In Michigan and other Midwestern states, a high school graduation tradition is slowing winding down. By July, most of the graduation ceremonies and fabulous open houses laden with meatballs, potato salad and barbeque are over but in Ethiopia they are still in full swing. School was officially over several weeks ago but graduation ceremonies continue. It’s not uncommon to see little children dressed out in black graduation robes and caps holding bouquets of roses as they proudly exit the school with their parents. Yesterday as Mark and I took a walk in the neighborhood groups of children held their precious diploma in their hands indicating they had passed to the next grade. Smiles and congratulations were heard throughout the neighborhood. Last weekend we were invited to the graduation open house of Kidist, our language teacher Paulo’s wife. Kidist graduated from Arba Minch University with a degree in elementary teaching with an emphasis in Amharic. In some ways the open house was very similar to a Michigan open house. Gifts of money are valued and appreciated and food is a key part of the celebration. With rainy season in full swing, Paulos rented a large military tent and set up benches inside for comfort.
Open House Tent
Loud upbeat Ethiopian music greeted us from a CD player with extra-large amplifiers. We took lots of pictures of Kidist in her graduation gown but that is where the similarity ended.
Kidist with her diploma
As foreigners we were treated to very special Ethiopian celebration food inside their mud brick home. Doro Wet is a chicken dish made with the basic Ethiopian ingredients of onions, tomatoes, garlic, oil, butter and beri beri spice. What makes Doro Wet different than other Ethiopian dishes is the extra spices that are added like cardamom, cinnamon, and nutmeg. You scoop up the delicious sauce with handfuls of fresh baked injera. After enjoying the meal sitting around the coffee table in the living room, we went out to the tent where an enthusiastic singer was entertaining the crowd with his guitar and songs. Later a very energetic preacher gave a lengthy sermon about heaven. As we picked our way back home over dirt ‘roads’ pitted with potholes and tortuous ditches gauged out by the heavy rains, we could hear the ominous thunder rumbling in the distant hills and were glad that Paulos had erected the tent for their celebration.
Abebe entered my life on my first day of ESL class. There were 10 students but Abebe caught my eye. His English was above average and his interaction with the class excellent. But there was something else about him…he seemed sad. After class I walked him outside and asked if there was anything wrong. He quietly told me that there was but he would tell me at another time. The next time we met for class he was there again. He walked with me up the long compound drive and told me part of his story. He was an orphan, his parents dying when he was quite young. He had been living with his father’s brother and his wife, but the aunt did not like him and was always criticizing him and beating him for any infraction. He couldn’t take it anymore and fled the home to live with some school friends. He needed some work to help with his expenses. Since we were in a new house and it needed a lot of outside attention, I hired Abebe to come and help me out. Little did I know that in the process of working with me, he would steal my heart.
Abebe planting ground cover
Part of Abebe’s story is way too familiar to me. My father was also an orphan. Both of his parents died during the 1917 influenza epidemic that killed an estimated 30 million people around the world. He and his sister were split up between aunts and uncles. He was taken by an uncle, a farmer in Missouri , who needed extra male help on the farm. My father was cruelly beaten by the uncle who expected him to be more of a slave worker than beloved orphaned nephew. He was able to finish grade 7 in school before he eventually ran away from his uncle and the farm. He only really talked in detail about it once to me, but his story seared my heart. Now here came Abebe… bright, kind, orphaned and in need of a family to love him.
My heart and Marks are huge for teenagers who need a safe place and someone to love on them. While I was in the states, he spent a lot of time with Mark, planting a garden and even playing a game of Scrabble with him. Abebe loves Jesus and often teaches small children in Saturday “Sunday” school. He prays deep prayers. He is a thinker and is sometimes way ahead of me and the other workers when it comes to ideas about designing gardens and pathways. He recently finished his 9th grade studies. I asked him if he was the first in his class, knowing how bright he is. He very humbly said, “No unfortunately, I am not the first.” “I am the third.” Well, third is pretty good in a class of 2000 students! In the fall we hope to get him into a private high school where he can finish grade 10 before moving on to the high school classes at the government school. We are seriously working on sustainable ways to make a difference in this very sweet boy’s life.
Texas was way too hot for this Michigan girl, but hanging out with my two kids, Betsy and David and my precious grandson was worth the heat. Jack David is now two months old and responding to people and hugs.
