| |
September 7, 2008
Letter #2 from Ethiopia
Dear Friends,
What a gift we have been given—by the PC(USA), by the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus ("dwelling place of Jesus"), and by you, our supporters! From now until January, our job is just to be full-time learners. Mornings are like a sabbatical, filled with language lessons reached by a taxi ride across the city. Afternoons are like vacations. We find it hard to believe that this is our job, just absorbing everything we can about this strangely alien culture! The pink paint blotches on the fat-tailed sheep mean they are for sale. Donkeys’ ears tilt forward when rain is expected later in the day. When you’re sick, it’s polite to say you are fine the first two times you are asked, so, of course, you have to greet someone three times to find out how they really are! Our job is to learn how to shop for bananas at one of the little stalls (“souks”) which line the streets, how to eat from the communal plate using only our right hands to pinch bites of lentil stew with the soft, flat bread called injera, and how to sleep through three different creeds broadcasting services across the city at all hours.
We are slowly learning to see beauty. Robin chats, little gray birds with bushy, white eyebrows, come to the crumbs we put on the kitchen windowsill. Kites and vultures perch in the tops of trees, nearly level with the windows of our second-story apartment. Some mornings, after a heavy thunderstorm has cleansed the sky, we can clearly see the forested hills that ring the city. And the faces around us are beautiful, rushed or relaxed, smooth or furrowed with age. Gazes tend to be direct, even from children. Some faces look like cats, with pointy chins and huge eyes. Some look like weathered ebony. We can hardly wait to hear their stories, so our lives right now are given to studying Amharic, the national language, as a gift both to our hosts and to ourselves.
Question: What language is spoken in heaven? Answer: Amharic. It takes all eternity to learn.
Amharic classes are fascinating. “Blue” means “sky-colored,” so to say “blue sky” you say “sky-colored sky.” “Brown” is ‘coffee-colored,” and “orange” is the word for the fruit, just like in English. If you would like coffee with no milk or sugar, you order it “empty.” While learning greetings (which are very important here), Lora and I discovered that we are too old for the typical masculine and feminine greetings. We are entitled to the genderless greetings for highly-respected elders. At first that seemed funny to us, but when you remember that the average life-span here is about 48, it loses its humor. By Ethiopian standards, we really are old!
Gender changes depending on how you feel about an object. If you say “noisy little boy,” that’s masculine, but if you say, “sweet little boy,” that's feminine. If two men are good friends, they say “hello” using the same greetings they would use with women. So, if something is small, cute, or much-loved, it’s feminine. (I thought French was strange, where “milk” is masculine and “mustache” is feminine, but at least French genders always stay the same!)
There are two phrases for thank-you. The first translates as “praise God.” The second, more complex one, means, “May God give back to you what I cannot.” This phrase is what you use to say “thank you” for something you really appreciate. For instance, the other evening the electricity went off and Ato Teferri, our principal, called to see if we were OK. Were we comfortable, all alone in the creaky old classroom building where the windows bang in the night wind? Did we have enough candles? “Yes, we're fine.” And not only that, we were touched that Ato Teferri was worried. “May God give back to you what I cannot.”
Not all the learning is fun. The fancy form of “thank-you” also turns out to be what you can say to the omnipresent beggars. Christian beggars thank you for the blessing and move on. Muslims frown; since they use “Allah” for “God,” this is obviously a Christian blessing. Kids just try again, practicing their English by moaning, “Hungry, hungry, give me money!”
Last Tuesday afternoon we heard a big boom and Lora looked out the kitchen window to see a large cloud of black smoke billowing in the air a few blocks from our compound. It dissipated, drifting west across the clutter of corrugated roofs punctuated by water tanks and minarets. We shrugged, figuring that it was a gas line or a kerosene tank, just one more thing that we would never understand. The next morning, though, Voice of America reported that it had been a bomb in the area called the Mercato. Four people were killed and 24 wounded. The Mercato is a huge maze of narrow streets and crowded shops. Some call it the largest outdoor market in Africa, some the largest in the world. Our taxi comes through it every day on our way home from language school, and we had passed that way about three hours before the explosion. The next day we received an email from the U.S. embassy pointing out that this event was similar to a Mercato bombing last February and advising U.S. citizens to avoid the area. When we explained the warning to Seyoum, our taxi driver, he replied, “No problem. There are many streets to use! But why did they do that? These are just poor people, they have nothing! They just want to ride a bus or a taxi and shop for food! All Ethiopians ask, ‘Why, why?’” We agree with Seyoum. Some people feel that violence is justified, and it’s the poor who suffer. With all our study, there remain some things that we will never understand. Please hold in your prayers both the victims and perpetrators of violence around the world.
Please allow us to reassure you that we feel well-cared-for here. Though we are completely ignorant ourselves, between the church and the embassy we have two lines of communication to warn us of danger. Both sources agree that this sort of random violence is not targeting foreigners, and that if we vary our daily taxi routes and avoid the Mercato from now on, we'll probably be OK. Please remember that if you ever hear a worrisome news item about Ethiopia and you'd like to check on our safety, you can call Lacey Gilliam in the Africa Office at (888) 728-7228, extension 5817, for any updates. And if for some reason our messages cannot get through, remember that Ato Teferri will be calling us in the night on your behalf.
One more note on Amharic. The verb “to record” is also the verb “to pour.” That's what we are doing here. We are recording for you our descriptions of Addis Ababa, pouring out our experiences in this bewildering place. Quite frankly, we find it a hard-to-love city. But we are grateful for the God-given opportunity to grow in so many ways, including even the painful challenges of learning about beggars and bombs. Thank you for granting us this incredible gift and for keeping us in your prayers.
May God give back to you what we cannot.
Love and peace,
Lora and Bruce
The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer &
Study, p. 223 |
|
