“A Bird Flew in the Window, Dad . . .”

While working in the office one afternoon, I was interrupted by Amani, Abby and Sophia who came running all speaking at once. Breathlessly they told me that a bird had flown in the house and I had to get it out. I went with them to check it out and, indeed, it was true. A local weaver bird had flown in the open window (we don’t have screens on all the windows, somehow it’s not possible, we’re told). The beautiful orange-colored bird was hanging on to our curtains for dear life as my chattering trio burst into the dining room pointing to the obviously scared bird. I opened up the windows as far as they could go. Then I stood on a chair and slowly moved my hand towards it. It had the presence of mind to see the window was open and it flew through the window. Problem solved.

The Flora and Fauna are different here, naturally. But there are some similarities as well. One bird looks like our robin. The weaver birds bear a resemblance to our orioles. And the crows are like ours but with a large splash of white around the collar. There are other fascinating birds I have seen that I haven’t figured out their names yet. A bird that has a crown like a cardinal but with an extraordinarily long tail. There are vultures that look as ugly as they did in cartoons. They seem to be everywhere in town. They circle high above round and round where ever they might see dead or dying flesh. We occasionally have to drive past a slaughterhouse and the vultures are everywhere there. They perch by the hundreds on the roof and all around the where the waste is dumped.

And there are eagles here, or very large hawks, that hunt next door in the open field where a school is. I’ve gotten the binoculars out and the girls have enjoyed watching the eagles sit majestically in the trees watching for live prey. When they spread their wings and take off, it is truly an awesome sight.

The flowers and trees are fascinating too. Wanda recognized flowers from back home but only much bigger. We have a peace lily in our garden but it’s the biggest peace lily she’s ever seen. Some plants grow so big they are almost small trees! There is a cactus type plant/tree in our back yard. And everywhere you go you see Australian Eucalyptus trees, apparently they grow fast and are hardy.

We have a garden space as well. Wanda and I are thinking of bringing seeds of our favorite vegetables and fruits back from North America and planting them here. Will they grow in this altitude? We won’t know ‘til we try.




Recently we were downcountry to Nazret (yes, like Nazareth) and we ended up in a rose garden. It was a beautiful day and I took photos of beautiful flowers. I’ll share them with you. Some you may recognize, some you may not. In addition I saw my first avocado tree (top) as well as a tree bearing fruit I have never seen (bottom). Our Ethiopian friends could not give us the English name. So here’s the mystery, do you know the name of this fruit?

Cheers everyone.

"TGIF"

Friday night is becoming a special night at the Amstutz home. The girls know that there will be pizza and a movie or games. We have been buying a pizza recommended by our friends, the Blosser Yoder family, who were the CR’s whom we replaced (actually we have been following a lot of their recommendations). Metro Pizza is about 10 minutes away if traffic is flowing well. The girls have enjoyed their cheese pizza and the adults have been experimenting with their other pizza options. So for about 90 Birr (about $9) we can get two medium pizzas in about 15 minutes of waiting. We order ‘take away’ and bring out the pop for the special occasion. Lately we’ve been buying chocolate bars, one per person, as a dessert.

Last night I made my pizza for the first time since we arrived. Friends and family know I enjoy making homemade pizza and some even claim that it tastes pretty good (ask my girls). But how would it taste here? How does one make yeast dough at 8,000 ft. above sea level? So I went online for some hints. Beware of the dough rising too fast and too much. Add a bit more water, subtract a bit of yeast. But it didn’t really matter much in the end. I think I killed the yeast, I put it in too hot water. So the dough didn’t rise, *sigh*. Oh well, I rolled it out and the dough was still edible.

We bought some Ragu pizza sauce (made in New Jersey), cheese, and veggies like green peppers and onions. We found canned mushrooms from China. It costs us a bit more, perhaps, to make rather than buy a pizza (cheese is the expensive ingredient). But there’s nothing like making something from scratch. So Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young music blared from the computer and portable speakers (our stereo) while I worked in the kitchen. Wanda and the girls played round after round of Dutch Blitz, staying busy so they wouldn’t think about their hunger.

So how was it? Good enough for the first time. I’ll learn from my mistakes and keep trying. The girls said they liked it as well. We put more cheese on our pizza than most fine establishments. After supper the candy bars were distributed and we went over to our living room where TV and DVD player were waiting for us.