Jack and me
The plan was for me to take over in the home after Betsy’s mother Jill came back to Michigan. Betsy had two more weeks of school to finish and then home for the summer to be a full time mom. Each day Jack and I got up when Betsy and David left for the day. We went for early morning walks before the Texas heat simmered up to 100 degrees. Betsy left enough breast milk in the freezer and I kept busy making bottles, singing to Jack and preparing dinner. On the last day of school Betsy left class and keeled over with pain in her abdomen. By that night she was vomiting and the next afternoon we took her to an outpatient clinic and then on to the ER where they diagnosed gallstones in her duct and gallbladder. She was in so much pain. She was finally admitted to the hospital on Saturday morning and had two surgeries, one on Sunday morning to remove the stones from her duct and then on Monday to remove the sick gallbladder. She came home from the hospital on Tuesday morning before I had to fly out at 5:00 that afternoon. I definitely had more Jack David time than I anticipated, but was so very thankful that I could be with them during this unscheduled health crisis.
David, Jack David and me
Before the hospitalization they took me to Rosa’s to meet their small group…David pastors a Spanish speaking church at Antioch. Their friends in the church are so warm and friendly and just made me feel so welcome. Saturday morning we went out to an Anabaptist community where we ate breakfast in their lovely restaurant and then toured all of the buildings where they make textiles, grind flour and create beautiful furniture.
David, Betsy and Jack David
David and I took two trips to HEB, their upscale supermarket where I thoroughly enjoyed checking out all the new foods and ice cream labels. Yum. I think David would have bought me every ice cream that my heart fancied. We settled for some yummy Blue Bell peanut butter crunch and my favorite, Ben and Jerry’s Pistachio Pistachio.
The rest of my trip has been lovely catching up with my friends and family here in Michigan. By next weekend, I should be back with my loving husband!
With Mother’s Day fast approaching and no children around to celebrate with, we decided, along with Jackie and Duane Anderson, to make a getaway from Soddo and combine several errands into a mini retreat. The planned departure was Thursday morning. We were packed and ready to leave when Duane came to the door at 7:00 A.M. to inform us that we could not leave until Friday. The Ministry of Education, at the last minute, had decided to come to Soddo to inspect the hospital in regards to the PAACS residency program. Our administrator, Desalyn, wanted Duane here. That worked out OK for us for I had lots to do here.
The rains have begun and it is planting season. I have taken on the rather daunting task of working in the hospital flower beds and helping to direct our talented gardener, Degu and his new assistant Mogus. I say the task is daunting, because the gardeners have created so many flower beds, along each walkway and each building that they cannot possibly keep up with the maintenance. The beds have continued to get larger and larger with fewer flowers and more weeds. My goal is to tighten the beds so that we can maintain them and sustain them in the long dusty dry season. With that in mind, I wanted Degu, our gardener to accompany me to Addis to pick out plants for the hospital.
Our first destination was Addis Abba where Jackie and Duane wanted to purchase new furniture for their house. Jackie and I have this lovely unusual relationship. We both like the same things…books, colors, ideas, baskets, flowers, food, tea, exercise. I’ve never met anyone so much like me. They really liked our comfortable furniture and wanted something like it. We arrived in Addis about 5:00 on Friday afternoon and went straight to the furniture store. They shopped the store and ended up purchasing the identical furniture for several hundred dollars less…it was on sale! We shopped for staples at a nice grocery store and later ate out at a delicious Chinese restaurant run by a great Ethiopian chef. The next morning, Duane had lots of meetings and Jackie, Mark and I took off to get our errands done. Our hospital driver, Goucho and Degu, hired an Isuzu truck to carry the furniture and meet us at our final destination, Debra Zeit to purchase flowers for the hospital
We chose Debra Zeit for two reasons, the most important being they sold many flowers along the roadside and we would be able to purchase plants for the hospital flower beds. The second reason was that there were beautiful crater lakes with several nice hotels.
I love to garden; in fact, you could say it is one of my passions. Walking along the two mile stretch of flowers, shrubs and trees was a taste of heaven. The plants were healthy and cheap! For instance, I purchased 40 good sized hedge plants for .50 each. Geraniums were the same and palm trees were only $3.00. Degu and I shopped and shopped and he carefully chose healthy plants for the hospital. We sent him back to Soddo with the Isuzu truck and we went to our hotel.
It wasn’t quite the hotel we were expecting but the owner, a kind and chatty former nurse from Belgium welcomed us. We settled into two mud huts with grass roofs overlooking the lovely Lake Babagayo, a volcanic crater lake.
