A Few Life Changes

Life around Dangila has changed a lot in the past month.  All of the change was spurred by my landlord and his family moving across town.  Following that, I moved into their old house on my same compound, and a lot of my daily routines have now changed.  Living on my compound now is a woman about my age, whose younger sister (maybe 18 years old) is currently living with her.  Additionally, there is a guard my landlord hired, who is pretty old and whose mumbled Amharic I can barely recognize as the language I’ve been learning for 18 months.

My landlord built this shack in the front yard for the old guard... way to make me feel worse about my big house!

As one of the nearby missionaries said when first seeing him, “wow, he won’t be stopping any thieves quickly,” but he does help with the children who are up to no good.  There is also another worker hired by my landlord to take care of the mama and baby cows on the compound.  He now lives here too, although he is gone all day taking the mama cow somewhere (18 months later I and still don’t know where they go all day).

The guy who takes cares of the cow; Here he is helping me build a fence around my garden.

Word on the street is that 2 Japanese volunteers from the organization “jica” are moving into the compound late in the summer.  I’ll keep you updated about that—could be fun to have new foreign faces around to sympathize with me!

Having the big house is life changing, really.  Let’s start with the fact that the walls are cement! The amount of dust collecting on every little thing is now minimal as compared with my former mud house.  I have BIG windows! The house is so bright and partnered with the yellow walls and shiny white tile floors, it just makes me happy.  I have space for all that “stuff” I have collected.  It’s so nice not having to cram things under my bed.  Plus the extra space allows for fun activities, like yoga or cartwheels, right in my living room!

The tile floors are my favorite part though.  I can walk around barefoot.  I can sit down on the floor and play with Arbay.  I forgot how nice those things can be.  Life is all about the simple pleasures!  But while I love my floor, it isn’t always “shiny” as I described above, especially during muddy season (the rains have begun!).  Which leads me to my other favorite addition to this life of luxury I’m leading: Aragach.

Aragach is one of my students in my English Club.  She is 20 years old, grade 9 student, doesn’t have a father, and her mother has recently hurt her leg and cannot work to support them anymore.  At the beginning of May I started paying her to come once a week to wash my clothes, a chore I never looked forward to, but something I did find therapeutic.  It was also something I took pride in doing, but sometimes you have to take one for the team, so in order to help Aragach (without just giving her money) I decided to overpay her to help me.

Since I moved to the big house, every Saturday she also mops my floor to clean up all those muddy dog prints!  Aragach and I also moved all of my stuff to my new house by ourselves (sans one big piece of furniture we pulled two random guys off the street to help with).  I love having her around, and as much as I haven’t adapted fully to the cultural norm here of just dropping by and lingering uninvited in people’s houses, I really enjoy when she comes by.  She’s becoming like a sister, and she’s such a sweet motivated young woman.

Another big change in life is that when I go out of town, the landlord’s kids take care of Arbay allowing her to stay in their new compound.  It’s kinda fun, like dropping her off at Doggy Day Care!  Since Arbay loves roaming the neighborhood and going off on adventures, just about every day when I’m in town she will walk herself over to the landlord’s new house to hangout.  Once in their compound they don’t let her out (I think they’re afraid she’d get lost or something) so I go by to pick her up.  It works out that most afternoons now she’ll go over there, meaning I still get to see the kids every day.  I usually stay for a little while to play with the kids, which has led to way too many afternoon photo shoots.  

I am feeling more independent in my own compound now which I really like.  I also love having the kids to visit—I think we appreciate each other a lot more now.  I’m sure there will be more changes to come in the next 7 months; for now, I’m happy and adjusted.

Unexpected Goodbyes

Where to begin? Some weeks pass and it seems like there is nothing significant to report, while others come to an end and I’m not sure exactly how I’m suppose to convey all my happenings.  This past week was the latter.

The week started out as normal: A little work, a lot of time to visit neighbors, but nothing out of the ordinary.  Until Lindsay, my closest neighbor from my group of volunteers (about one hour south), called to say that she decided it was her time to go home.  It is a personal decision we each have to make, every day, to stay or to go, and she finally felt it was time to say ‘goodbye.’  I of course made the day trip down to say my ‘goodbyes’ and help her with some errands around town.