Thanks to our friends, the Knudsens from Denmark, we have a nice collection of movies to watch. They have found a small time dealer who specializes in the DVD market for pirated films. Ethiopia has no laws against pirated films (except for Ethiopian produced ones) so sometimes the new movies are here even quicker than at home. But the quality is very uneven. Then there is the language thing. The films often come from Europe or Asia so even though the English language is not messed with, there are some interesting subtitles or dubbed language options (Thai, Chinese, Hindi among others).

Last night we watched the animated feature called Happy Feet. I admit that I wasn’t enthused to watch it but my girls were so insistent (adamant, actually), that I gave in to watching it. It is a story about a penguin that doesn’t fit in. From birth he dances rather than sings, like everyone else. He is an outcast in his community because he doesn’t fit in but in the end he becomes a hero in the penguin community. The part of the story that intrigued me was the strong environment theme. A moral in the story. I used to dismiss my Dad when he would ask, Does the movie/ music/ TV show have any redemptive value? Now as a dad myself, I ask the same question (funny what goes around comes around). So in the end I was won over by the warning of humanity’s destructive habits to the environment.

Our girls love Friday nights and already are looking forward to them. But the point is that we are doing more as a family already. Somehow we didn’t have the strength to turn off the TV in the evening back home. But now we are playing more games like Dutch Blitz, Pit, Rook, Uno, Scrabble, Mastermind and the occasional Monopoly. Now the only time we watch TV is when we have a DVD. We control the DVD’s coming in. There are two TV stations we can get by antenna, both government controlled stations so there isn’t much on even if we were fluent in Amharic. There is no incentive to watch TV (unless it is to learn the language). So for now we all look forward to Friday nights for good food and good fellowship. If you are in town, stop in and we’ll include you in our TGIF fun.

Home Makeover

Our new house is nice. We look around at the majority of our neighbors, see the numerous tin roofs and shacks made of dried mud and are grateful for the living space that we have. But it is a change from what we knew. Central heating and air? A fading memory. Basements and 2nd floors? Not here. The windows are from 40 years ago, the tiled floors as well. But it does have an open feeling, especially between the living and dining rooms. The bedrooms are spacious enough as well. This is a 40 year old split level pre-fabricated house that was probably the shining diamond of the neighborhood when it was built. Buzzers in each room to ring the servants. But in 40 years the shining diamond has lost its luster. For whatever reason, we have been given the job of a house makeover.

We were given encouragement to make changes this year by outgoing CR’s John and Holly. It makes sense to do things right as you are moving in. Everybody knows that once you are settled in a place it becomes difficult to make changes. So where do we start? First thing that happened to us was the plumbing got stopped up. Someone put toilet paper in the toilet instead of putting it in the waste basket. This may seem like a silly thing to worry about but anyone who has had a toilet back up on them knows the annoyance of an overflowing toilet. That has finally cleared up. Then it was our hot water heater for our shower. It was overheating. We were getting steam from the faucets in our master bathroom. Pipes were warping under the intense heat. So a new water heater was installed. John saw to that before he left. There isn’t much water pressure and the hot/cold adjustment is microsensitive (you move it 1mm in a direction and either freeze or get scalded), but we are grateful for warm water. We found some old ceramic space heaters and now use one for our bathroom in the morning to take the chill off when we shower and get ready. We also bought a standup radiator-like heater (like the one we had in our house in St. Catharines) to stay warm in the evening when we hang out in the living room.

There was some fixing to do. Broken windows to be replaced. Doors that wouldn’t shut unless you slammed them so hard the house would shake (one time the guard came running to see what the noise was about). Finally they were planed and now all close quickly and quietly in the evening when I need to lock up. The sink finally has a drain catch and plug (one had to be quite careful, I dropped my toothbrush down the drain and feared I couldn’t get it out of the long piping, but I did. Wanda worried about dropping rings and other things down the open hole). It’s the little things we are grateful for. I also did some major cleaning out, rearranging and organizing of shelves. Do you know how stuff accumulates in corners over the years? I do because we just experienced that in moving from our house in St. Catharines. Well some of this stuff looked like it hadn’t been moved in 40 years. It felt good to pull out stuff from closets, drawers and shelves, weed out the old and useless stuff and reorganize the stuff that still held some value. I did that for the MCC Ethiopia library and the games we found here.