Lake Babagayo
The furnishings were rather primitive, but we did have electricity and hot water. We had a pleasant dinner sitting outside, enjoying the peace and quiet of the still lake.
Our African lodge in Debra Zeit
The peace and quiet, however, were short lived. In the night a pack of dogs and hyenas began a barking howling war that lasted several hours. At 4:00 A.M. the Orthodox Church turned on their loud speakers and we felt like we were right inside the church listening to the chanting in the ancient Geze language. By 5:00 the road outside our room was bustling with truck traffic. We thought about looking for another hotel but wondered how Jackie and Duane would feel. But the first thing they said in the morning was, “Let’s look for another place. We have no electricity or hot water and the bed is like sleeping on the floor.” It actually was. It was a mud bed with a thin mattress over the top. Ours was much more comfortable. So
Our mud hut hotel room
after a small breakfast we walked along the lake looking for another hotel. Eventually we found a lovely resort that was empty for Sunday night. It was right across the lake from our previous hotel. When we ordered lunch we discovered that the cook and hostess were Americans. She assured me that he would make me a real American hamburger and he did. So we spent our Mother’s Day relaxing in a beautiful Western style resort overlooking the water where I enjoyed my first tub bath since coming to Ethiopia! Unfortunately, the Internet didn’t work, so we had no contact with our children on Mother’s Day. That was a disappointment but the compensation was a delicious candlelight meal on the water prepared by an excellent American chef.
Breakfast at our hotel overlooking Lake Babagayo
Monday morning we left early to return to Addis and finish our shopping. But first, Jackie and I had to take one last look at the flowers. I decided to purchase a few more plants for the hospital (few meaning about 40!) and more for our house, including three rose bushes. We packed the shrubs on top of the van along with our suitcases and arranged the rest of the flowers inside the van. We headed to Addis where we had too many errands to accomplish by 2:00. We dropped Duane off for another meeting and headed into town to shop. As we headed into a round about the police flagged us down. Our driver got out of the car where the policeman chastised him for having plants inside the van! He gave him a ticket of 160 birr and kept his driver’s license. This meant that we had to pay the ticket and then drive back to the police officer to prove to him that we had paid the ticket so that Gaucho could get his driver’s license back! Two precious hours later we turned in the receipt and drove away with the plants still inside the van!
Justifiably, Goucho was edgy about the plants so after we finished our shopping for perishables, we repacked the van and loaded the remaining shrubs and plants on top. I put my foot down, however, with the roses. I showed Goucho that I would place my sweatshirt over the top of the plants to hide their existence, but I would not put the roses on top of the van to blow in the wind for 5 hours! We arrived back in Soddo about 8:00 Monday night, tired but also exhilarated to have so many new plants to work with.
At 5:15 A.M. the rains came in earnest, pounding the house with the unrelenting force of sheer water. We snuggled down in our bed and pulled the duvet around our chilled shoulders preparing for a cozy rainy morning in bed. At 5:55 the phone rang, jarring us out of our lovely respite with the rain. Mark quickly got out of bed and went into the bathroom to take the call. My end of the conversation went something like this: “How far dilated is she?” “How far dilated is she?” “How far dilated is she?” I said, “How far dilated is she?” “Is she crowning?” “Is she crowning?” I said, “Is she crowning?” “Crowning?” “What are the heart tones?” “What are the heart tones?” “Do you have heart tones?” He never raised his voice and continued to ask each question patiently over and over. As most of you know, I’m not near as patient as Mark and I wanted to scream from the bed, “What are the HEART TONES?” Our nurses are required to speak English, in fact, their nursing school is all in English but the unfortunate reality is that they really do not understand spoken English. The poor cell phone quality also contributes to the frustrating phone conversations. Mark put on his blue scrubs and walked into the living room. He slipped on his white coat that holds all the important things like his stethoscope and fetal doppler. I got up and turned on the bright fluorescent kitchen lights preparing to make the morning coffee. Mark opened the door into the dark morning and I heard him shout! “Uggh, get away, what’s this?” His arms were flailing as he fought off the hundreds of flying insects that had hatched from the hard rain. They were swarming and swirling into our house seeking the kitchen light. Quickly I quenched the light and he carefully opened the front door which I hastily closed behind him and he walked out into the dark rainy morning to check on a patient that he had virtually no idea what the problem was. He left me to fight the flying bugs swirling around my kitchen.
