Blog- tangents, electricity,Amharic, kids, etc….

~ angelarose921 ~ 1 Comment

So, if anyone of you reading this blog is like me, then you will have had good intentions ones, twice, maybe even three or four times, in your life to keep a diary, probably have a few accumulated over the years with only a few pages used up in each one, but never a finished one……… yeah, join the club …..that hasn’t been founded yet…..

So, the moral of this tangent you ask? Well, it would appear blogs are distant relatives of diaries, hence the lack of quantity of blogs.

So, back from the tangent to actually writing a blog

This morning I woke up cold for the first time since I’ve been here. It made my day! The only thing which could have made it better would have been for someone to give me an ice cream cone for breakfast…….. but that didn’t happen, in fact I’m not sure of the residency of ice cream here, but since the electricity is always iffy, I don’t think it would have a very long life……….. if I didn’t get it first the heat probably would…………………..

A few teachers here were telling me about the electricity problem in town, apparently there is only one company here run by the government so they have no competition. Plus the government has been taking their money to build a dam so they can have better electricity, but they are planning on selling the electricity to other countries for money so it’s not going to help the locals with their electricity problems. Of course for the people who don’t have electricity this doesn’t act as a real problem to them.

I’m slowly learning Amharic. Not as fast as I want…… well, really I just want it to come to me without having to study it, but so far I’ve only got the basic “hello, bye, how are you? good morning…….. etc” I might have to actually study some if I want to actually converse with the locals. My non-verbal communication has definitely improved here though. I even amuse myself sometimes with my wild hand gestures and extreme facial expressions to try to get my meaning across.

The kids all know a little English though, mostly just “You! You! You!” and “wat dees your name?”. I seriously feel like a celebrity whenever I go out of the sisters’ compound. Kids all flock around making it hard to walk through them, all of them wanting to shake my hand and kiss me and ask me my name. On Sunday the sisters open their grounds for kids to come play. After playing with them outside, I teach the older kids English in the classroom.

Time seems to be flying by, I’ve been kept busy teaching at the college. I’m pretty sure my time here is going to fly by without me knowing where it went! Thus I shall end my blog, and I’ll try to get pictures for the next one!

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I time traveled! Hello 2007!

~ angelarose921 ~ 5 Comments

Hello everyone! I am now 15…………. Well, sort of……

Ethiopia is such an amazing country! They have AVOCADO trees, need I say more?! I’ve always wanted to have an avocado tree in my backyard (I even think I have a fb post about it from some years back) and now I have!! Oh, yeah, why am I 15 you ask? And what’s all this about time travel? Well, here in Ethiopia it is 2007. Which I was pretty excited about. I also had to do some googling to figure out how and why, but I will let you google Ethiopian Calendar and figure it out yourself. Also, the clocks are different to. When the clock says 4:30pm it is really what we would say is 10:30pm. It always amuses me to go to lunch at 12:30, and look up at the church’s clock tower and see it say 6:30. It makes me realize that I am very truly in another country.

 2007!!!!!!2007!

 

Also, the sweet potatoes here are disguised as ordinary potatoes! The sisters said they were sweet potatoes, but I thought they just called regular potatoes sweet potatoes so I was surprised when the regular looking potato, that was not orange, tasted sweet.

photo (39)On the way from the capital of Ethiopia to Dilla I past many houses that looked like the picture to the left. I also saw camels, but sadly no elephants in this part of Africa.

There were Dust Baby Tornado also many mini dust tornadoes, which you can also see in the picture below. There was one really close to us but I couldn’t turn on my phone camera fast enough.

I had my first English class today, there are about 30 students in it. I have 3 classes that I teach twice a week, I think……… I’ll have to check my schedule. But if there are as big as this one I should be seeing around 90 students a week……….The “I’m bad with names” saying has never been more true! Especially since all the names are hard for me to pronounce. I do remember one name though! But that is only because the guy raised his hand after class when I asked if there were any questions, and he said “Do you remember my name?”……. I still don’t remember his actual name, sad to say, but I remember he said people call him Mudd for short. Oh well, I’m here for 8 months so hopefully I’ll get it eventually…………. Well, bye for now!!! I’ll tell you about the amazing embroidery next time!