A Day in the Life

My life as a Peace Corps Volunteer is never as predictable or as locked into a schedule as most people’s lives are in America, but it’s finally settled into enough of a routine for me to try to recreate a day in the life of Kristen Rosen, PCV:

6:30 AM: Wake up to the sound of cows mooing and roosters crowing. Read my Kindle in bed.

7:30 AM: Get up, go out to the latrine to use the bathroom, and greet Howi and Moti, the kids on the compound. Wash last night’s dishes, using a big bucket for a sink and a bucket with a pour spout for a faucet. Put on water to boil using my electric hot plate and a kettle, and start assembling a delicious breakfast of oatmeal: oats, mashed banana, powdered milk, brown sugar, cinnamon, dates, and chopped pecans. (The last five ingredients are courtesy of trips to the capitol city and care packages). Other breakfasts include pancakes (weekends only), scrambled eggs with toast and jam, or just bread with jam/pb/banana. 

8:30 AM: Check my email and facebook using my USB internet stick.

9:00 AM: Do my daily religious study

9:30 AM: take my big bucket out to the front of the compound to fill it with water from the spigot (most volunteers have this version of “running water” available to them, but if the water goes out, we hire people to haul water for us from a river). Put half of the water into my water filter because it’s getting low. Sweep out my house and porch because they’re both getting pretty dirty. (none of this occurs every day)

10:oo AM: Get dressed and get ready to go out. Brush my teeth into my little bucket and dump it and the dishwater out on the dirt in front of my house.

10:30 AM: Meet up with my site mate and walk down to the high school. As the first step in our selection process for which 9^th grade girls to take with us for the one-week female leadership camp we’re putting on this summer, we gave out applications to about 60 girls and waited for them to complete it. Later we’ll interview the top 20 and choose the top 8 as campers (on other days with nothing special happening I'll go down to school to make teachers practice speaking English with me).

12 Noon: Using my umbrella as a parasol, walk home, stopping to greet people we know in the local language, shaking the hands of kids who come running up to us, walk hand-in-hand with some other adorable kids, and ignore the verbal pokes from duriyes (young men with nothing better to do than bother the foreigners).  Detour to buy roll-shaped bread from a café and mini bananas from a roadside stand for my lunch. Once home, change into a tank top to cool off, and make a peanut butter & banana sandwich for lunch (lunch is almost always either a pb&j or a pb&banana sandwich). Watch an episode of TV while eating – I’m watching Bones right now.

1 PM: Do some exercising inside my house – a short, intense burst of cardio, some abs, and some yoga is my new routine (okay, okay, exercising at all is new for me, but I’m hoping to make it stick).

2 PM: Get called out into the central outside area of the compound to sit and drink coffee with my landlord’s family. Try my best to follow the conversation in the local language, but largely fail, as always. (Though I’m getting really good at knowing when they’re talking about me, to their surprise and delight when I chime in.) I’m urged to “play!” at least 10 times, and handed a plateful of boiled corn that’s way too big for me to finish, but it’s always a good day on the days they include me in their coffee ceremonies.

3 PM: Do some miscellaneous tasks – today I sent some camp planning-related emails, prepared a package to send home to a friend, uploaded photos to facebook, spent some time working on a design for a future sewing project, and did some prep-work for visual aids for my classroom.

5:30 PM: Settle into my upholstered chair to read for a while – heavenly. My Kindle and my chair are two of my most prized possessions here.

7 PM: Cook pasta and make tomato sauce from scratch for dinner, using my propane-powered stove. (My dinners can be made from bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, lentils, tomatoes during the dry season, carrots and cabbage sporadically, and various seasonings and sauces sent from home)

8 PM: Crawl into bed for the night – watch a movie or a couple episodes of TV or  read more of my book.

10-10:30 PM: lights out. 

A random photo of me, because every blog post should have a photo. 

Peace out, friends!

My First Ethiopian Easter

This past Sunday was Fasika, Ethiopia’s Easter. (For any new readers, Ethiopia’s calendar is entirely different from the calendar most of the world has adopted, so all of their holidays fall on different days of the year than ours do. This means I get two of everything!) For Ethiopian Orthodox followers, it marks the end of 55 days of veganism, referred to as fasting, for Lent. For Protestants, it marks the end of a two-day fast during the days that Jesus was dead. Regardless, Easter is the holiday of MEAT, and is tied with New Year’s for being the biggest holiday of the year.

The town was imbued with holiday spirit by the middle of last week, with offices shutting down, school attendance plummeting, and busloads of relatives returning home to their families. On nearly every compound, the women were busy making barley juice and roasting and grinding coffee beans in advance, while I took to hiding on my compound and in my back road neighborhood to avoid all the out-of-towners who made a big deal out of my presence.

On Wednesday I was invited to my favorite family’s house to eat muuluu (mushy boiled grains, served with mitmit’a – a spice mixture of red pepper and salt). Muuluu, I’m told, is a food that is also served at funerals throughout the year, and is prepared before Easter as a symbol of mourning for Jesus’ crucifixion. In my own analysis, the muuluu is a way to deny yourself enjoyable food in respect for the loss of life:

At my favorite family's house, eating muuluu and drinking coffee!

A close-up of my plate of muuluu, sprinkled with mitmit'a

On Easter Sunday, PCVs across Ethiopia were denied their sleep as both Orthodox and Protestant churches held their overnight church services (loudspeakers on the churches exteriors are a part of the service…), and then were invited to an early breakfast with their compound families who couldn’t wait to break their fast. Dishes served were doro wat, k’ai wat, t’ibs, or gunfo – all beloved and tremendously spicy meat and dairy dishes. They spent the rest of the day going from house to house, being repeatedly served heaping plates of doro wat, overfull glasses of homemade barley juice, and large chunks of dense wheat bread.

For me however, the day was anticlimactically quiet. I was invited to my compound’s main house for a coffee ceremony, where I was served coffee, barley juice, and bread, and later I was also invited next door and back to my favorite family’s house for more coffee ceremonies with them and their friends. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, because let’s face it, I don’t like spicy food, but I also was a bit disappointed that I wouldn’t emerge with any war stories of forcing down a 4^th plate of meat or a 6^th glass of juice.

In the end though, it reminded me of an important lesson: not everybody celebrates the holidays in exactly the same way. This is clearly true in America, but easy to forget when you’re learning about a new culture. It’s tempting to paint the picture with broad generalizations and an image of perfect homogeneity for the sake of simplicity, but there are complexity and variation within any culture. In my case, I gravitate toward quiet people, so my holiday was a quiet one. The people in my neighborhood are not wealthy, so it’s entirely likely that they ate their meat dishes with their families in the morning, and served the cheaper snacks in the afternoon.

All in all, it was a pleasant day, full of families, friends, and fun. Maybe next year I’ll give the neighborhood kids an Easter egg hunt!

All dressed up for Easter!