. Ben (from St. Louis, Mo.) and Pepo (from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), a recently married couple, are two of our housemates. Well, three technically - Pepo is expecting and due in April. Anthony and Amber also live at the house but we have yet to meet them. Both are in the United States at the moment.

The house is also somewhat staffed. Ayo cooks for us. She cooked for the house when the U.S. missionaries who rent out the house still lived in it. And Haile is our guard. He is 26-years-old, and he was raised in a small village outside Addis, where his family lives. Such is all I gathered from our conversations, from his smatterings of English and my complete ignorance of Amharic, the dominant language of Ethiopia, most used especially around the capital. Haile went with us to Awashbuni on our first visit there, to see what we would need and to test our plaster.

Awashbuni

If passengers on a bus, on a southerly route away from Addis, yawned at the appropriate time, said passengers would never see our little community, Awashbuni. Even if they did see it, they would not know what they had seen. The town is not marked. It's scarcely a school and a few mud houses beside a major southern highway, with the rest of the community living in the distant fields, accessible by dirt back roads. Nevertheless, it's our home for the next few months, and we've done our best to make it feel as such.

We painted the mud walls with a thin coat of white plaster, hung a dining table top from the rafters (we didn't have the table's legs), organized the shop (a container with our tools and pipes), installed a new door and set up a bunk bed. We did not do this alone. Our neighbors, our landlord and his sons, and the gang of boys that hang around our house all pitched in one way or another.

So many come by every day that I'm beginning to understand our area of Ethiopia as being an extrovert's paradise. At first I thought that everyone came simply to see the new neighbors, to see what the farenge (the white foreigners) were doing. But then one sees everyone out and about in groups, conversing on the side of the main highway, and when one realizes that every errand (such those we engaged in to take the carpenter looking for tools to install our door) becomes a social occasion, a chance for deep and involved conversation with shop owners, one suspects a deeper, cultural influence in the constant stream of visitors.

We even had a sort of house warming coffee ceremony during one afternoon of painting. An evangelist who works in the area and a school teacher and another guy, all of them non-Orthodox believers, brought over some coffee beans, water, a coffee pot and some porcelain cups. They roasted the beans, pounded them into grounds and served us three boils of coffee arabica. Later that week we went to a market place and bought our own coffee set, so now I make the coffee in the mornings by the same ceremony. On Christmas Eve, Pepo and I had a boil off. She did the coffee ceremony in the afternoon, and I boiled in the evening. The judges (Jeremy, Joe and Ben) were gracious enough to call it a close match, although Pepo clearly won. No worries. I have several more months to practice.

Our most frequent visitor is Haile, not Haile the guard, but Haile the school teacher, the school teacher who was present during the house-warming coffee. Haile, one might notice, is a popular name. It was the name of the last Emperor before the Communist Derg. Who would not want to name their child after the Emperor?

Haile helps direct the school down the highway and teaches chemistry there, as best he can with few supplies, he says. For now he has been our language teacher, instructing us in both Amharic and Oromo, the local language.

We're also indebted to Haile for his hospitality. He invited us to eat at his homestead, where he has several cattle, a bee hive for honey and a large field of teff. Teff is a grain used to make injera. And injera is a sour, flat, spongy bread which looks something like a flimsy tortilla used to grab the food of most traditional dishes. Beneath the circular thatch roof of his circular mud house, Haile brought us injera and a cup of curdled milk mixed with chili powder. We dipped the injera in the mixture - which tasted as good as it looked bad - and read the newspapers on the walls. Yellowed pages listing old Russian stock exchange prices, British tabloids describing the latest Tony Blair scandal: all such old newspapers are used to wallpaper homes in our area.

As for our usual meals, we're on a steady diet of rice, french fries, beans, eggs and sardines. However, we often eat in the nearby town of Tulubolo, at the Millennium Cafe, where we engage in a special ritual: we ask for the menu, point to items on the menu, understand from our waitress that every one of the items in question are not available, and end up ordering a fried egg sandwich and french fries, affectionately known as "chips."

The meals have nevertheless sustained us well, and next week they will be put to the test again - we have some catching up to do on our well. In fact, we lost our well. Joe had been drilling several days before we arrived and we drilled a couple more days, using the Landcruiser's wheel to pull rope for us since we don't have a full crew. And the day before Christmas Eve, we found that the hole had caved in, and we had left the drilling rig in the hole the night before, so we lost the hole and the drilling rig.

 

But we're a tenacious bunch here at Water For All; we've lost rigs and holes before. And good cheer in the face of such circumstances feels appropriate when you have two Christmases to celebrate.