The Ethiopian New Year

            Ethiopians follow the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar that Americans follow. This means that there are 13 months instead of 12, each one lasting 30 days and the 13^th month lasting only 5 days. September 11^th is the Ethiopian New Year. The Ethiopian calendar is also 7 years behind the Gregorian calendar which means that on Wednesday September 11^th, I celebrated the first day of 2006! Kind of strange to wrap your head around and be celebrating the New Year in the middle of September, but hey, if I get to celebrate the New Year twice in one year I’ll take it. More holidays for me.

            My host family was so excited for the holiday. Unlike us in the states, Ethiopians do not stay up until midnight and countdown the New Year (at least my host family doesn’t). Rather, they celebrate all day on New Year’s Day. My host mother woke us all up early on Wednesday morning. While eating breakfast they turned on Ethiopian music really loud and started dancing. Then, we all got dressed, my mother and sister in their traditional Ethiopian dresses, and headed over to my host grandmother’s house. Most Ethiopian families typically go from one family member’s house to the other to celebrate the New Year. Also, with holidays comes a lot of meat, however since the New Year this year fell on a Wednesday and Wednesday is a fasting day for the Ethiopian Orthodox church, we saved the chickens for the following day.

            I learned something about family on that day. It doesn’t matter where in the world you live, what culture you are from, what you believe in, or what traditions your family practices. At the end of the day family is the same everywhere. After lunch at my host aunt’s house, the family got into a heated discussion (all of this in Amharic of course, but it doesn’t matter what language one is speaking, you can usually tell when people are arguing). So the whole family got into a heated debate, disagreeing with one another about who knows what. Before I knew it some were crying, when twenty minutes earlier they had all been dancing and laughing. Well, twenty minutes after the crying they were all dancing and laughing again. This reminded me of my family. Our holidays are a mix of emotions as well and it wouldn’t be a holiday if there wasn’t laughing, shouting, crying, and more laughing. So I realized that yes, my Ethiopian family does things that my French/American family has never done. They eat foods that I had never heard of before this, they dance differently than we do, listen to different music, kill animals in the backyard when they want to eat meat, and their concept of time is completely new to me, but family exists everywhere and it doesn’t matter where you are from, at the end of the day family is the same across diverse cultures. At first glance we may all seem very different, but we have much more in common than we think. The Ethiopian New Year reminded me that we are not that different after all.