Add It To My Resume

ELECTRICAL REWIRING
I repaired—or attempted to—an outlet (220 Volt AC), which had fallen out of my bedroom wall. Suffered only minor electrical shock, including charred black fingertip and a serious scare, when a current passed from one thumb up my arm, around my shoulders, and down the other arm. Christie, who was helping me, and I both sprang back from the spark, physically fine, but slightly terrified. Note: remember to turn off fuse before attempting further electrics maintenance. The bad news is that the outlet is no longer functioning, reducing me to a single outlet and an extension cord.

EMERGENCY MEDICAL TREATMENT COORDINATION
Another volunteer who was visiting town came down with some serious gastrointestinal nastiness last weekend. She was unable even to keep down the anti-nausea medication our medical director had prescribed, and was having trouble making it from the bed in her hotel to the toilet without feeling lightheaded. A stool sample was described as "raspberry lemonade" (gross, I know…).  Needless to say, she was not feeling good. And needed an IV and some antibiotics, pretty badly. This, of course, would have to have happened during the worst week in cell phone reception in recent history, at 10pm on a Saturday night (which is as good as 2am in a place where public transit shuts down at 8pm), on a night when the two doctors I know were both out of town, and when all of the roads in Bahir Dar had been torn up for construction. I got to test my emergency network here in town, rustling up an all-night clinic, a car to come pick her and another volunteer up at the hotel, and another to pick me and a third visitor up at my house to accompany them to the clinic. The good news is that, 4 liters of IV fluid, some heavy-duty antibiotics, and an unpleasant night spent at the clinic later, she's feeling much better. Unofficial diagnosis: shigellosis. Not something I'd like to get. Ever. In some ways, though, it was good to be able to test out what to do in an emergency with something that was serious—real—but not immediately life-threatening.

HOSTEL MANAGEMENT
Bahir Dar has become the hub for other volunteers needing a break from their smaller towns. Of the 12 weekends since we've been at site, there has been at least one visitor in town during 7 of those weekends. Which is lovely. And I'm more than happy to be a host. But it's also exhausting. It does mean that I've gotten to know the town quite well. If you come to visit, I can point you to the quietest place to sit beside the lake, to the cheapest little shop for buying a propane tank, to the streets with the fewest harassing shoe-shine boys (and the ones with the shoe-shine boys who are most likely to be able to fix your broken sandal), or to the 3 places where you can get pizza and the 2 places with ice cream here. You know, the basics. I also have some fantastically comfortable floor space you're more than welcome to.

ZOOKEEPING
There are two new families living on my compound. One is a nest of small red sparrow-like birds living in a hole in my outside wall, directly above the fuse box (I discovered this family after the mini-electrocution). I've only seen mom, but can hear a bunch of babies chirping in there. The other is a momma-cat, who had been hanging around my yard for some time, and her three incredibly cute four- or five-week-old kittens. They're white, orange, and gray, very shy, and incredibly cute. She must have had them in a little den in the huge rock pile out in my backyard. I spent approximately 5 hours this week stalking them—luring them out of hiding and then cooing uncontrollably. Got a good sunburn out of the endeavor, too.

COFFEE FARMING
There's a bunna (coffee) bush on my compound, and I finally got around to peeling the beans I had picked several weeks ago. A coffee bush (tree?) is about 6 feet tall, scraggly, and bears bright red coffee berries the size of small grapes and tough-skinned. You should apparently pick them and dry them in the sun (though the 5 or 6 weeks I left them to dry might have been slightly excessive. Ah, laziness…). You then peel off the berry skin (not easy—there must be some trick I'm unaware of), and inside each one are two green coffee beans. Roast 'em, grind 'em, brew 'em, and you have coffee. A lot of work. I'll never under-appreciate a latte again.

Getting Adjusted

Yesterday afternoon, I rode past a security guard at a state-run petroleum depot, in full military uniform (camouflage) holding a long rifle (not an uncommon sight here). What was odd—and amusing—was that there was a goat scratching its head against the barrel of the rifle while the man sat there impassively. I still haven't gotten accustomed to seeing goats, cows, horses and sheep in my street when I come out of my front gate. There's a baby lamb now (born on Monday) which one of my neighbor kids handed to me (he'd had it riding on his shoulders) when I walked past. "Konjo, aydelem?" (it's pretty, isn't it?) he asked me. Indeed, it was—soft and clean and sweet, baa-ing softly to its mom from my arms. It scampered back to mom's side, kicking its little feet indignantly when I put it back down. Maybe I would like living in the countryside after all. It's nice being in a place like Bahir Dar, where with a twenty minute walk in one direction I can be in the city-center (such as it is), with restaurants and nightclubs and internet, and with a twenty minute walk in the other direction, I can be in a totally rural area, with mud huts and shepherds wearing short green canvas shorts and blankets thrown around their shoulders for warmth. I walked out to a huge field near my house the other day, and saw kids, dogs, and livestock all running around happily, and women hanging out at the edge of the field, gossiping and supervising.

