Christmas 2013 in Addis Abeba

It didn’t look like Christmas at all, today, December 25th! 

Apart from the flowers in our garden, that is. 

 Robert went to work and I had the carpenter to instruct about where to bore holes to hang Rob’s pots with Geraniums, make tea for them (The carpenter and his assistant are making a small chest and and make the curtains for the dining room.  

But first of all I had to store the kilos of Ethiopian Kái Wott (the base for a lovely sauce) that Beletech made for  me. She made a whole bucket of it and it didn’t fit in the freezer compartment.  The wott consists of 10 kilo’s onions (mashed), 4 kilos of tomatoes (mashed) and this toghether cooks for a whole day until ¼ of its volume. Then you add Berbere, a dry spice made from lots of hot red pepper, dried, garlic, ginger, an Ethiopian spice that I don’t know, both the black and white variety. Beletech took me yesterday to the ‘mill’ where they ground the mixture into the red powder called Berbere. It was an adventure in itself, waiting in the line of women, each bringing a bIg sack (or two) with their particular homemade mixture.  

Any way, when I completed the curtains around 15:00 I went to the GYM around the corner to rehabilitate my body (I am growing ‘vadsig’ – a good Dutch word for being not fit and a bit overweight in the wrong places). I am so happy to have a Gym around the corner! 

Now I am listening to beautiful Christmas music  (Cantique de Noel, sung by Jose Carreras) and  it – finally -  gives me the Christmas feeling.  Rob and I had a simple Christmas dinner:  leftover spaghetti with a sauce of stewed beef, cabbage and berbere.  With new curtains, made of traditional handwoven cotton, that turned out quite all right.

Then we recalled all the Christmases we celebrated during the past 35 years, where and with whom, in Nigeria and  England (with Lindsay and Jeremy) in Hawaii with ‘the extended family’, in Canada, with Bart and Megan and Megans family, in Burkina Faso with Marjan and Frank, in Liberia with Roberts' parents and mine! In Jordan with Rob’s mum and her friend Sanne, In the Netherlands in Son with my family and in Renkum with Meike’s Hawaiian friends. Good memories, all of them!  We also thought of you, our friends and family now celebrating Christmas somewhere in the world. May light shine upon you.

And suddenly this evening there was internet connection again. So I managed to talk to Bart, Roberts’ brother in Canada. Even though it was short, it was good to be in touch. Megan’s mum died last week, and somehow  we are more connected than usual.

…Man will live for everymore… because of Christmas day… 

Goodbye and good luck Veronika

Today, Saturday night December 21^st, Veronika left, after having stayed  4 months with us. Veronika is a very interesting young Tsjech lady, doing her masters in Wageningen. She was here for her internship and lived with a farmers family in the countryside of Haile Mariam for several weeks, to learn out about collaboration and also how farmers associations  work. In the picture she is sitting between her 'hostfather' and her good friend Mamis, the translator, in the back of our car on the way home for a reunion. 

At the same time she got involved with artists associations in Addis Abeba, by which she got some very good friends, who also visited her in our house, so we also got acquainted with them. She has become a very dear friend, almost like an extra daughter, especially since  there are some similaraties between Veronika and our daughter Meike.

This  last day Veronica took me to several interesting shops to help her decide about presents to take home. We went to this shoemakers’shop. Amazing! The guy started 2 years ago and now has a well running business. All leather shoes, custom made, by hand. He copies fashionable models and makes them your size and colour, and – for European standards – very cheap. Of course I ordered a pair.

This Saturday afternoon, when Veronika was packing, she invited us to come to the front door to meet someone. This someone appeared to be her gift to us:  he looks like a shaman, but according to Veronika he is an angel, protecting our house, see picture. One of her artists friends made it from recycling materials. We are very happy with him and are already missing Veronica.  

Roberts project LAUNCHING WORKSHOP

On December 17^th Robert had organised the project’s launching workshop, in the Harmony Hotel (what’s in a name?). 

