The “fasting plate,” my favorite option from the teacher canteen. Best 70 cent lunch I know of. And it’s vegan, too: potatoes, beets, carrots and cabbage, shiro (bean sauce), greens, and lentils on injera.
Fasting never tasted so good.
Turkey in the straw (basket)
We had to go to work on Thursday – it’s an international school, not an American one – but we had the day off Friday for mid-quarter. It was a fine day for cooking, visiting with friends, and generally being thankful that we were far, far away from any kind of Black Friday insanity.
Assembling the ingredients for a proper Thanksgiving dinner in Addis presented a few challenges. Mashed potatoes, carrots, and green beans were easy. In our shipment I’d packed a can of cranberry sauce, canned yams, some dried sage and thyme, and baking chocolate for Alekka’s favorite pie. I baked my own bread for the stuffing. Our friend Nella contributed a pumpkin pie she made from local squash. I brought whipping cream back from South Africa in an ice chest. I gave up on the idea of creamed onions, though – no little onions available, whatsoever.
But the trickiest part was finding a turkey. If you want to buy one from the United States commissary, you have to order it in the spring (we were living in Bosnia then and so missed that important step). Andreas thought he had a lead on a turkey farm outside of town, but then that fell through.
Luckily my friend Alex knew about the frozen French turkeys at the Greek grocery. She said if you don’t see them in the case, ask at the meat counter. Woo-hoo! Success. We bought two. Weighing in at eight pounds each (baby turkeys!) and a price of 1500 birr, that’s…. oh…. about $10 per pound. Hey, it’s tradition – who can put a price on that?
Two French hens.
Stuffed faranji.
Model United Nations is a big deal at a lot of international schools. Participants role-play as UN delegates. They debate and vote on resolutions concerning human rights, security, economics, health, and other matters of global importance.
My daughter Alekka is a 10th grader at ICS. She became interested in MUN when we were in Bosnia. Our school in Damascus didn’t have a club (you can’t very well debate issues you aren’t allowed to mention out loud) but tiny little QSI Sarajevo boasted an active and successful team. The highlight of their year was a conference in Budapest with sessions in the gorgeous Hungarian parliament building. Alekka’s best Bosnian buds were involved and having a marvelous time; unfortunately we arrived too late in the year for Alekka to join them.
So Model UN was Alekka’s first pick for after-school activities when we came to Ethiopia. The team needed an assistant coach, and Andreas volunteered. Sisay, the head coach, has worked for several years to develop not only a top-notch competitive team but one that serves a leadership role in developing Model UN programs with less privileged schools in Addis Ababa and beyond.
This past weekend, ICS hosted a local conference at our school.
Sign in our parking lot advertising the event.
All the international schools in Addis were there, as well as a couple of national schools and two college teams that are just getting started and wanted to get some practice.
At the end of the day, a recognition for some of the most successful delegates.
Alekka was excited that her resolutions for Sudan were adopted, but she says her speech skills need work before she’s ready for a big-time conference.
The ICS team hopes to travel to Delhi this spring, and plans are in the works now for hosting a high-profile Addis Ababa conference next year. Sisay and Andreas are thinking big: they want to hold it at the new African Union headquarters.
AU headquarters in Addis Ababa
Addis Ababa makes Lonely Planet’s list of top 10 cities to visit in 2013
Well now, this is exciting news. The registrar at ICS just shared this link on the school “staff lounge” email channel.
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/themes/best-in-travel-2013/top-10-cities/
ICS is looking for twelve new teachers. The guest room is ready, friends! Come see for yourselves.
This is our car.
Not our actual car, but one just like it.
Nice, eh? It’s a brand new 2013 Toyota Hilux, Africa’s most popular car. Ours is the extended cab model, loaded with plenty of features including a bed liner and canopy.
If you’ve met me in person in America, you must know that I am not the target market for a truck – my husband and I regard them as environmentally irresponsible and wholly unnecessary for our Oregon town lifestyle – but this vehicle is perfect for dealing with the special challenges of Ethiopian driving. A large, high profile diesel 4WD with a sturdy exterior works well with deeply flooded streets, potholes, muddy dirt tracks, and crazy truck drivers, not to mention a shortage of gasoline outside the city. We ordered it with a canopy so we can haul stuff around safely and so we can sleep in it if we need to.
Only problem… guess where our new car is right now?
Yep.
Djibouti.
After searching fruitlessly for a suitable used car in Addis, we placed our order with a Dubai auto dealer in mid-October. It wasn’t a simple process, and we had to enlist the assistance of one of our kids in the US to complete the money transfer. Price? Probably 50% more than you would pay in North America, if the Hilux were sold there.
The dealer was great to work with, but the import process here in Ethiopia is both opaque and (as my friend Lindsey would say) slower than Christmas. The school’s purchasing director, Tegenu, is in charge of the paperwork. Last week he told us that a form had been filled out incorrectly; amending it will take another week at least before he can proceed to the next stage.
This morning I got a message from the dealer in Dubai. Did I know that that the crate with our car in it was still sitting on the dock in Djibouti? Yes, but we’re at the mercy of the import office. And I just heard yesterday that there is a bridge out on the road from Djibouti to Addis.
The Hilux journey
Meanwhile the clock is ticking on our 6-month duty-free resident status. If we don’t get the car here by the end of December, suddenly we will owe an import fee of about twice the value of the car. Ouch. Slower than Christmas, and much more expensive.