The bugs are about the size of a butterfly. They have four paper thin wings that remind me of the original biplanes. They flutter at a rapid speed for about five minutes and then crash to the ground where the wings fall off and the bug, about 1 ½ cms. long remains. The entire onslaught lasted about 15 minutes. I swept up the wings and bugs, made the coffee and just laughed at the sheer madness of our early Tuesday morning.
I stood outside on the balcony overlooking the lush courtyard watching the gray clouds rapidly move closer to the high school compound. The wind began to dance through the open doorway of the classroom creating a pleasant contrast to the earlier heat of the afternoon. Would it rain, I wondered? I looked over at the young man standing next to me waiting for the class to begin and I asked him, “Do you think it will rain today?” He thought for a moment and then said, “No, it will not rain. The wind will blow the rain away.” “Hmm,” I said. “In my country if the sky looked like this and the wind felt this way, it would definitely rain.” But thinking that he must know more about the weather pattern in his home country than me, we went into the classroom to begin the lesson.
The classroom in this private high school is rather sparse considering it is just that, a private school.
My classroom at Chora High School
One would think that since the students are paying tuition to attend this private school that the facilities would be a little more ‘up scale.’ The lab does have microscopes and there are working computers in the computer lab, but they are ancient. The long desks in the classrooms are getting rickety, swaying from side to side if one leans just a little too hard on the edge. The chalk boards are black painted wood. The floors are concrete and the windows leak. The hardest part about teaching in this school is the echo that my voice makes when I speak. Even if the room is full of attentive students, it is nearly impossible to hear the students speak. Ethiopians are traditionally quiet soft spoken people who rarely raise their voices. The contrast with the boisterous Cameroonians and Nigerians, the people we used to work with, is like night and day. When I ask a question in class I have to physically walk over to the student and ask them to repeat their answer. I just cannot hear them with the echo reverberating off the barren walls, windows and bare concrete floor. There are no books in the classroom, no bookcases, no curtains, no pictures on the walls….nothing to soften the stark concrete structure. To make matters worse, my classroom is on the second floor, just under the rooftop.
My class is supposed to begin at 3:30 when school lets out. But that is a reality that is not going to happen. The students need time to visit with their friends before coming to a special tutoring class for the national examination they will take in June. In actuality, my class usually starts at 3:50 and goes until 4:55. When I began this class three weeks ago I started out with 47 students. It has pared down to about 12, which is actually quite manageable when you are teaching English as a second language. We usually start the class with a warm-up activity and then repair a poorly written paragraph. After that we review old examinations. Ethiopian students are like just about any ESL student, they leave out the important little words like the, an, our, it and at.
Yesterday just as we were reviewing an old national examination the rain began. This was no normal rain, however. It started with big splotches against the window panes and then it began in earnest. Talking was impossible…the heavy deluge pounding on the metal roof just above our heads was deafening. The rain continued, pouring heavy water against the windows and muddying all the ground that wasn’t thickened by creeping grass. I tried shouting to be heard but even though they could probably hear me, trying to hear their quiet answers against the pounding storm became laughable. I had to admit defeat. It was 4:45 but I bundled up my papers, closed my backpack, erased the board and got out my umbrella preparing to exit. The students sat quietly at their desks. Did I forget to say something? Did I do something culturally wrong? Then I remembered. They have a custom here that my teacher friends in the states would love. Out of respect, the students wait for the teacher to leave the classroom before they get up. They never exit the door in front of me but always wait for me to pass through first. It is a nice gesture that I admit I’m enjoying. It is gratifying to teach and have the students listen and participate and seem eager to learn. Later as I was walking out of the compound trying to negotiate the slippery mud, two of the girls ran up to me and put their arms around my waist steadying my slipping feet. I held the umbrella high as we walked home together slipping and sliding and laughing in the rain.
Recently I wrote about the privilege of giving blood at Soddo Christian Hospital. As one friend wrote, in Africa we become the walking blood bank and it seems like the Obstetrics Ward drains most of our blood! The mother I gave blood to went home last week with her newborn baby girl after a stay of three weeks. She came in with a hemoglobin of 2.5, in preterm labor with severe malaria. I remember watching her little body scrunched on the bed, barely alive as she wrestled with the pain of labor and the struggle to get air into her emaciated body. Mark really doubted if she would live through the labor. He certainly didn’t expect her baby to live. But through prayer, God was gracious and she survived and here baby survived. I was able to pray with her several times during her stay and each time I entered her room she was smiling more and feeling stronger. We sent her home last week with new baby clothes and hat and a brand new mosquito net for her bed.
Allison posing with the mother and daughter she gave blood to.
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