I was also invited and that was a great pleasure! The Canadian Ambassador was there (being the biggerst donor), the Ethiopian minister of Agriculture, since the project is part of a country wide programme for Sustainable Land Management, and the director of KfW, the German Development Fund that also contributes and steers the project on behalf of Canada. Most of all I liked to meet with the project coordinators in the three different areas, Bahir Dar and  Mekelle north of Addis and Oromya, just south of Addis. They all speak  very good English and got their masters degree abroad, so it was a pleasure to talk and exchange ideas. Not only about sustainable agriculture, but also about politics, life in Ethiopia, their children etc. 

The workshop (about Sustainable Land Management, SLM) was very interesting and very succesful indeed and Robert got quite a few compliments for the organisation of it all. 

Sinterklaas in Addis Abeba 9december 2013

On december 8th our Dutch Sinterklaas party was celebrated at the Dutch Embassy. Sinterklaas arrives usually two weeks before his birthday, December 5^th,  in the Netherlands and on the evening of the 5^th he and his black Peters distribute presents, through the chimney, to children that have been good this year. In many families it is a custom that you give each other presents, but more important than the present is the poem that accompanies the present, saying something about the characteristics of the receiving person, or about silly mistakes he or she made.  Instead of a poem you can make a characteristic disguise for the present, imagining something the person would like to have but cannot get. I once got a clock from Sinterklaas (my dad made it) with 20 hours in it instead of 12, because I always had so much to do, that I was always running short of time. 

Anyway, we went to the Embassy, also because we had been celebrating Sinterklaas here 24 years ago, in the same compound, with at most 16 Dutch and half-Dutch children, amongst which our own. I can’t describe you how different it was this time. 

At the entrance there was no way one could avoid the colourful beer-bar, there were a hundred Belgian and Dutch children and their parents and there was a lot of noise:  Sinterklaas songs were broadcasted, a bit too loudly for our ears ( but maybe we get old!). 

The children were asked to get ready for Sinterklaas, but they were only interested in the sweets: pepernoten. Robert and I looked behind the scene, where Sinterklaas was getting ready and that was fun!  There was the old embassy building, not any more in use now, and the garden we remembered, where I taught the 8 Dutch children Dutch on Saturdays.

We had the pleasure to meet the now grown-up children of our friends: Gertjan Becx ( his parnets worked here at the ALERT lerosy hospital 24 years ago)  and Harm Haverkort, son of my intervision group friend Bertus. This next generation is continuing the good work!  Time to talk with the Agricultural attaché  was pleasant and useful too.  All together a very pleasant afternoon. 

Fieldtrip!

From Tuesday3 till Thursday 5th December I  was  invited to join the Meta Meta team on their field trip to the South, direction of Awassa.  3 guys, two of them Spanish, one Dutch. We stayed in a hotel in Arsinegelle, a nice provincial town, relaxed, compared to Addis Ababa. 

The hotel was clean, good bed, cold and warm running water (which we haven’t got at home yet) and it cost 170 birr per night, which is the equivalent of 7 euros. Amazing! 

As I concluded earlier: there are two financial circuits here, one for the rich and one for the poor, the majority.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the trip:  Diego driving  us – in an old non air-conditioned, dust catching Lada that didn’t get faster than 80 km an hour - through the beautiful countryside. There were rich areas, rich from an agricultural point of view, with many stacks of recently  harvested teff, the main food crop here. 

In one area  they grow wheat in an almost English looking country side with scattered big trees.  There were a few combine harvesters at work. Quite a contradiction with the dry and less fertile Acacia landscape near lake Langano.

My reason to come along was to learn more about the sustainable agriculture projects that are going on here. The project Ruben Borge is working on, soil improvement with a mixture of rock dust and organic compost instead of the very expensive chemical fertilizer  NPK, will be in the English version of my book THE WHOLE WORLD, on which I am working presently. 

We visited an Ethiopian model farmer who had an integrated farm with everything in it: a fish pond fed by the chicken dung of the chicken pen hanging over the water, an irrigated vegetable and fruit garden, a biogas installation which provided his family with compost and light and gas for cooking; saving wood! Next to that he grew wheat and barley. His son spoke English quite well, impressive!

We also visited Dutch flower exporting farmers. Actually, you can hardly speak of farmers, they are businessmen with hectares of greenhouses. To my surprise they were more sustainable, both socially and environmentally, than I had expected. Their problem was how to compost  their green waste, of at least 3 truckloads per day.

the photo to the left is of an Indian herb farm; red basil. he exports to various european countries, also fresh mint.