I have vivid memories of the seasonal bulletin board in Mrs. Collins’ kindergarten classroom at Merriewood Elementary School. Fall leaves, winter snowmen, spring flowers, summer suns – that’s some of the important stuff you learn about when you’re five.
My neighbor Vicki’s shipment arrived a couple of weeks ago. She teaches kindergarten, and some of her boxes contained teaching materials from the US. Those materials look a lot like Mrs. Collins’.
“Miss Vicki! Is that supposed to be a mongoose?”
Just kidding. This is neither Vicki’s nor Mrs. Collins’s bulletin board – it belongs to a Kayla Johnson in Ohio. http://bulletinboardideas.org/295/we-are-jumping-into-fall/
Vicki is wondering now what to do about her seasons unit. We are still in the northern hemisphere but the bulletin board cut-outs don’t match the local reality. Here in Ethiopia the seasons go like this:
For a slightly different interpretation, you can look at the Visual Geography website, which describes three seasons: http://www.visualgeography.com/categories/ethiopia/climate.html
What to do about those bulletin boards? Fortunately I don’t teach kindergarten. I think I will go outside and enjoy a gorgeous November spring day.
It can be a bit tricky finding your way around Addis.
In this city of four million people, only major roads have official names – Bole, Churchill, Ring Road, Victory. Smaller roads are known by landmarks, and are not signposted. There is no street signage anywhere in our neighborhood of Lebu, nor are there building numbers.
Friends of ours who have been here awhile say it was only seven or eight years ago that street signs began to appear. Until then, for the most part even large boulevards were known by informal names like “Flesh Alley” (a double entendre) and “Confusion Square” (haha). Then the African Union came to Addis, and the government decided to honor the members of the Union by naming streets after the countries of Africa. Now those roads are signposted but your average person – including the taxi drivers – only know them by their old names (our school is on Mauritania Road, used to be Euphoria Road).
To further obfuscate matters, the traffic circles (and there are many of them) are called “squares.”
Why not get a map? Because there aren’t any. At least no good ones. The Ethiopian government‘s security concerns make it wary of publicizing the location of anything. Official maps have to be purchased through the Ethiopian Mapping Authority, a government office with limited public access. When even those maps can’t keep up with the building boom, unofficial maps geared to tourists are incomplete to say the least.
Several of the Varnero faranji realized that we would have to produce our own maps to figure out how to get to and from school, should any of us ever manage to complete the trifecta of car, license, and registration. Our hand-drawn efforts are unlovely but at least somewhat accurate.
A work in progress
Here is an example of directions a friend gave us to get to her house:
Take the road opposite Dembel Center on Bole – go straight past Deluxe Furniture shop – past Champions Bar – past Admas College. At the T junction turn left where it’s signposted in orange to Destiny Hotel. See big school on your left (Ejera? school) and a telecom pylon tower ahead. Keep to right of pylon tower and you’ll see a yellow sign advertising an employment agency and a souk / small grocery shop ahead. You’ll also see a big black gate on the corner to the right of the fruit stand / shop. Go right onto that wide cobbled road, then first left onto very narrow muddy dirt road (about 200 – 300 m down the cobbled road). You’ll see a big beige building ahead on your right. At the end of that short muddy road turn right, and our gate is immediately there on left. We are a 2 minute walk from the big elementary school, so call if you need us! [note: we did call, twice]
We had an “external threat drill” at school the other day. As the director explained to the students and staff gathered in the designated building, “this gives us all a safe haven where we can be in situations like we had a couple of years ago, when there were problems during the elections.”
American elections don’t normally lead to rioting in the streets, but I’m still glad I’m in a safe haven overseas where I can avoid most of the folderol. I used to think presidential elections made for great entertainment – we bought our first television to follow the 1992 results – but then something bad happened. The rhetoric got nastier, and our grandmothers’ admonition to never discuss politics or religion in polite company seemed to be forgotten. Maybe Grandma’s rules don’t apply on Facebook, or maybe my friends don’t qualify as polite company: either way, the stupidity of my fellow Americans is a constant irritant in election years. I think I exhibited impressive self-restraint in not unfriending anyone this time around. I just want the whole thing to be over so I can get back to liking people again.
Of course I still want my candidate to win. So I went through the process of registering online as a “long-term absent overseas elector.” My ballot found me all the way over here in Addis Ababa, but unfortunately not in time for me to mail it back. And Oregon isn’t one of the states that lets you scan and email your voted ballot as an attachment. So, my dear like-minded friends, I’ll have to rely on you to turn in your ballots today. I’m going to feel really bad if my man loses by one vote.
While we were away, the school conducted a full-day kitchen fire training for the faculty’s housemaids.
Memo in my inbox:
From: “Safety & Security Officer” To: “ICS staff”
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 7:42:18 AM
Subject: Fire demonstration
Dear All,
Please be informed that we will have fire demonstrations today and tomorrow around 4:00 pm. If you see thick smoke during those times, they are part of my projects.
Sincerely,
S———— T——————
Safety and Security Officer
I’m kind of sorry I missed it.
Here’s the new fire extinguisher they installed in our kitchen. Our housemaid knows how to use it. What I want to know is, who told them about us?
Lorna of Arabia 