A Grand Welcome

I’ve written before about Ethiopian hospitality and how it’s unrivaled, but even after living here for so long it still knocks me off my feet sometimes.  I’m a fairly hard person to surprise. I see things coming, read into foreshadowing, and pick up on subtle signs. But this incredible hospitality often gets past my radar and surprises me more that anything.

The morning after my friend from home, Chris, arrived in Ethiopia I made him board a bus at 5am heading north to Dangila.  This ride is something I’ve become used to enduring by now, although it never can end soon enough.  Around 3pm we finally arrived in Dangila, exhausted from the journey.  We loaded our luggage into a bajaj taxi and were taken straight to my house.  As I opened the gate to my compound, waiting patiently inside was my student/friend Aregach.  As we got all our belongings inside I realized she went back outside and was bringing in a pot and basket, filled with the special holiday food duro wat and injera.

I later found out that Aregach, who had been fasting from meat for two weeks (as were all Orthodox Christians), postponed her holiday celebration by several days just so she would have duro wat (chicken stew) for our arrival.  She also came over to my house over two hours before we arrived by bus and waited patiently for us to show up!

 My new friend/neighbor Taish came over to join the celebration as well.  The four of us ate the delicious food and hung out for a couple hours which was more than anything I could have asked for. Aregach is such a wonderful friend and she teaches me new things every day about loving and giving. It was a great welcome back to Dangila.

During Chris’s week-long visit in Ethiopia we only stayed in Dangila for a couple days, which meant we had a LOT of coffee and food invitations to squeeze into a short amount of time.  And Chris had only been in Ethiopia for less than 24 hours when we got to my town, meaning his experience with, and acquired taste for injera was minimal.  He was a great sport to eat whatever happened to be put in front of him.

After we went to my final class of my summer English club, one of my students invited us over for coffee and lunch.  We enjoyed listening to American music (from the CD I’d given my perfect attendance students as a prize), drinking the three rounds of delicious coffee, and stuffing ourselves with yet another meal of injera and wat.  I think by this point Chris was finally getting the hang of what my life is like here!

Then finally, on our last day in town, we stopped in my neighbor’s house to say “hi” and found ourselves leaving several hours later, stuffed to the brim.  It was not altogether unexpected since I often spend hours at a time laughing and eating in their house, but it surely was nothing less than an adventure with Chris there.  We sat for the longest time just drinking the rounds of coffee as I played translator between the family and Chris.  We were all set to leave when the mother insisted on making something for us to eat (since she had promised me the week before that she’d make something special when my friend arrived), so we got comfortable knowing there is no turning down such a generous invite.  Luckily we saw Taish walk passed their house and called him in to eat with us, adding another stomach to divide the food between.

Dangila is full of surprises and every time one of them hits me, it makes me want to stay until I discover them all.  With the end of my time here in sight I really am trying to live every day to the fullest, and sometimes that is referring to the state of my stomach.  The culture I’ve experienced here of entertaining neighbors and guests is something I hope to carry with me throughout life.  It is beautiful, selfless and loving. I think we can all learn something from a culture like that.  On that note, I’m here for five more months and very open to more visitors… any takers?

The Thirteen Spices of Burbere

Having purchased burbere packaged in a bag in the past I knew the only way to get delicious homemade burbere was to make it at home, go figure.  I’ve survived for a year and a half without my own ready supply of this delicious burbere but I decided it was time to put an end to that.  My student/friend/clothes washer Aragach was on board and for about a week she researched how much of each spice we would need to make a batch of really good burbere.  We decided on an amount to make (we’ll get to that later) and started buying ingredients.

Maybe I should tell you a bit about burbere.  It’s a mixture of spices used in just about every Ethiopia dish to a little zing!  At first I thought it was rather spicy, but now it is simply delicious and necessary to add to every meal.  This essence of Ethiopian food is rumored to contain approximately 13 different spices, but since it is usually homemade, every house makes it slightly different, exchanging some subtle spices for others.  I will promise that my recipe has 13 different spices but I’ll take the recipe to my grave! Ok, well, maybe I don’t know the names for all 13 but I think I could pick them out of a lineup!

Aragach and I decided to make 10 kilos of burbere.  Why 10? Is it because I’m used to pounds? Was I confused? Was there any good reason I wanted a small child worth of spice? No.  There is no good reason.  I told Aragach I would give her half, and I figured five kilos for myself and friends would be just about right.  I also thought that we weren’t accounting for the weight that gets lost while drying out many of the ingredients, but apparently it was thought over because we ended up with over 10!

