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. 

Lake Langano

We’ve been in training for 10 weeks now and to say that G9 is exhausted is an understatement so our day trip to Lake Langano could not have come at a more perfect time. I can feel myself slowing down and losing motivation and when I talk to other trainees they feel the same as I do.  This past Thursday, Peace Corps treated us to a break for the day, to Lake Langano. The lake is about an hour and a half from Butajira. We all got up early and walked over to the hotel where our buses were waiting to take us away for the day. When I woke up that morning, I heard exactly what I was afraid of, the rain. No! I just wanted one free day. But oh well, at least we were getting away for the day. As we got on the buses the rain came down harder and the buses had to wait in the parking lot for an extra thirty minutes to avoid the bad roads. What a great start to our day. The entire way to Lake Langano it rained. But as we pulled up to the gate to the park, the sun came out. It felt like a miracle. And it was warm. As the day went on, the weather kept getting better with the clouds moving away and letting the sun shine on our skins. Lake Langano is the only lake in Ethiopia that our Peace Corps doctors have told us we are allowed to swim in so many trainees took this opportunity to go in for a dip. I did lay out and welcome the heat from the sun. My shoulders and my face are now red, but I am not complaining. It feels good to finally get a full day of sunshine (I can’t wait until this rainy season is over). So for the entire day, I got to lay on the “beach,” I use the word beach here loosely, and marvel at the beautiful landscape while listening to music, and just hanging out and having fun with the other trainees. We have less than 2 weeks left until we swear in as Peace Corps Volunteers and I feel ready and determined to finish these last few days of training. Peace Corps planned this trip at the perfect time, I think they knew what they were doing when they scheduled this, I mean, this isn’t their first group of trainees.

 

Practice English Club

Part of our training this past week involved doing a practice English club. Since the majority of us will probably have some kind of English club at our assigned schools, our education team thought it would be a good idea for us to get some idea of how to conduct one. In our language groups (the group that we have Amharic class with) we were told to pick a focus for our club and an age range for the children. Next, we had to pick children from our neighborhood to come to our club where we would meet at our language teacher’s house. We’ve been here 2 months now so many of us have gotten familiar with the neighborhood kids. As a group, we decided to pick children ranging from ages 8 to 12. (We tried to get kids that were at about the same level in English).

Our club was to meet on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for one hour each day. As a group we thought it would be a good idea to have an environment day. Keeping the environment clean does not seem to be a major concern here seeing as how trash is dumped everywhere around the neighborhood. Many people in our kebele burn their trash and the materials that do not burn get dumped in the gorge which is unfortunate. For these reasons we thought it would be a good idea to teach the children about why they should keep their neighborhood clean.

On our environment day, we started with a discussion on why we shouldn’t throw trash on the ground explaining that the trash can get in our water and is dangerous for our bodies and how harmful it is to all the animals that graze on the land. We then split the 12 kids into teams of 4, each one of us leading a team. Each team had one trash bag and had to pick up as much trash as possible within 10 minutes. I wasn’t sure how much the kids would enjoy picking up trash, but to my surprise they were so excited and really into it (it probably helped that we made a game out of it). The kids were running around the dirt streets picking up all the trash they could, some even getting into the prickly bushes to grab what they could find. It was great to get to see the children understanding our lesson and being excited about keeping their home clean. We then got back together as a big group, decided on a winner, did a quick recap of our lesson, and were left with 4 piles of trash…what do we do now?

We started off with a great idea, but obviously we didn’t quite think it through. Yes, picking up trash and learning about keeping the neighborhood clean was great, but what were we supposed to do with the trash we had collected? So that’s why people are dumping their trash into the gorge and burning it. There’s no other option. Realizing that we had four big bags of trash and nowhere to put it was extremely frustrating. We had had such a great idea, but now had no clue what to do with it because we for sure weren’t going to throw it into the gorge and burning it releases awful chemicals into the air. I’ve never cared much about the environment. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think trash should be thrown on the ground but to be honest, back home I didn’t recycle all the time and I’ve never taken environmental classes or just ever been into it. It’s just never been my focus. However, standing there with all of that trash felt terrible because I knew that there was no good option to get rid of it and I suddenly became angry, angry that we use all this stuff and then just dump it somewhere.