I will continue later, have to go now. 

Visit to Fistula Hospital and Hamlin College of Midwives

On Tuesday november 26 the ‘broads-abroad’ women’s group assembled in front of the Phistula Hospital for a visit. We appeared to have parked  in front of the neigbours’ quite beautiful house where a Dutch family lives. So I had a pleasant introduction to Mirjam, about 10 years younger than I am and we got on very well. Her husband is the defense attaché at the Embassy.

The Fistula hospital has been started by Australian gynaecologists Catherine and Reg Hamilton in the 50ees to help the usually very young women (14-18 years old) out of their dreadful situation.  The problem is this:  when a young girl gives birth to her first child, sometimes  her pelvis is not mature enough or too narrow.  The baby is in the wrong position or too big, the labour is obstructed. The family members who assist in the birthing process press her to continue pushing, in order to get the baby out, because that is what they know from experience. After up to 4 or 6 days of pushing, the baby dies and the young woman is exhausted. This is already bad enough. The village doctor sometimes takes out the baby in pieces. After that it appears that urine and sometimes faeces is just running down the womans’ legs. This is due to a fistula'  that developed due to the endless pushing: an open connection between the uterus and the bladder or between the uterus and the colon. Of course the young woman doesn’t know what has happened to her; least of all what to do. Because she is smelling so badly and she can' thave sex, her husband marries another woman and sends her back to her family. Her own family will put her in a seprate hut and she is ostracized by the community. She doesn’t dare go out and depends on food and water that is brought or thrown to her.  In general such women emaciate and die after a  number of years. If they happen to know about the hospital they take sometimes years to get there, since they need to collect money for the bus, walk for days, travel for days or weeks because some busses will not take them as they smell so badly.  We got the chance to meet with Catherine Hamlin who will be 90 in two months time. She is still working there.

The Fistula hospital has a programme focussing on three solutions:

-       1. Treatment: ‘repairing’ the women with an operation

-    2.  Social, physical and psychological rehabilitation

-    3.  Prevention. By educating rehabilitated women as a midwife, after which they go back to their community and by awarenessraising about the existing possibility of healing and about the existence of the hospital  and - in the mean time - 5 health centres spread over the country. All the nurses are former patients.

Some women can’t be fully healed. They may have to live with a handicap. For those women a village has been built, where they live together and learn a profession, Hamlin village, see picture. There is a restaurant, they cook, they raise chicken and grow vegetables and fruit, there is a dairy farm, they make bedsheets, tablecloths and embroidery and they sell all their products. 

We visited this place as well and we were impressed with the cleanliness, the layout, everything. As the projectmanager,  a beautiful woman with the name Belasatcho, said: this is paradise for the women. And for them it is difficult to go back to their village in a remote area after they have experienced this, but hey must,  to make place for new women. 

So much happened in my first week in Ethiopia

To start with, here is a general impression of the cityscape of Addis. The first picture is in our neighbourhood, a little higher up in the hills surrounding the city.

The second picture is of Megananja Square, in the North Eastern part of Addis, where they are digging up the ringroad in order to make a metro. in the morning everbody is walking here to work and trying to find a bus.

Then this is the road that Robert takes in the morning towards the ministry; you can see the smog and the cars getting into the daily traffic jam. The 4th picture (below) is of the traditional city houses lining the street, usually with shops on the ground floor. 

Life has been so inspiring and ‘giving’ to me, this first week,  it is just unbelievable! There were so many coincidences, so many things I couldn’t even have planned or foreseen and yet they came my way and made my life fuller, giving sense.

It all started with Anne, the wife of Robert’collaegue and partner Martin, taking me out on Tuesday November 19^th to a gathering of international women,  talking about the DO’s and DONT’s in this country, very worthwhile. While there, someone announced that there was still one place available in the Amharic classes, so I said I would join. This appears to be a very interesting class. We are only three people and it is an hour’s drive, like going from Renkum to Utrecht though traffic jams  3 times a week, lessons from 5- 6.30 pm and them I am home at 20:00. Robert arranged a car with driver for me to take me there, otherwise I would not have known how to get there.  




Anne also took me to Selam village; a Swiss project, a village actually, set up for orphans to live there and get an education in growing vegetables, serving and cooking food in a well run restaurant. After a good lunch we bought some nice plants. 