Then there was the matter of entertainment. Sure we have the MCC Ethiopia library in our house and that has been wonderful for the girls and us. I’ve already read The Sign and the Seal, a book about whether the Ark of the Covenant actually is here in Ethiopia by Graham Hancock (I highly recommend it!) and I read the first two Harry Potter books. I am plowing through David Lamb’s The Africans. The girls have found Peanuts and Garfield the Cat books. All that is good. We also play games. We’ve played Monopoly, Mastermind, Pit, Rook, Dutch Blitz and others. Still, being North Americans, we missed our TV. The previous CR’s apparently bought and sold their TV’s in the past. We decided to buy a TV and DVD player for MCC Ethiopia and finally settled on a Phillips 21” flat screen TV and a Phillips DVD player. Our friends from the Danish Mission have lent us stacks of DVD’s they bought off the street (are they pirated? Don’t ask . . .) and we have been enjoyed some films we missed seeing over the recent years.

But the biggest renovation/changes are yet to come. We are planning to have new cabinets and cupboards installed in the kitchen. The current ones could be as old as the house. Laminated countertops that have warped and pealed with water and age. People have hammered them down with tiny nails but still they rise. Drawers no longer open. So we are currently taking bids by recommended cabinet makers. We want to do the same for the tiles. Many are chipped and cracked. Of course this all costs money but the good news is that the materials and labor cost about 10% or less of North American prices. We hope to have all the bids in and to have picked out what we want done before we go to South Africa for an MCC CR conference at the end of September. The hope is to have the workmen come in when we are gone that week and that we would miss the mess of installation.

The other thing is lighting. Today we are having two ceiling lights installed in our dining room and living room. It took us a couple of afternoons going through numerous light shops before settling on one we liked. We bought two, one for each room. Lighting for each room previously consisted of a single bulb. The corners of the rooms were in darkened states. Reading in the living room wasn’t easy on the eyes (I can remember as I was growing up, my dad would come into the room and say, much to my annoyance, “You need more light on what you are reading.” And now I say it to my daughters, much to their annoyance.), so these new lights will alleviate that.

It is exciting to see all the changes. Still, a house makeover isn’t the same as a home makeover. That will take time. But I believe it will happen. We will become used to living here. We will become used to shopping here. To getting around here. But one’s house needs to become a home if one is to feel stable and secure enough to venture out and meet the challenges of a different culture. And it is happening, step by step . . .

A Time to Play . . .

It was a beautiful day on Wednesday when we went to Bingham Academy. After threading our way through Addis’ city traffic (vehicles from huge trucks, public transports to the smallest cars all spewing black clouds of exhaust, all manner of people jaywalking everywhere and docile donkeys as beasts of burden) we found the alley that led to the gates of the school. It felt like we were entering another world. A protected place of mowed green, grassy space. A school building that looks more like the schools we know (although the layout is closer to southern schools like Sarasota Christian, where students walk outside from one building to another between classes). A new gym that is said to be one of the best gymnasiums in East Africa.

Here we met the headmaster (principal), Mr. Murray Overton, with a broad Australian accent. Mr. Overton had invited us to meet with the teachers during morning tea. We met with Miss Root, the new Grade 4 teacher for Amani and Abigail. Miss Root is like many of the newly recruited teachers, young. She is from California and had a sunny disposition. She kept saying how much she is looking forward to having Amani and Abby in her classroom. It just so happens that she will also have two other sets of twins in her classroom as well (identical twin boys and fraternal twin boy and girl). We met with Miss Long, Sophia’s new teacher for Grade 3. She is from Suffolk, England and she was also quite friendly and eager to get started. Perhaps Sophia will acquire a British accent.

Soon enough the tea time was over and the teachers had to return to their orientation. I had brought the whiffle balls and bat and gloves as well as frisbees for us to play with. After all, one cannot waste a warm, sunny day with blue skies in the middle of rainy season! First we explored. The soccer field is well maintained. There are moss-covered cement stands around part of the field. There is a running track that follows wall all around the compound, almost 1 km in length. And there is a swing that attracted the girls instantly. A swing with a rope almost 30 feet in length, chained to two towering Australian Eucalyptus which, when you pull the swing up on the ridge and let go, it sends the swingee far over a small ravine. Amani, Abby and Sophia couldn’t get enough of the swing. Wanda couldn’t look (typical mom, it looked dangerous). Time and again I pushed them as hard as possible and they soared far out over the ravine.

Eventually Sophia and I made our way to the ball field. We set up a mini diamond with the frisbees as bases and I began pitching to Sophia (Amani and Abby went with Wanda back to the library to check out more Nancy Drew books). To play the familiar in an unfamiliar place felt good. We enjoyed the light breeze in our faces and sun on our skin. We watched a large hawk land on a nearby water tower. We saw vultures soaring high in the air. The rest of the family eventually came to join us and we all played ball. Then Frisbee after that. I look forward to spending Saturday mornings there playing pickup basketball with some guys or running on the track or playing with the girls on the field. After all, none of us are getting much exercise.