Furthermore, there is no trash pick-up here in Butajira and there is no recycling, but the system we have going on in the United States isn’t perfect either. We don’t see a lot of the trash in the US because it gets dumped in places we don’t see or know about. A lot of our trash gets dumped in Africa. So if we leave our trash for Africa, where are the people in Africa supposed to dump their trash?

So what did we do with our four bags of trash? Well after about 20 minutes of bouncing ideas off of one another, our boss was driving through our Kebele. We asked him what the Peace Corps office in Butajira does with their trash. The PC office is located in Kebele 3 and there is a trash pick-up there as he informed us. You pay a man about 10 birr and he comes by with his donkey-drawn cart to pick up the trash. But just because he picks it up doesn’t mean the trash is taken care of. He just takes it somewhere outside Butajira and dumps it. So our boss took the pile of trash out of our hands to the PC office where we didn’t have to worry about it anymore. However, I’m still frustrated about this. In that moment I realized the importance of using reusable material and recycling because there is no good way to get rid of all this trash. And there are a lot of materials, such as Styrofoam, that you can’t ever dispose of, so we should stop using and making such items. My job title may be teacher trainer, however I have the freedom to start projects outside of this and veer off in different directions. As I said earlier, I’ve never been one to do much to take care of the environment because the truth is, I’ve never had to deal with it. In America, we have people who take care of our trash for us. They take it away and we never have to worry about it. We don’t know where it goes and honestly, it’s easier not to know. Well I’m where a lot of the trash ends up, in the Global South. And here in Ethiopia, people do not have the luxury of having a trash system that takes cares of all their crap for them. So I’ll be thinking of some sanitation projects for Butajira and teaching my teachers and students about caring for the environment because we can’t keep this up forever.   

My current/future site

About three weeks ago I found out where in Ethiopia I will be living for the next 2 years. Of the 57 education volunteers in G9, I will be the one chosen to stay in Butajira (our current training site). I’m not going to lie and say that I was thrilled when I found out the news. We found out at our site ceremony where everyone’s site was revealed one by one. I was so excited the morning of site ceremony to find out where my future home would be. One by one, a site was described and then the name of the trainee who would be stationed there was called. An hour and a half later, it was time to reveal the last site. We all knew that one person would be staying in Butajira and since my name was the one that had yet to be called, everyone knew it was me. I wasn’t excited because Butajira wasn’t anything new to any of us sine we’ve been here eight weeks already. So I was a bit disappointed because while everyone got to go off on their site visit and discover a new part of Ethiopia, I would be staying where I was, a place that everyone already knows about. After asome thought however, I realized all the positives that there were to staying in Butajira.

For one, and probably one of the most important things for most volunteers is I have internet!! That’s more than a lot of volunteers can say about their sites. Some volunteers don’t even have regular network in their site so I’m very thankful for the internet. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to contact everyone back home for 2 years, but I got lucky and that won’t be the case. Another positive is I’ve already met so many people in Butajira. Many people know who I am and I have several children who call me by name when I walk down the street. Several volunteers have come up to me and said that their host families were so excited that I would be the one staying in Butajira. So that makes me feel really good. Next, I’m only 2 – 3 hours from Addis Ababa. So if there are ever any items that I’m missing or foreign foods that I crave, I can always hop on a minibus and spend the day in Addis. One G9 volunteer found out that her site was 2 days away from Addis!!!

Also, even though I do not have a site mate and so will be the only volunteer here when training is over I’ve been told that Butajira will probably be the training site for future trainees. So I will get to host G10 and G11 when they arrive next year and show them all around Butajira. Also, many G9 volunteers will come back to visit their host families throughout their service so I will get to see them as well.

Furthermore, when I found out where I would be place I was upset because I wouldn’t discover a new part of Ethiopia. G9 however, has been dispersed over 4 regions in Ethiopia so I have plenty of people that I can visit over the next 2 years. Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, and SNNPR (Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region). The name of this region correctly portrays how culturally diverse the area is. There are 9 regions in Ethiopia however about half of those regions Peace Corps does not work in and has told us not to visit for safety and security reasons. These include the Afar, Somali, Gambella, and Benishangul regions.

