Letter from Erin ­ late October 2003

 

Dear Everybody,

 

Well, we are here in Addis Ababa Ethiopia, we being myself and my cousin Rebekah. We left on Tuesday the 14th at 10:30 am and arrived in Addis at around 9:00 pm on the 15th. The flight was about 26 hours long and neither Rebekah and I slept as much as we would have liked; only a few hours during the last leg from Frankfurt to Addis with a brief stop in Cairo where we unloaded about half the plane before continuing on.

 

We were met at the airport by Yohannes and four Ethiopian women who are on his staff.  Yohannes is the man who started up the book center where we'll be volunteering. The whole staff speaks English but are also determined that we learn Amharic, the most common language in Addis Ababa, so we sit through intensive Amharic lessons taught by one of the four of them and they throw more information at us then we could ever hope to learn in a week let alone a night but of course I'm learning this language for me not them so I study as much as I feel l can and leave it at that. I'm actually having a good time with it. Learning languages is totally fun.

 

We haven't actually started working in the book center yet, they're giving us time to get settled and learn at least some America before hand, but we'll start about November 1st and sometime next week we'll have a meeting with the staff and figure out what we will actually be doing here. =)

 

We are living in a two bedroom house with a living room, dining room and a kitchen as well as a bathroom with sometimes hot sometimes luke warm sometimes down right chilly water flowing out of the shower head. Rebekah and I share a room as her brother, Jon, is coming Friday (tomorrow) to join us and will stay through May. The house is decorated in a very tradition style so all our furniture is made of bamboo, there's traditional art work and weavings up on the wall and our blankets and pillows are covered with very beautiful embroidery. Lovely. Our kitchen is equipped with a fridge, a gas stove and a largish contraption for boiling water (necessary before drinking it) but neither Rebekah or I have had to use either of those things as we have a maid and she does all the cooking and cleaning for us. Having a maid in the house is a definitely a big adjustment and feels pretty strange especially since we don't, yet, have a common language and figuring out what she needs or what we expect her to do ( or don't expect her to do) is pretty hard but it also forces us to use what ever Amharic we know which is good though admittedly it has at times only increased confusion.

 

People here have been really great about taking us around and showing us the city. I even went and saw my old house where I lived from four until six and a half and re-met a bunch of people who knew me then but I had forgotten. It was fun and I'm sure we'll go back often to visit. We were taken there by a boy named Andualem who is a long time family friend and spends a lot of time at our house when we were there before teaching us to how to raise pigeons.

 

I think that's about all the major information I have to tell you all. For further details you can e-mail me as I, obviously, do have access to the Internet and can check my e-mail regularly. I know there's some of you on this list who didn't even know I was going to Ethiopia (I apologize) and if you'd like to hear the specifics of how the decision was made you can e-mail me with questions and I'd be happy to explain.

 

I'd love to hear from all of you so do stay in touch and I'll try to send out big mass e-mails like this every couple of weeks and respond to individual messages.

 

Erin~