A New Church

When you are new in town, it’s hard to get to know people, especially if there is a language barrier. Churches are good places to make friends. There are a number of churches who conduct services in English or have good translators. The big one in town is the International Evangelical Church (IEC) which many folks go to. I’m sure there are many great people there but we felt a bit out of place. So we managed to find another church, International Lutheran Church. A friend of a friend who goes there gave us directions and we went off on a bright sunny Sunday morning (don’t underestimate the power of a sunny day in the middle of rainy season, optimism in finding our way there was heightened even though it was undeserved).
We may have gone the wrong way down a divided street, it’s possible we might have almost caused an accident by our indecision amongst innumerable city buses, large passenger vans, taxis, donkeys, sheep and people. It’s certain that my girls can’t help but play back seat drivers, to my consternation (“if you don’t like the way I drive, close your eyes and you’ll be fine”). But we made it, thanks be to God (we said that in the service as well).
The Lutheran church is a bit more liturgical than we are used to, lots more litanies. The hymn books look like a modern day Ausbund, the Amish songbook; all words and no scores. We looked at our bulletin and saw familiar hymns and nodded assuredly to each other, this looks good. But to our dismay they used different tunes and we struggled.
Yet, the church was small and friendly. Best of all, on that Sunday there were lots of young “western” girls who were more or less the same age as our daughters. A huge drawing card. At the IEC we were lost in the crowd. But the ILC was a bit like the Cheers line, a place where people know your name. Afterwards folks came up and introduced themselves, including a family from Denmark with 3 young daughters. It turned out that their middle daughter is the same age as our twins and their youngest and Sophia are the same age. The Knudsens are sending their daughters to Bingham Academy this fall too so the girls found someone they knew before school started.
That might have been the end of it but as we got into our 1987 white Toyota station wagon some little Ethiopian girls ran up to my window chattering excitedly about a “goma”. They pointed to a tire but I wasn’t sure this wasn’t some trick (some boy gangs do this to scam drivers, lining up and pointing out a defect on the vehicle then producing a part they claim they saw fall off, whereupon they helpfully direct the poor driver to their friend’s garage and proceed to charge an outrageous price for nothing). But wait, I reasoned, this is in the walled compound of a church and these are young girls. I got out and found, yep, a flat tire. Front passenger side. So I started getting out the equipment, found the spare under the back of the car and started to jack up the car. Helping hands appeared from everywhere and soon a small crowd gathered around to see the spectacle. Better here than on the road somewhere. The guest preacher, a kind Pentecostal man from Nigeria, insisted on helping in spite of the fact that he had an absolutely beautiful suit on. I couldn’t dissuade him. Lars Knudsen, the father of the family of girls, was helpful in getting the whole business going. When the spare tire was on the crowd dispersed. And what had been a “Why me, Lord?” moment became a “Thank you, Lord” moment. The Knudsens and a few others invited us to go with them to a Korean restaurant for lunch. The food was good (if you like Korean), the company was good and the girls got to know each other. After the lunch the Knudsens invited us to Kaldi Coffee for ice cream and coffee. There the girls tasted the first ice cream that is fairly close to North American ice cream (don’t worry, Avondale, Dairy Queen Dalton Dariette needn’t worry about competition). There we agreed to exchange daughters for the day on Monday (twins to their house, their Sille to our house to play with Sophia). So we had to see where each other lives. The Danish Mission has a large compound and they have a nice house in a large compound. So perhaps this is a beginning of a friendship.
That was last Sunday. We went back to the ILC this morning. This Sunday the hymns were familiar, the sermon was too (Wanda and I can’t help but critique, occupational hazard). The communion was unfamiliar, Wanda and I joined a number of others going to the front and kneeling on long cushions of the first step. There, kneeling, we held out our hands and received the bread and the wine/grape juice (the familiar little cups were either one or the other). Afterwards we all stood, held hands while the pastor pronounced a blessing on us. Then we went back to our seats.
Will we go there again? Probably, but we still wish to visit other churches. Attending an Meserete Kristos Church (MKC) would be great, but out of the question because of our girls and the language barrier. The services run 2-4 hours long and our Amharic is not good enough yet (if ever). So we need to attend English services that run less than 2 hours. It is tempting at this stage to stay comfortably in our compound and not venture out on Sunday mornings but if we had stayed at home we wouldn’t have made new acquaintances and we would have missed corporate worship (we did worship one Sunday at home as a family). Continue to remember us in prayer as we find our way through the city to new places and destinations.