The visit was sad, but necessary, and I was happy to spend some time with her in her town before she left.  One of my favorite things I was able to help her with was giving away some of her extra clothes to her Ethiopian friends.  The thing was, they didn’t know yet that she was leaving, they simply thought she was giving away some extra things.  They were so grateful and happy; Each left with just a few new items that undoubtedly doubled their wardrobes.  The excitement on each of their faces was priceless.  What came later was a little less heart-warming…

Lindsay and her dog, Sam

She finally let the cat out of the bag, telling the people on her compound that she was leaving, and that cat truly was the catalyst for mayhem.  People whom she loved dearly were all vying for everything she had left.  It was, in a word, ugly.  The families that you share a compound with are the people you interact with everyday, the people you love as your own family.  To see those people treat you like the rich white person you’ve struggled for over a year to distance yourself from, especially during your final hours, is hard.

In theory, the other Peace Corps Volunteers are no better.  We all came and took our turns looting through her extra stuff in order to empty her house.  We did it before Group 1 volunteers left also, and I know Group 3 will do the same with my stuff.  It’s the Peace Corps cycle.  Nothing is wrong with that.  So what is the problem when Ethiopians want the same thing?  I’m not sure.  Now maybe it will be less of a surprise when my turn comes in early 2011.

I returned home, a little shaken and heartbroken from the events in Lindsay’s town, only to encounter my own distressing trials.  Friday evening when my landlord’s wife called me into her house for a coffee ceremony, I expected nothing unusual.  I sat through the first two rounds as usual and only before cup three did my suspicions arise.  A crew of workers came in, parking a big flatbed semi outside the compound.  They participated in the final round of coffee and then, bam, started carrying out the sofas practically from beneath us.  My landlord’s family was moving.

You may have seen pictures in my recent album of the celebration I attended about a month ago at my landlord’s new house and ask yourself, ‘didn’t she see this one coming?’  The answer: yes.  But while I knew they were building a new house, and knew it was completed sans plumbing, they kept avoiding talking about their departure date when I would bring it up.  Indirect communication is common here, doubled by the fact that I don’t understand everything people say in Amharic anyways (my landlord does not speak English, nor is he a sympathetic listener when I speak Amharic), meaning that I am often out of the loop.  But this one hit me like a freight train.

The celebration last month as they finished building my landlord's new house.

And I couldn’t even tell you why, but as they loaded the last of their stuff into the truck, ready to haul it 5 blocks away (yes, their new house is just 10 minutes by foot from my house) I was holding back tears.  You never really appreciate things until they are gone, right? And while I’ve adjusted to the culture and people here, change is still hard.  I couldn’t help but feel a tad bit abandoned as they pulled away.  I thought they were my family; how could they just leave me?

My landlord's new house.

But as always, when necessary, we re-adapt, we create a new normal, and we figure out things slowly.

New Sites, Old Friends

Another month has passed in what seems like seconds.  It feels like just last week I was contemplating my birthday celebration and already it is time to turn the calendar once again.  It is hard to believe I have been here now for eight months.  I try to capture those eight months in my mind to comprehend all that has happened, all that has changed, but I cannot; it is like trying to hold water in my cupped hands.  This is my life now, and it is equally hard to imagine life back in America.  Costcos and Targets, public drinking fountains and air conditioning seem like a fairyland, not a reality I will return to one day.

I am part of Group 2 here in Ethiopia since Peace Corps returned in 2007, and as my group begins our eighth-month, Group 1 enters their 22nd.  Some of my good friends in Ethiopia are from the first group and it is fun to daydream with them about their upcoming integration back into American life.  I realize as I read this that, what to me is “daydreaming,” to my friends is their upcoming reality.  It is easy to get caught up in future plans and joke about common amenities we do not even think about anymore.  It is hard to realize that these dear friends of mine will soon be leaving and my time here in perspective has only just begun.  Months now can be talked about as if they were weeks, or days. Saying out loud that I will be here for about 18 more months is no longer an amount of time that scares me. But knowing Group 1 will be leaving in four months; that amount of time does not seem like enough.

Dear friends.

As part of the ever-rotating Peace Corps cycle, one group’s departure means a new group’s arrival.  Two months from now, in October, Group 3 arrives for their 10 weeks of training.  And while I don’t like to think about my friends leaving, knowing new people are coming takes my mind away from that a bit.  This past week I was able to join Peace Corps staff on “Site Development, Round 1” as they prepare for Group 3.  In order for PC to place the new volunteers, they do three rounds of site development in towns around the country to find places for volunteers to live after their training.  There are several towns around my part of the country (including two in my zone, which is like a county) that are being considered.  If any Group 3 people are reading this, some of you could be my future neighbors!  I enjoyed getting out of Dangila with PC staff to visit surrounding towns and help with the preparation process.

There are going to be a lot of changes with the training and counterpart selection that are new and exciting to all of us.  I’m sure I will be writing about these upcoming changes in my life here a lot in the next few months, but for now it is fun to be a part of something new, even though I’m not looking forward to seeing friends leave.