Butajira is located in SNNPR. SNNPR represents some 45 different ethno-linguistic groups. Most of the historical sightseeing destinations are located in northern Ethiopia however SNNPR is of primary interests for its natural and cultural attractions. There are several beautiful lakes along the Rift Valley floor and several National Parks for viewing wildlife. Butajira is located at the base of the Zebidar massif in the Gurage Zone. Butajira is beautiful. Since it is rainy season everything is green and lush. When the sun comes out you can see the stunning and impressive mountain range that surrounds this town. Based on the 2007 census, this town has a population of a little over 33,000 making it a middle sized town for Ethiopia. About 50% of the population has reported being Muslim, 30% practice Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity (I’m hoping to learn more about this type of Christianity while I am here), and 8% are Protestant.

All in all, I’m happy to be spending the next 2 years of my life here in Butajira. When the sun is out this town is gorgeous (dry season, aka, sunny time, lasts from mid-September to June so I’m excited). I’ve also  met some amazing people and started to form some wonderful friendships. I hope these facts shed some light on my home for the next 2 years.    

Market Day

This past week was our site visits so while all the trainees traveled to various regions to visit their site, I stayed in Butajira where I will be for the next 2 years. Since I am already familiar with the town, it was a pretty relaxing week for me. I was able to get some much needed rest. Also, it was nice not having all the trainees here so that I could start getting used to being here by myself. Each day I walked around Butajira and discovered areas I hadn’t yet visited and did all the necessary tasks for site visit. I met the directors of the three primary schools and some of the English teachers that I will be working closely with. I visited the administration office as well as where I met the head of the education office, the head of the financial department and the mayor. I also went ahead and set up a bank account and a post office box (so now I can get my monthly allowance from the Peace Corps and receive letters and packages!!). All this of course was with the help of my community liaison, a member of the community who Peace Corps asked to help show me around town and meet the right people.

By Friday morning I had finished all the tasks Peace Corps had assigned for me to do throughout the week. When I got back to the house my host mother was getting ready to go to the gabaya (the market) and asked if I wanted to come along. I was hesitant at first and here is why. These markets can have several hundred people in them at once, so PC has warned us about going to markets on such days just because it can feel a bit overwhelming and hectic to foreigners in the beginning. Furthermore, my first experience in an Ethiopian market had been a bit traumatizing. On our first weekend in Ethiopia, G9 traveled to the sites of current PCVs on what PC called demystification trips. The goal of this four day visit was to demystify any preconceived ideas we had about PC life. Our group got to our PCV’s site on a Friday and some of the girls wanted to visit the market. It had just rained so it was extremely muddy and we had to be careful wherever we stepped. There were also six of us so that brought a lot of attention. Everyone was watching us as we were trying to walk through the market and many kids were following us, pointing and laughing. I kept telling myself to look at the ground and watch where I was going. It didn’t take me long to fall right on my butt, in the mud, in front of a huge crowd of people. My pants were covered in mud. It was quite embarrassing. Safe to say after the four days I had been demystified.

Likewise, on this day that my host mother asked me to go to the market with her it was Friday. In Butajira, Friday is market day. I’m currently reading a book on Ethiopia and right after writing my first draft of this post I read a passage that was discussing this very topic. Donald Levine explains that, “… all parts of the country have developed local markets which as a rule meet once a week.” On market day people from nearby towns and villages come to sell and buy their produce and various other items. Levine goes on to say that, “Interconnections among many of the peoples of Ethiopia through the system of local and regional markets must have been established as far back as two thousand years ago.” Markets here in Ethiopian are an important aspect of Ethiopian culture and history.

Back to my market experience, after some thought I decided to accompany my host mother to the gabaya. I was nervous about going because there would be so many people and I would attract a lot of attention being a foreigner however, I’m going to be here for 2 years so I’m going to have to get used to all the staring and pointing that I get. And I’m going to have to buy vegetables when I live on my own because I need to eat. So it was smarter for me to accompany my host mother and learn about the gabaya and how it works then to try it out on my own once training is over.

