Part of the field that they cut

I keep getting lots of questions about day to day life and I want to take a post to tell you what my life is like now.  To give you an idea, while I was working on lesson plans in my apartment while the deluge of rain, thunder, and lightening was happening, I watched three Ethiopian men cut an entire field of grass around one of the buildings on campus with a sickle. It took several days.  It is a big enough area that I would have wanted a riding lawn mower or tractor and it could have been done in an hour.  The concept of time is just a different thing here than it is in the U.S.

Dryer controls

I live in a two bedroom apartment (see pictures below) that I share with an Ethiopian teacher, Dawit.  It is pretty minimal by U.S. standards, but it is comparable to an apartment I had when I was in college.  There are challenges here in construction standards.  There are no OSHA regulations.  You will see workers hundreds of feet up in the air on construction projects with scaffolding made from eucalyptus branches.  They aren’t wearing harnesses or taking any safety measures. It is very dangerous.  The building standards are also nonexistent.  I have open wiring in my bathroom near the shower. And I had to laugh in the kitchen when, although there is space for the refrigerator, they neglected to put a power source so the refrigerator is in the living room where there is a plug.  The kitchen has a cooktop and I have a convection microwave for baking but the directions for it are in Dutch so I stick with microwaving when I need to heat something up.  The communal washer/dryer for the complex is also in Dutch so I just randomly push some buttons until it works and hope for the best.

Breakfast foods

When I get up in the morning, Dawit and I might go for a run or I might do some yoga.  Running three miles at 8300 ft altitude is definitely good for my body and my lungs.   After my workout, I stretch and then have some breakfast which usually consists of a hunk of bread with honey or peanut butter and a piece of fruit.  When I need a pick-me-up, I switch to the Ethiopian version of Nutella in place of the honey or peanut butter.  Lunch is noodles or rice with some vegetables.  Dinner is whatever someone cooks which may be Ethiopian food or western food or we might go out to eat.  We eat a lot of pasta.  My favorite thing so far has been the shiro.  The local beer and wine isn’t too bad either.

Abandoned horses

I have pretty much become a vegetarian.  When you see the meat hanging in the shops, just out in the air with no refrigeration or sanitation, it is really hard to think about eating it.  I see goat herders corralling goats for slaughter and I saw a group of pigs today rooting through the trash when I was out on my run.   I think one of the things I am having the most difficulty with is the way animals are treated.  When a farm animal has served its usefulness, they are abandoned on a street to starve.  I have watched these horses that were left on a street just obediently stay there day after day and get skinnier each day.  I know that one day, I will go by and one will be laying there dead. The worst part is that there are hundreds of abandoned animals such as that.  I have seen them kill a rat at the produce stand where I was shopping and that same day, we walked by a dead human body on the side of the road.  Ethiopia is 173rd out of 187 countries on the Human Development Index.  There are lots of challenges here.

Dawit’s way of looking at life and his understanding of Ethiopian culture is helping me adjust.  He reminds me a lot of Matt.  Dawit is the chemistry and biology teacher and we work on lesson plans together.  He was born in Ethiopia, then migrated to Ghana before being educated in the states but has now come back to Ethiopia to work.  School starts next week.  Dawit gave me the best compliment I have received in Ethiopia.  When I offered him a rain jacket to wear, he told me I was very open with sharing my resources.  I told him that it was just “stuff” and wasn’t important and that he was welcome to use anything of mine he needed.  He told me I had an “African soul”.   I thought that was pretty cool and I am getting a pulse on what that really means to be able to write a blog post about it someday.

I typed this out on my computer in my apartment so that I could go to the internet café and post it because our internet line was cut in one of the construction projects and the government hasn’t fixed it yet (it has been several weeks).  Of course, I had to wait for the deluge of rain to stop before making the dash down the road.  They keep telling me that the rainy season will end in 3 weeks… I don’t believe them.

Cheers to everyone and know that I am well.   Following are my apartment pictures.

Apartment from outside. I live in a unit on the bottom floor