Epiphany and Stardom

Today was Epiphany (Timket in Amharic), which is a big religious holiday here. Ethiopians claim that the original Arc of the Covenant is here, and each Orthodox Church has its own smaller arc as well (they're not unlike the arcs that hold the torah at synagogues). For Timket, each church takes its arc out and parades it to a park or a field in town, where it meets with the arcs from all of the other churches in the area. There's a blessing of the arcs (and everyone there) with holy water, a huge celebration, and then the arcs are each paraded back to their homes.

The whole town has been full of energy this weekend. Even now (I'm writing this at home, around 8pm, and the festivities are mostly over), I can hear horns blowing and people clapping somewhere along my road. I went to the park where the arcs had assembled around 10:30 this morning. When I stepped out of my gate, my whole street was bustling with families dressed in their finest coming from and heading towards the various festivals and to family and friends' houses. Ethiopian traditional dress is almost entirely white. Women wear "habesha kemis" (Ethiopian dresses), which are made from a lightweight white crepe material, with beautiful colored hems or embroidery, and "netela"—scarves or wraps made from the same material—over their heads and shoulders. Men wear white pants and a long white tunic, sometimes with a white sweater vest over it, and some wear white turbans. Because it's starting to get hot out this time of year, almost everyone had an umbrella as well. The church officials didn't just carry umbrellas to shield the arcs and themselves, but elaborately decorated parasols, some of them gleaming with glitter and velvet. Most of them also had tassels and iconography.

The park had a total party atmosphere. I could hear people singing, horns blowing, and drums beating from several blocks away, and the field was just full of people dancing and clapping. We joined in the procession wholeheartedly, and paraded the first arc back to Kidus Georgis church, in the center of town, which took a good two hours, because we stopped to sing and dance every fifty meters or so. Beth has mastered the Ethiopian traditional dance moves, complete with epileptic shoulder movements, and she got a huge amount of attention for her dancing prowess. I meanwhile, befriended the world's cutest old women, and learned to ululate wildly in appreciation for a good dance. We also saw a man in a fabulous bike-turned-wheelchair play a beautiful tune on a small harp, singing his heart out for everyone who could hear. From time to time a gang of young men and boys carrying huge stalks of sugar cane would run by, thrusting the sugar cane up and down in their hands almost like war spears, dancing wildly and pushing people out of the way.

People were in a fantastic mood, and were incredibly welcoming and kind. We each had a couple of kids by the hand at one point, and several people told me never to forget them. An unbelievably wrinkled old woman with a small fez on her head and a cane made from old re-bar (who had exactly 2 teeth) was just absolutely smitten with us, patting our shoulders and cheeks, and encouraging us to dance.

The whole thing was pretty magical although I've almost never been as hot and sunburned as I was at the end of the parade. The closest thing I could compare it to is a street fair—or maybe the May Day protest in San Francisco for immigrants' rights a couple of years ago, which was more of a party than a protest march, at least among the crowd I was walking with. It was overwhelming, exhausting, and just fabulous. I'm really glad we got to experience this. Maybe next year I'll go to Gondar (a city about 3 hours North of here by bus), where 22 churches apparently all gather together to celebrate (here it was 7).

            What else is new around here? Oh! Guess who was on Ethiopian National TV yesterday afternoon?

 

That's right: I was, with Levi. Last weekend, we attended an event thrown by the Regional AIDS Prevention and Control Office. It was the launch of a short documentary about World AIDS Day, and a thank you celebration for all of the local partners who had helped with AIDS Day programming back in December. For some reason, Beth's boss, who was one of the people planning the event, felt that the three of us needed to be sitting at the table of honor, up front, with the director of the office. At some point, Beth's parents called from the States, so she was off talking to them when Levi and I noticed a camera trained on us.

"I bet that's ETV," I told Levi.

"You know, I don't want it to be, but look at how nice that camera is," he said.

Well, it was. We didn't make our debut until today, but debut we did. Lake, our friend and one of the trainers from back in Wolisso (who lives here in Bahir Dar) told us yesterday that he had seen us on the afternoon news. "Levi was wearing shorts," he reported.

Other than the holiday and the new stardom, things are beginning to settle into a routine. Work is beginning to pick up as I start to get to know people and systems at the hospital. I did get to see a really neat use of technology this week. Every month or so, ITECH provides distance education seminars for its providers around the world. I sat in with Dr. Manuel (my supervisor) and a couple of others on a session on HIV dermatology. They use a real time web cam so that the participants can see the presenter, and also broadcast his PowerPoint, complete with a pointer. The participants can then write to him using some sort of instant messaging, so that it's actually a dynamic, live interaction. While HIV dermatology isn't really my thing (a photo of a fungus-covered toenail cemented for me the fact that I don't actually want to be a doctor), I was really impressed with the technology. I didn't catch the name of the software, but will be sure to next time. Neat stuff.

