After living in Ethiopia for over a year and a half I’ve come to terms with not knowing a lot of things. I sit through casual conversations, coffee ceremonies, and even important meetings without knowing what is being said completely. My language skills are increasing but Amharic is not a language I will likely ever speak fluently. I’ve become accustomed to sitting through meetings understanding a bare minimum waiting patiently to get a rundown of the meeting from my counterpart after the fact. I am fortunate enough to have a counterpart willing to attend most meetings as my translator. But then there are countless get-togethers with neighbors of which I will never know the full extent of what was said. This is something I’ve come to terms with here. Coming from home where you understand every little eavesdropped conversation this took some time to get used to, but now I’m strangely fine with not knowing everything.
Sometimes this not-knowing finds me in awkward situations. Many times this is not so much from the lack of understanding the language, but more from the lack of direct communication. It is not the culture here to directly correct someone. I had a school teacher tell me recently that students learn to correct their mistakes here if you simply speak correctly, you do not need to tell them directly when they are incorrect. Not true. This is why person after person still yells “Where are you go?!” on the street when I pass. This applies for when I make mistakes also; they never get corrected.
A good example would be when I took those 10 orphan boys to get tested for HIV during my Testing Raffle event last fall. Several people knew this was happening, and the boys all agreed and wanted to go, but no one cared to mention that the boys were all 14, and you cannot get tested without a guardian until you are 15. That was an awkward arrival at the health center.
This not-knowing is something I’ve learned to deal with but not something that I find particularly fun, nor does it tend to end with a positive outcome… until this past week. After a meeting with my counterpart and the Dangila mayor about my internet café project I was told we needed to come up with possible vacant land options to submit to the mayor. Then the town would decide whether or not to approve our land proposal, and once a location is approved the grant would pay for a container to be built on that land for our internet café. My counterpart and I were sitting in our office discussing land options for a few hours when he mentions casually, ‘we could use the container across town that was built to help orphans.’
Excuse me?
There is a vacant container that was built with the intention of starting a business to help orphans? Why were we not planning on using this all along? We struggled to come up with that 25% “Community Contribution” necessary to receive the grant money. How did this never come up?
The next day we pitched the idea to the mayor of using that container for our project and he was elated with the idea! He mentioned that he is very excited to help us in creating a sustainable business to really help Dangila’s orphans for years to come!
Sometimes things just fall into place. And something you wonder how you can not-know something so obvious for such a long period of time. But usually I am out-of-the-loop, which I've come to accept as part of the ferengi role. I’m very ecstatic about the possibility of having this premade location for our internet café!
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| The road to the market in Dangila. |
Sometimes this not-knowing finds me in awkward situations. Many times this is not so much from the lack of understanding the language, but more from the lack of direct communication. It is not the culture here to directly correct someone. I had a school teacher tell me recently that students learn to correct their mistakes here if you simply speak correctly, you do not need to tell them directly when they are incorrect. Not true. This is why person after person still yells “Where are you go?!” on the street when I pass. This applies for when I make mistakes also; they never get corrected.
 |
| The main road in Dangila. |
This not-knowing is something I’ve learned to deal with but not something that I find particularly fun, nor does it tend to end with a positive outcome… until this past week. After a meeting with my counterpart and the Dangila mayor about my internet café project I was told we needed to come up with possible vacant land options to submit to the mayor. Then the town would decide whether or not to approve our land proposal, and once a location is approved the grant would pay for a container to be built on that land for our internet café. My counterpart and I were sitting in our office discussing land options for a few hours when he mentions casually, ‘we could use the container across town that was built to help orphans.’
Excuse me?
There is a vacant container that was built with the intention of starting a business to help orphans? Why were we not planning on using this all along? We struggled to come up with that 25% “Community Contribution” necessary to receive the grant money. How did this never come up?
The next day we pitched the idea to the mayor of using that container for our project and he was elated with the idea! He mentioned that he is very excited to help us in creating a sustainable business to really help Dangila’s orphans for years to come!
Sometimes things just fall into place. And something you wonder how you can not-know something so obvious for such a long period of time. But usually I am out-of-the-loop, which I've come to accept as part of the ferengi role. I’m very ecstatic about the possibility of having this premade location for our internet café!
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