Even though the gabaya is in Butajira it was a long walk so we took a gari. A gari is a horse drawn carriage! Don’t imagine anything fancy (I’ll try to get a picture of one and post it to a future post). It’s one possible mode of transportation here in Butajira. This was my first experience on a gari and I enjoyed it. It’s a nice change from all the walking I have to do. We took a gari to the gabaya. The gabaya is located in an open field closer to Kebele 5 (My host family lives in Kebele 1). People set up in the morning. There were hundreds of people there. Donkeys are also found everywhere in the gabaya sitting on the ground. They carry the items to and from the gabaya in huge sacks on their back. Sellers will lay out a tarp on the dirt/mud ground and lay out their items. You can find sellers sitting on their tarps next to their products. Some of the produce you can find here includes beats, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, lettuce, and carrots. All of these are used in different delicious Ethiopian dishes (I will dedicate an entire post on the amazing food I’ve had here in the future. The food alone deserves its own post!). Different spices are sold as well as coffee beans. You can also find clothes, shoes, some cooking items, and hand woven baskets. On another side of the market are the chickens which you can buy and take home with you live. Their feet are tied together and people carry them by the legs, upside down until they get home, where they become doro wot (Ethiopian chicken meal…delicious!). To a foreigner it all seems pretty unorganized however my host mother knew exactly where she was going and had no trouble getting her produce so there is a structure to the market that I haven’t gotten yet, but hopefully as I get more experience I’ll understand the ins and outs of the Friday gabaya.  

In the end I’m glad I accompanied my host mother to the gabaya. I got much less attention as a foreigner being with her then when there’s an entire group of us walking around. I got to see how one goes about buying the products and when and how you have to bargain for a good price. I’m not sure if I’m quite ready to go to the gabaya by myself, but I definitely feel a lot more confident about it then I did after my demystification trip. 

The Ethiopian Classroom

                As I’m sure many people can imagine an Ethiopian classroom is not at all the same as an American classroom (speaking strictly about public school in both countries). For my practicum teaching I was in a primary school in Butajira and here are some of the things I observed:

1. There is no electricity in the classrooms so when it is cloudy or even worse, when it storms it gets very dark (I had to teach on one such day and it does not create a great learning environment)

      2.  The roof is made of tin therefore when it rains it gets extremely loud and you have to yell for the students to hear you. Usually when it rains most of students stop paying attention to the lesson.

      3.  Some of the classrooms had no doors.

      4.  Each classroom had an old and used chalkboard – writing with chalk is not simple. First, it is messy and     gets all over your clothes. Second, if you’re not careful when you write your arm can erase part of what you wrote before. Third, chalk breaks easily.

5    5.  The desks are all very old and small. They are long rather than wide and I have seen up to four students at a single desk.  

      6. The floors and walls are cement. Some of the walls are not painted so it looks more like a prison and the floors are extremely dirty. There are no janitors here so the classrooms and the school compound never gets clean.

      7.   Many students will come to class without paper (or what they call their exercise books) or something to write with. During practicum we were told to kick students out if they did not come prepared. I partially understand this. This is school so students have to come prepared to learn however I have the feeling that some of them could not afford a pen or exercise book. The few materials that I saw were in terrible condition.

        8. Students’ level of English ranges from not being able to speak, write, and comprehend the language to being able to understand all the teacher’s directions. This range exists in all the grades we taught (Grade 3 – Grade 8) making it challenging to plan lessons that will help all the students.

Peace Corps gave us one flip chart paper and two pieces of construction paper (half the size of the flip chart) each day. Our supplies did not make it to the end of practicum so we had to get creative and reuse some material, use the flip charts from our previous lessons, write on the back or cut parts of the flip chart that hadn’t been written on. At first it was a bit frustrating because how were we supposed to plan a creative lesson with visual aids with so little supplies. It was an important part of practicum however because there’s a good chance that when we get to our sites we will have fewer materials than the little bit we received for practicum.