The main ingredient in burbere is burbere. Confused yet? The dried out red pepper found in the market is called “burbere” and the final product of this ground up spice mixture is also called “burbere” (both pronounced bur-bur-e).  Other key ingredients found in all recipes include garlic, red onion and ginger.  The remaining nine are up for grabs, and I left that decision to Aragach and her mother’s advice.  I believe some of the spices include cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  The preparation lasted for over a week and involved drying, sorting, combining and roasting.  And you better believe there is some blood, sweat and tears in there too! Not really, I swear, but I cannot deny that my dog did run across the drying mats a couple of times.  I’m not really helping my argument for trying some of this spice when I get home, am I?

Alas the final morning had come.  I agreed to meet Aragach at her house at 7am on a Tuesday morning and would we go together to the mill to have it all ground together.  I arrived to find her and her mother roasting everything one last time to ensure that all the moisture was out.  We then combined the 12 spices in one bag, kept the bag of burbere separate, and added an additional kilo of salt.  Bundles in hand we walked across town to find a mill house with a burbere machine that was open.  Mills are on every street in Dangila, they are the Starbucks of small-town Ethiopia, but hours of operation are not posted and machines are kept separate to ensure that there isn’t any mixing between your bread flour and your spicy burbere!

Aregach's mom roasting everything to ensure it was dry.

With a stroke of luck we arrived at a mill that had just opened and we would be the first customers of the day.  I’ve been told that this is a very good thing because the amount of powder in the air is minimal and the machine is not yet hot which heats your product to untouchable temperatures.  Being the first ones wasn’t my favorite part even, I was overjoyed that children hadn’t seen us turn in here; we were the only people in sight other than the workers!  The moment of truth had arrived when it was time to pay for the grinding, 1 Birr per kilo, weigh-in time.  Ten kilos of bubere, three of other spices and one of salt.  14 kilos!  Then began the grinding, and I don’t think you can truly know burbere (or Ethiopia) until you inhale burbere and inevitably touch your eye with pepper residue on your hand.  Breathing in that intense pepper is unlike anything else; it feels like your insides are on fire and no amount of coughing will suffice.  But we survived.

Weighing the spices before entering the mill house.

Grinding the pepper together with the spices.

The pepper is in the machine waiting to be ground.

Aregach and me.

Aregach carrying our wonderful bubere back to my house.

A short while later, after taking plenty of pictures and befriending the mill employees, Aragach donned the basin of burbere on her head and we walked to my house proud of our product.  We stirred all the spices together and tasted what our hard work had produced; its brilliant orange color is unlike any color I’ve seen in nature.  I no longer worry about what I will do with 14 kilos (minus Aragach’s share) because this spice sells itself.  I finally have that homemade burbere I’ve wanted and it smells (and tastes) so good that I don’t even mind that my entire house smells of it!

Back at my house with the bucket full of burbere!

Fasika, Take Two

‘This is wonderful duro wat!’ I complimented my landlord’s wife, as is cultural here in Ethiopia.

‘If it is wonderful duro wat that means it will be a wonderful Easter!’ she replied.

A great omen I thought for the day ahead.  Good thing too, since it was bound to be a long one—that first helping of duro wat was served to me at 6am this morning.

As I prepared my new group 3 neighbors for the biggest Ethiopian holiday celebration, I had one piece of advice for them: don’t over-commit yourself!  I have been anticipating Easter for a month now, and knew that while I was going to thoroughly enjoy the holiday here in Dangila, this year would be different; I wasn’t going to tell more than two families I would come to their houses on Easter.  Somehow, that plan went awry.

Last year I think I accepted any invitation that came my way, an "I’ll-take-what-I-can-get" kind of attitude.  As you can read from my blog last April, I had far too many commitments for one day, and had no idea what I’d gotten myself into.  This year it was a completely different situation; I have so many wonderful and close friends that I simply couldn’t refuse people’s offer for me to spend the holiday with them and their families.  And I knew exactly what I was getting myself into, but I just couldn’t say ‘no.’  Moreover, because I have such close friends it was less an invitation and more a statement of what time I was going to be at their houses on Easter Sunday.  Three such invitations presented themselves throughout the past week and I obliged them all with a grateful acceptance, but I will admit the fourth invitation was not exactly unsolicited.

Knowing Easter was approaching, I couldn’t have imaged not spending part of my day with Tizita’s family, who I spent Easter morning with last year.  Something about having a constant between the two celebrations was appealing, so I planned on having lunch at Tizita’s family’s café on Thursday before Easter, hoping to secure an invitation.  Worked like a charm; I hadn’t even placed my order for lunch before Tizita’s mom asked if I was going to be in Dangila for Easter.