I went to the post office on Tuesday to find my box filled with letters and cards (a lot of the Christmas/New Year's cards didn't make it through until now). THANK YOU to everyone who wrote! I'll start writing back, but it may take me a little while. Meanwhile, keep the letters coming! I love that feeling of reaching up into my PO Box (it's higher than I can even see!) and finding good stuff from people I miss.

Pictures from Ethiopia

This is Anna's dad, making an entry at her request.  She can't put pictures into these entries because of the way she has to make her entries via e-mail, and she asked me to put some here for her.  

However, the blog software won't cooperate.  It makes the assumption that you're going to have a lot of text and very few photos, and it compresses what I wanted to be captions into a paragraph that streams along the side of the first picture or two.  So I've placed the photos Anna sent us on my own web-site, where you can view them:

http://clem.mscd.edu/%7Etalmanl/Anna/Pix01.html

or, equivalently,

http://preview.tinyurl.com/yvngjp

--Lou Talman, Anna's dad

It's been a month already?

I've decided that the two best things that I brought with me from the United States are my camping solar shower and a sharp paring knife. I used both today, and both were a treat (particularly because the knife was cutting some apple, brought from Addis at considerable cost, into slices).

 

All is well here. I've been in Bahir Dar nearly 4 weeks, and I'm finally beginning to feel more at home here. My neighbors recognize me and wave hello. The shoeshine boys I pass every morning on my way to work have stopped shouting "money, money!" at me… at least most of the time (now it's usually "hello, hello!" which is remarkably better). The kids on my street yell my name at me as I walk past. Sometimes they ask me if I want for them to find a kitten or a puppy for me. I'm considering it.

 

It's amazing how quickly people start to know you. I was waiting for a motorcycle taxi to Beth's new house (on the other side of town from mine), and when I tried to get into it, the driver said, "no, no, you go toward the hospital." Indeed, I usually do. Another taxi driver wouldn't let me get out 100m from my stop when another woman was getting off, because he knew where I usually end up. A man at a café reminded me which kebele (neighborhood) I live in. About once a day, someone asks me if I remember them; they remember me! It doesn't feel menacing, particularly because my house feels so safe, behind a big wall in a quiet neighborhood, but it is kind of incredible. Since Day One of Staging in Washington DC, we've been told about the "fishbowl effect." I guess I hadn't quite internalized it until now—people really know a lot about me already here, and there really isn't any stopping it. Next step is to spread the word that I'm a volunteer and therefore don't have much money to spare; the presumption is that any foreigner here is loaded. I've also made a resolution to be polite and make conversation with people who are polite to me, even if I don't feel like talking to them, and to try to just ignore the rude folks. We'll see how it goes.

 

Yesterday, I got a lovely package from a group of my grad school friends who are back in Seattle, which will keep me well stocked with books to read and puzzles to solve for quite some time. The post office is really something. Usually, we have to lean through the window of the "Parcels—Foreign and Domestic" office and point out large bags of mail which haven't been opened to inspect whether there might in fact be something in there for one of us. This time, though, I actually got a slip in my box notifying me: amazing. It had only taken 3 weeks for the package from Seattle to arrive, but another box from Denver had been in transit since December 3 ^rd. The Christmas cookies in that one were a little worse for the wear. Meanwhile, attempting to mail a small box to the States was a 45-minute-long, prohibitively expensive hassle; so, sorry, don't expect gifts until someone comes to visit and can haul them back to the States!

 

I've met a number of great Ethiopians here in town, as well as a couple of interesting ex-pats. Clinton Foundation, MSF, and the Carter Foundation are all here, and the University also hires visiting professors, so there are a number of foreigners wandering around. I think that Bahir Dar will be a nice little community to live in.

 

I've been working on record-keeping, particularly the charting system, at work. A colleague and I went searching for the charts of people who had missed their November appointments yesterday. Of 78 charts, 44 were missing. People have some idea of where they might be, but it requires a long, manual search of unsorted piles in order to find them. And of those we did find, only one had really missed his appointment; the rest just hadn't been recorded right in the system (probably because the charts never made it to the data entry clerk). Hmmm.

 

I'm also working on putting together a couple of talks about burnout, management skills, and teambuilding for the HIV team at the hospital. The work environment here really doesn't incorporate much in terms of continuing education or support for the employees. I hope that it will be appreciated.

 

I'm getting used to living by myself, and am trying to get into some sort of routine. It definitely takes time to feel comfortable in a new spot, and adding a new language and culture means that this is taking even longer. I'm trying to keep the Peace Corps' favorite virtues, patience and flexibility, in mind.