Ann also introduced me to a German lady who invited me and Robert as ‘unknown guests’ to their birthday party last Saturday. This turned out to be a real nice party, where I met some interesting people, involved in wildlife, in (strengthening) beekeeping  in Ethiopia, an Iranian lady married to a German guy, a very nice Ugandan woman married to an American; I mostly talked with her 13 year old daughter, a real ‘third culture kid’. 

Also together with Anne and Martin we went to the artisan fair, a big twice yearly event where all Ethiopian artisans bring their special products. Robert and I bought some plates, covers for the (ugly) sofa, two nice paintings, cushions, Christmas decorations and a laundry basket. 

One painting (photo) I like particularly since it depicts an Ethiopian priestess or goddess and it feels good to have her in the house. Before buying it form the guy who painted it, I had a long discussion woth him:  why he painted a woman and not a man. When I said women are better in connecting people he agreed and said that he couldn’t live without his mum, who, as a woman, made the difference to his family as she was the glue, keeping everyone together.

On  Sunday November 24^th  we went to the Ayurvedic massage for our weekly treatment, but couldn’t get there because of the annual Ethiopian RUN. So we returned home (which takes half an hour with the traffic here), pottered around, had a coffee ( with nice Italian home baked cookies)  and then went to see Belatech (Hanna’s mum) to have traditional coffee and lunch: Injera with a lovely sauce, cabbage (Gomen) and green salad. Meanwhile she and her daughter Zedewnesh washed our  laundry, since we haven’t got a washing machine yet. 

On the way back Robert got some money from a cashpoint (very modern indeed) and we went home. There, Veronika, our Tsjech student/ family member had just returned from 2 weeks in the village (research for her Wageningen University masters degree). There was lots  to share over many cups of tea, while Robert picked up the new Sebanja (watchman/ gardenboy). A nice young guy, 26 years old, who is on his first job, living in the boy’s quarters behind our house  and –luckily-  speaking English quite well.  

It’s amazing that I have been here for only a week now and so much has happened. 

Settling in in Addis Abeba

 Here I am, on monday 18th of november at 10 a.m., sitting at the back of our big house, in the shade, at a plastic table which I have covered with a very old Indonesian tablecloth that I brought - it makes me feel at home.  There is a lot of wind, I had forgotten about that. And since there is a mountain climate here at 2600 meters (8500 feet), the nights , mornings and evenings are rather chilly. So I draped the Ethiopian Airlines blanket (which I didn’t steel but asked to take home as a souvenir) around my neck and body not to catch a cold. Throat aches  and colds are common here since the air is very  dry and there is a lot of dirty dust in the air.

Our house is in a new suburb reserved for ‘Diaspora’ Ethiopians at the very East of the city, past Bole International airport.  Diaspora Ethiopians are people who have fled the country when Mengistu took over from Haile Selassi in the 1980ies; 
they are mostly higher educated, English speaking  and wealthier Ethiopians. The present government likes them to come back to help build a stronger economy, so they were provided with this area to build their houses.  As everywhere in this city, they build houses first  and infrastructure (roads) later or never. So to reach our house you sort from the newly constructed and only halfway finished ring road onto a recently built tar road, with views onto the heaps of trash and the countryside further away; then you turn right at the sign ‘Tiny Tots’, towards  what must be a childrens’s nursery school in the neighbourhood,  into a very bumpy stony dirt track in between walled villa’s. And that’s where we are.

Garden and birds. Robert choose this house – I am sure! - because of the small but lovely garden, with roses, oleander, Pelargonium (Geranium in Dutch). He has already organised pots on the veranda with different Fuchsia’s, his hobby. We are frequently visited by a variety of special birds: a Lark (leeuwerik), a  White collared Pigeon (Duif, met twee jongen op ons dak) black kite (valk) mountain Trush ( soort lijster) Superb Starling( een oranje met blauw en groene  spreeuw), black bellied Starling ( glanzend blauw-paarse spreeuw) , Kamerkop and Black winged Lovebird (knalgroene papagaaitjes) 
Posted on wednesday 20st, the day I got internet!Thanks to Robert, who also organised a car for me to go to my first Amharic lessonthis evening. I 'll write more soon!