Friday, 13 March 2009

The last few days have been rough - sporadic electricity outages have been hard on Dan’s progress on the website and other computer issues and I’ve had the flu.  I spent 3 evenings resting in our room after dinner. And yesterday, I stayed home, sleeping into the morning and eating very little besides Sani’s pasta and vegetable soup twice (“Mom knows how to take care of her children,” she said).  Kuku, our nurse student, asks me how I am each time she sees me.  This morning, I finally had an appetite for breakfast and no longer feel achy or feverish.  I just hope on one else gets this; it was crummy.

Ydidia and Abi have been teaching us more Amharic words : spoon sounds like mong-kia, fork is shoo-kia, knife is bill-ya.  And since we ran out of instant oatmeal, we’ve purchased bran flakes and Cheerios for breakfast. Abi likes the Cheerios especially!

Electricity is again unavailable at FIDA, so we got permission to go to the Field Office for the morning, where Dan needed to work on the telecommunications set-up in Ermias’ office anyway.  Back at FIDA for the afternoon, there was still no electricity, so the day was not very productive.

From there, however, we took Markos with us and picked up his wife and headed for the Edna Mall.  Knowing that Bole Road would be very busy, they guided us through some back streets to the airport area; we were going to the movies!  Mark had told us about an Ethiopian/American film director whose movie was currently playing (and we were assured that there were English sub-titles), so we bought our tickets (chosen seats too) for 30 Birr each (less than $3 US) and a couple of bags of popcorn (total 12 Birr, about $.55 each) and went in.  It was an intense movie called “Teza” about a man who is back in his home village in Ethiopia, crippled, with flashbacks about his medical studies in Germany and his struggles with communism both there and in Ethiopia.  It seemed to be a good representation of what life was like in this country during the difficult days of Communist revolutions and dominance. Afterwards, we found a restaurant where we enjoyed ham and cheese sandwiches with “chips” (fries)  while they shared a pizza.  We got back to Anbessu’s house late, folded some clean laundry that was waiting for us and packed for the weekend...