I have a newfound respect for teachers after getting a taste of all the work that goes into lesson planning. And even after lesson planning there’s no guarantee that your class will go according to plan. I’ve found that even with a good lesson plan, there’s a good chance that the Ethiopian students will not understand me. I’ve had to repeat directions and rephrase my explanations the best I could because the students did not understand my English. Sometimes I had to think of a whole new lesson within the first ten minutes of class and pretty much throw my lesson plan out the window because the students had no idea what I was teaching. In some of my other lessons I had the opposite problem where I found that students already knew everything I had planned so I pretty much had to improvise there as well. Basically, when you’re dealing with any classroom you can never be exactly sure of how well it will go so it’s good to plan extra material just to be on the same side. Also, these were not our students and we were only with them for a short time so it was difficult to assess their level. I’m hoping that when we get to site we will get a better taste of the level of our students and therefore plan accordingly. I’ll definitely have more to write on this topic when I get to my site and start working. For now practicum teaching is over. What started off being the scariest part of training ended up being the most help full. I have learned a lot about the education system in Ethiopia. For now, G9 is going back to workshops with the Peace Corps Education training team.

This little girl was in the 3rd grade class that I taught. When the bell rang for the end of class she came up to the board and wouldn't let me erase anything until she copied every last word.

Me teaching a 5th grade class

Part of the school compound 

This is an awesome tree in the school compound that I had to get a picture of

Teaching Little Ethiopians

Last week, G9 began practicum teaching and what started off being the most nerve racking thing I have done thus far in Ethiopia has become the most exciting thing and the happiest I have felt in country. Our group has been dispersed over three schools in Butajira. Last week we co-taught for 3 days with a fellow G9 member. This week we have been solo teaching one section and observing a fellow PCT for a second session. We’ve had to make our lesson plans and make sure we timed our classes correctly (50 minutes). We took the lessons from the student textbooks, but had to make them our own. Our training has taught us that the textbook objectives do not often match the level of the students, therefore we had to adapt out lessons to the classes we were teaching while at the same time making sure that the new objectives we had come up with matched the Ethiopian curriculum. Each day we switched classrooms giving us the opportunity to teach from 3^rd grade to 8^th grade. I was so nervous on my first day. After the 2 hours were over however (with the co-teaching the first week we taught 2 classes), I felt a huge rush of happiness. I did it!! Yes it was difficult and yes it did not go as planned, as I had been told it wouldn’t however I was so happy to have gotten through it with no major catastrophes. The children were so excited to have an American teach them English for that afternoon session that truthfully it didn’t matter too much how well the lesson went.

So here’s why practicum has made me feel so much joy… 

Thus far, to say that pre-service training has been stressful is an understatement. Ever since we arrived in Ethiopia I have felt so many emotions and gone through so many moods it would be too complicated to try to describe to anyone back home how I am feeling, but I’m going to give it a try. First, living with a host family is challenging. My Ethiopian family is wonderful, but they are of a culture very different than my own and so the integration process gets frustrating. Second, our medical sessions can get stressful because the Peace Corps doctors are keeping us informed of all the sicknesses and diseases we could possibly get if we are not careful. Third, there are our safety and security sessions where we are told to constantly be on the lookout and watching our backs because we can’t trust anyone. Fourth, we have daily language sessions that are crucial to our integration process because if we can’t speak the language, it’s going to be an even more difficult two years. All in all, it’s a lot to process at once.

With all these stresses however, doing practicum for the past two weeks and having our technical training sessions puts all those stresses and fears away. I’ve enjoyed teaching and lesson planning and it makes me so much more excited to get to my site. I’ll be honest, having to go through all the challenges I listed above makes me wonder at times what I’m doing here, but going through practicum has gotten me excited all over again about working in Ethiopia. The students loved having us as teachers, and to find out that I’m able to get the students focused and attentive for a lesson is such a rewarding feeling. There may be tons of challenges around me, but it feels good to know that I’m going to enjoy my job and that teaching can completely alter my mood, in a positive way. When we go for our technical sessions on training Ethiopian teachers, or when we get to teach as we did the past two weeks during practicum all those stresses seem to disappear.