 

I've had a good couple of weeks. Peace Corps folks from Addis Ababa came for a site visit this week—checking up on our work and making sure that we're doing okay with the transition. I was amazed to hear myself saying mostly positive things about my life and work here. I guess that I'm beginning to settle into a routine. There are several interesting projects on the horizon for work. I'm working on systems for tracing patients who have dropped out of HIV-care at the hospital, on a survey to find out why they're dropping out, on linking the hospital's services to other community organizations, and on a project run by the Clinton Foundation to have orphans in town tested for HIV. I'll write more sometime soon about what my work is actually like—it occurs to me that I haven't really yet.

 

 Next week, I'll be at a regional review meeting for all of the organizations working on HIV in Amhara province. It's in Debre Markos, where a couple of other volunteers live, and a number of others are coming from other towns in the region as well. I'm hoping that it will be a nice mini-reunion (as well as potentially being a useful meeting!). We had a few other volunteers in town last week for the PC site visit, and it was interesting to hear what people have been doing. My frustrations were totally normalized—I think that we're all feeling a lot of the same aggravations at adjusting to life here.

 

Adjustment. I'm beginning to see what that means. Adjusting expectations of getting a million things done all at once. Adjusting ideas of what it means to live abroad. Adjusting to living alone. To not having a TV. Adjusting to being stared at, shouted at, and sometimes followed on the street (and just as much, adjusting to not having those things happen when you expect that they will). Adjusting to new communication patterns with colleagues. To being partially informed (at best) about what's going on around me. To plans changing or falling through. Adjusting to being so far from home. To the idea that this is home for the next while. And, most significantly, realizing how long it takes to adjust. It occurred to me that I've been here two full months, and I'm still just getting my life figured out. I just keep repeating to myself again and again, "it takes time."

 

I've found myself incredibly frustrated with language learning recently. I have the basics down, solidly. I can greet people, ask directions, order food in a restaurant, bargain, take public transit, and make general small talk fairly competently. But then there's sitting in a department meeting at work and knowing vaguely what the topic being discussed might be, but not being able to follow along for the life of me (let alone imagine contributing anything to the discussion…). There's having a little, sick, old man approach me on the hospital compound and ask me for something and not catching a word of it. There's trying to ask my neighbors if they have baby kittens (a very pregnant mom-cat has been in my yard a lot in the past few weeks) and having them hold up every cat in their place saying, "is this your cat? Is your cat lost?" There's getting a plate of bread ("dabbo") and a macchiato, rather than a double macchiato. The learning feels far less rewarding than at the beginning; progress is so much slower and so much subtler. It's also easy to just be complacent and rely on my colleagues' excellent English for work. (They are, however, so proud when I can come up with something unexpected in Amharic). What probably needs to happen is to really devote myself to learning this language (actually study, maybe?), but this odd sense of entitlement, that the ability should just come on its own, is plaguing me. Maybe I can make a mini-resolution to work hard at it for a few weeks and to see if I notice any difference. Any advice from those of you have learned a language from scratch by living in it?

 

I'm getting excited about the idea of travel—only bit longer in forced captivity here in Bahir Dar (Peace Corps requires us to stay in our sites, with a few exceptions, like the meeting next week, for the first three months, so that we can "integrate" better into the community). Rough plans in store for seeing Axum and Lalibela—holy sites here in the North—for going hiking in the Simein Mountains, and for the distant future, for seeing Tanzania and Egypt. Also looking forward to seeing all of the other volunteers at our In-Service Training in April (and checking out some of their towns). It's amazing how strong some of the friendships formed in those first 10 weeks together have continued to be.

 

It's getting warmer and warmer here. I took one of my two wool blankets off my bed, and last night, I even kicked the remaining one off. Despite being in the Northern hemisphere, weather here seems to be virtually unrelated to the seasons as I'm familiar with them. We're nearing the end of dry season here, but before the rains start, we're in for some hot weather. A colleague informed me that it was 29 degrees centigrade (about 85 Fahrenheit) on Friday, and that it will get up to 34—or even to 39 (102 F!)—for the next couple of months. April is supposedly the hottest month. I'll let you know. I thought that I had escaped that kind of heat in coming to Ethiopia. I'm going to try my best not to be whiny about it. (At the very least, I'm telling myself to be thankful that I'm not in Mongolia, where it's -30F).