So with all the invitations in place I anticipated a long day with way too much food, but I was looking forward to the festivities as if it were Christmas day! Easter is such a huge holiday here that I suppose I really did get wrapped up in all the preparations and I was also looking forward to finally breaking the fast!  I woke up at 6am and hopped right out of bed, knowing my compound family would already be awake and enjoying the first course of meat for the day.  As soon as they realized I was awake they summoned me inside for a tasty platter of duro wat (chicken stew—the holiday specialty).  For all you injera-lovers out there, well, anyone who actually knows good Ethiopian food, it was more than just good wat, but tequs injera, freshly made within the hour—yum! 

And so the day had begun, the fast had been broken, and my only obligation for the day was to eat! I brought the children some Easter candy and unwrapped a few myself before I witnessed the first sheep slaughtering of the day by my landlord.  Then I was off to Tizita’s family around 9am (I received 3 different times from 3 different family members about what time I should arrive, so I decided on a 9am average).  I was promptly served another platter of duro wat—a whole tequs injera all to myself. As the day began I savored every bit, eating to fill my stomach with the delicious food.  Next came a coffee ceremony with a snack (as is required for the ceremony) followed with a platter of homemade “cheese” (old milk), and I began to realize that fasting has its perks in Ethiopia.  In fact, I realized all of my favorite Ethiopian foods are fasting foods, but I politely ate my fair share of all the holiday goodies.  I knew Tizita and her family would never let me leave before having some of the first platter of tebs from the second sheep of the day I just witnessed slaughtered.  So I waited for the food and finally left after tebs right around noon. 

I loved being invited back to Tizita’s family’s celebration.  It was such a treat for me to be in a familiar place with familiar people and to have an idea of what to expect.  Year 1 here I may have been comfortable with the people, but the traditions surrounding each holiday were still a mystery—moreover, it is like Christmas in America, where every family celebrates in a different way, so it isn’t something you can simply be taught.  Those three hours spent at my favorite little café, with a family who loves me and knows me was relaxed and easy.  And although it had differences from the year before, the major constant, which I expected, was that for those three hours I continually had a plate of food in front of me, and was continually told, “Be!” eat!

I should have known that appointment would have lasted until noon, but I guess I was optimistic about the amount of time it takes to slaughter a sheep, so now I found myself with my third invitation starting at noon and had just received a phone call from the fourth telling me to come now!  I swung by number four, ate a quick plate of duro wat, ran home to grab some candy for the kids at the next house, and luckily caught a bajaj to the other side of town for invitation number three: Yebeletal and his family.  He is my co-teacher for the English Club and a wonderful friend; his house had recently become a place I have frequented, especially since his wife just had a baby girl whom I adore!

Arriving 30 minutes late for the appointment, I was surprised to see that I was the last to arrive—surprised because Ethiopians are never on time.  However, I was greeted with warm smiles, holiday wishes, and not a mention of my lack of punctuality.  I was served several cups of coffee right away, we had a blessing from the elder in the house (Yebeletal’s father-in-law), and my third sheep slaughtering of the day commenced.  There came a point in the day where the meals became less of a treat and more of an obligation, and the instruction, “Be!” was less a friendly reminder and more a dreaded command.  I really enjoyed socializing with Yebeletal and his family for the two hours I was at his house, and one of my favorite things about him is his great English.  And we often chat about cultural differences, so he knows that I don’t like certain Ethiopian foods, namely, qeybay, butter with spices.  So while I was absolutely full, I really did look forward to the tebs made exactly the way I like them.  And you really can’t complain about meat that fresh, so I slowly but surely ate the food placed in front of me.

At 2:30pm I bid farewell to Yebeletal and family, waddled out to catch a bajaj wishing my skirt had a button to unfasten, and made my way home thinking I had until 4pm to rest up.  I let the kids come inside and watch a DVD on my laptop (Enchanted was the pick of the day) and I happily lounged on the sofa for about 30 minutes until my landlord’s wife called me in for “coffee”… but it’s never just coffee.  I sat around with my landlord, his wife, and one remaining guest while they fed me dulet and a beer and told me how I’d disappeared for their coffee ceremony—oops!  I actually preferred the calmness of just being with them though instead of the chaos of the ceremony where all the neighbors cycle in and out, despite their disappointment (in my defense they never told me what time their coffee ceremony would be).  I then watched a bit more of the movie with the kids and at 4pm went back to the house of invitation four, with whom I’d only briefly eaten duro wat before.

For now, I’m going to leave you waiting—I’ve decided to write about the rest of the day tomorrow.  The story about my “fourth invitation” family is extended, so I’ll make this a two-part entry.

to-be-continued…