 

The good thing about the warm weather, bright sun (and plenty of water during rainy season) is that a garden is a very real possibility. I met one of my neighbors (she's from South Carolina originally, and is teaching at the University here), who has cucumbers and watermelons, among other delights growing in her garden, knows where to get seeds, and even said she'd help me set up a garden of my own. So I have a new grand plan to feed myself from my yard. Okay, not really, but I would like to get some veggies and maybe some flowers growing. I've told myself for years that I was never going to garden, that I didn't like it, plus, there's too much to live up to, with a pretty darn good gardener for a mother, and an expert gardener for a grandfather. But perhaps I've been deluding myself—I'm actually really excited about the idea. Sunflowers and strawberries will both apparently even grow here. That would be lovely. Putting a shovel on the list of things to buy when I get back from the conference next week.

 

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.

St. Gabriel's Day Feast

What a day. Today is an Ethiopian religious holiday, St. Gabriel's day, which meant lots of people in traditional clothing milling about on the streets, that the Telecommunications company was closed (and Kristen therefore couldn't replace her stolen cell phone SIM card as planned, though we didn't know that until we had walked all the way out there, of course, argh), and that we had more than one reason to celebrate today.

 

A number of folks from nearby towns had come into Bahir Dar for the weekend to celebrate Christmas and New Year's (and, as it turns out, St. Gabriel's...), and celebrate we did. We prepared a *feast*, which included fried chicken, made from scratch. From scratch meaning from _live_ chickens. [Disclaimer: if you are squeamish or vegetarian, or both, this post may not be for you].

 

We went to the market (four of us: Levi, Beth, Christie, and I), and bought 2 chickens (30 birr, or about $3, each), and Levi carried them home, tied together with a bit of cloth, upside down, in one hand. We also bought a huge aluminum pot for scalding the feathers off of them, as per Peace Corps cookbook instructions, and an enormous bottle of oil, along with some other handy items. Took a motorcycle taxi home; the driver saw absolutely no problem with cramming the 4 of us into the 3-person taxi, or with the fact that we were carrying this squawking cargo.

 

Slaughtering chickens is an experience I am glad to have had, and hope not to have to take any part in again anytime soon. We were fairly inept about the whole process, but succeeded, at least marginally, in the long run. I'll try to upload some pictures, eventually (the event was well documented, and with good reason--certainly among the more dramatic activities of life in Ethiopia thus far...). Levi was responsible for the killing, which was culturally appropriate, as only men do the actual slaughtering here.

 

The precise moment of killing a chicken is entirely unpleasant, in a way I couldn't have predicted. Blood spurting everywhere, pained clucking until the last moment, wild death throes. Ours didn't really "run around" like chickens with their heads cut off, but there was still some violent wing flapping going on after their heads were already on the ground. Levi's pants and shirt were covered in blood--looked like he had just been in some sort of terrible knife fight. Christie kept saying "it's only nerves, he's already gone," as a mantra as they were flapping around, and we all had to repeat it to keep being able to face what was happening. I only had one major flip-out, when blood spattered onto my glasses, it was more than I could take and I had to run to wash my face. Beth (a nurse) was quite clinical about the whole matter, at least once they were actually dead, and in fact, I was proud of all four of us for our bravery about the whole thing.

 

Even once the chickens were plucked (no mean feat in itself...), we realized that we'd never actually prepared a whole chicken. None of us, in fact, had any idea how to skin or section a chicken. And the fact that we were working on the carcasses next to a plastic bucket filled with chicken heads, wings, feathers, and plenty of blood/water soup didn't make the task any easier. Nor did a kitten trying frantically to get at the meat.  All in all it took us almost 2 hours to slaughter, pluck, cut-up, and fry the meat. And these two full chickens made a whopping 10 pieces of fried chicken (granted, some of the pieces were big, because we couldn't figure out how to separate them to make them any smaller).

 

This whole time, I was picturing a pack of boneless skinless chicken breasts for sale at ANY grocery store in America, and was thinking (a) about how these chickens probably had a nicer life (and perhaps even a nicer death, unfortunately enough), than any of the ones in American groceries, (b) how BIG American chicken breasts are--hormones? (c) how either appreciative and/or disgusted I am going to be about being able to buy those chicken breasts when I get back to the states. I feel like I really understood, for the first time, what it really means to kill an animal in order to eat it. It's terrible. And at the same time manageable, just kind of feels like a part of life. I was both appalled and impressed at my own ability to take part in killing and eating a chicken. So it gave me yet another something to think about. Getting and preparing food, even cleaning up after eating, takes so much more effort here (and yet is so very much cheaper...we're given 600 birr per month--just over $60--for food, which is, frankly, exorbitant).

 

The rest of the dinner was much easier to prepare (and equally delicious), though it was decidedly an odd selection (including many goodies sent from families and friends, which were much appreciated. Even canned ham was happily consumed--this should tell you something about our state of mind). It was also wonderful to get to see everyone who came in for the weekend; though it has only been a couple of weeks since we left training, I was already missing these folks, who I'd grown so close to over the past couple of months.

Starting Work, Slowly.

I've been thinking a lot about how different HIV is here than what I saw in the US when I was working at the AIDS Health Project. I spent the morning in the Opportunistic Infections clinic at the major referral hospital (that is, the highest level of care available in Ethiopia, other than some specialty clinics and labs in Addis) here in Bahir Dar. This hospital is where I'll probably be spending most of my time for the next two years.

 

I kept thinking about one evening when I was co-facilitating the HIV+ Drop-In Group back in San Francisco and we spent almost half of the group time focused on one man's fears about starting ART. I don't mean to say in any way that I think that that evening was unimportant. I think that it meant a lot to him and to the rest of the group; his fears were absolutely real, and I think that it's fabulous that we had the time and energy--the luxury, I guess--to discuss them. Today we were seeing patients with acute PCP pneumonia, with Herpes Zoster rashes all over their faces, with leprosy, with CD4 counts of 6 (normal is 1000). I suppose that my perception of AIDS in the US might be different if I had worked on the wards at SF General, or if I had been in the Bronx, or in the inner city of any major American city, but I was just so struck today by the differences in the immediate needs of these people. Mental health is (barely) an afterthought in HIV care (in healthcare generally, I suppose) here; there's one page on the 8 page intake form for starting HIV care that explores a few "social" issues (like family support, mental status, etc).

 

Each patient had between 3 and 10 minutes with the doctor this morning. This doc sees 60-70 patients a day. And when I told him that this seemed like a very busy day, he told me that it's actually much better since they've added another physician--he used to see up to 110 patients a day. It's hard to fathom doing that day after day after day. The burnout must be incredible. It also must be incredibly frustrating as a well-trained physician, to not have every lab test, diagnostic tool, and medication you might want available at your fingertips. There was a man today in whom the doctor suspected deep vein thrombosis, but without a doppler ultrasound, a CT scan, or an MRI, he's out of luck in terms of getting a firm diagnosis. He said that he'll send some blood tests to Addis, and then potentially start treatment with a bloodthinner, but only if the patient can afford it (500 birr, or about $50, which is pretty prohibitively expensive in a place where the average monthly salary is not even quite that high). It makes sense why there are now more Ethiopian doctors working in Chicago than there are in the whole country of Ethiopia. (Which in turn contributes to the problems with the overburdened health system here...)

 

All of this means that I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed about how exactly I'm going to be able to find a place in all of this, how anything I can possibly do here will have any effect. There are an awful lot of problems. I'm feeling a bit at sea about how to begin confronting any little piece of it. One thing is certain though. I feel really lucky to be working with the people at ITECH and at the hospital here; everyone seems incredibly dedicated, smart, and thoughtful.

 

In short, I guess that I'm beginning to see the challenges of being in the Peace Corps, of trying to figure out a way to make your work feel meaningful and to feel as though you're making a positive difference in someone's life. There's a lot of work ahead of me. I'm excited and simultaneously terrified about jumping into it. I keep trying to tell myself that this is week 2, and that I have some time to figure these things out.

 

All in all, though, I'm doing fine. Christmas was nice; got the day off after all, since ITECH is US-funded, despite "American Christmas" not being an Ethiopian Federal holiday (we'll get the day off for Ethiopian Christmas on January 6). Steph was in town from her site, about an hour away from Bahir Dar, and she and the three of us here (Beth, Levi, and I) made a fantastic, if non-traditional, Christmas dinner of hummus, chicken noodle soup (sent in a package from the US), and no-bake cookies. We also had a nice time singing Christmas carols with a group of British, Swiss, and German relief-workers from Northern Uganda and Sudan who were in town vacationing, and went on a long walk by the lake. I also bought myself a fabulous Christmas present--a new, teal bike called the Viva "Sport Geometry."

 

Actually, the names of products here (and menu items) is one of my favorite amusements. There's another brand of bike called the "Flying Pigeon." A popular restaurant dish is "Shiro Feces" (ground chick peas and spices). We saw a bag of "Organic Testes," some unidentified white powder, at a grocery store. "Earaccuissene" items at one of our favorite restaurants (Eurocuisine? Maybe?) include "Roasted Lamp," "Hum and Chesses Burger," and "Peeper Stack." I could spend two years here fully occupied as a proofreader.

 

Thanks for all of the emails around Christmastime. Thinking of everyone especially this time of year. Hard to believe that 2008 is already almost here.   This year has disappeared without me realizing it--makes me wonder how quickly the next two will go. Happy New Year!