Critters: Lions, hippos and warthogs, oh my!

Hippos were a main wildlife attraction of our entire trip to Ethiopia; in fact, in the beginning stages of planning the trip, hippopotamus and injera were the main incentives for convincing the boys to embark on this adventure!   So of course we were all thrilled to see them! We took a lovely boat ride across Lake Awassa to see this giant and the rest of his/her(?) family.  There was a group of 6-10 of them near the Haile Resort.  A few nights later, we spotted one near the downtown shore, munching away on reeds (after we had exhausted our camera batteries on photographing birds; sorry!)

This is a dik-dik at the zoo on Sidist Kilo in Addis.  The zoo itself was pretty gruesome, but the boys did love petting this little guy, and he loved it, too!

We were pretty excited to walk up to this dude and pet him! Turns out that these tortoises are kept as pets all over the place. They are pretty awesome-looking, huh?

An Abyssinian "black" lion at the Born Free animal rescue park outside of Addis 

(they are a race of lions with black manes).  Our gracious guesthouse host Eyerusalem of Ababa's Villa took us there with some of her friends.  These felines looked a lot happier than the poor royal beasts in cages at the zoo.  

Hyenas abound in Ethiopia (particularly in legend and lore), and we could hear them at Common River, but only Dave saw an actual wild one cross the road in front of our car one night.  The boys and Em saw this baby at Born Free, who was oddly caged with a giant mastiff guard dog(?).  

The Natural History Museum in Addis has some rather bizarre taxidermied specimens of Ethiopian wildlife.  It was the perfect place to be during an afternoon rainstorm in the city, however.  

These gazelles live in the teeny-tiny protected area at the Abiata-Shala National Park, along with some warthog families who were too short to get a good photo of in all the tall grass.

And not to focus entirely on the charismatic megafauna, here are some endearing little creatures we found, too!

These colobus monkey families were in the fig trees at the Hawassa fish market.  The babies were frolicking as we left in the evening - does it get any cuter? (other than fuzzy baby donkeys, that is!)

  

These vervet monkeys are all over the lakeshore in Hawassa and are tame to the point of being a nuisance.  The one eating injera below was probably also the one that climbed up on the table in front of Dave, removed the spoon from the coffee cup and placed it on the saucer, and then ran off with cup!  Zenebe in particular found them unbearably hilarious!   A group of these guys were given some chat (a narcotic leaf people chew) in the parking lot, and antics ensued: sliding on windshields, munching car antenna, wrestling while dangling upside-down from a tree branch, and even - ahem - some behavior that prompted a review of how primate babies are made.   And since this post just became PG-13 anyway -- yes, that last photo is a Dave capturing some remarkable coloring!

Coffee grows on trees!

Well, coffee doesn't exactly grow on trees. Coffee berries grow on trees, but there are quite a few steps in the transition from tree to cup.  So, let's start at the beginning: the Coffea arabica tree.  In the Sidama region, folks interplant their coffee trees amongst their shady enset, bananas, beans, etc.  

There are plenty of mature groves like the one we are walking through in the photo, but folks are continually planting new seedlings and removing old trees.  We got to plant some baby coffee trees at Common River, in the hopes that we will return in a few years to enjoy the fruits!  

While we were there in June, the beans were still small and green, and won't be red and ready to pick till September.  They need to be cleaned and then dried in order to be

sold.  This will bring a burst of cash to the families that produce them, if they happen to get a good price the day they haul them to market.  In every town we passed through, we kept noticing mysterious, heavily-fortified empty buildings.  We eventually learned that they are for the coffee harvest!  This cash crop economy with a single annual harvest is a difficult thing to rely on for many families, especially since the harvest coincides with new year's festivities...

Dried coffee beans are stored and then sold year-round in village markets and at shops.  You can purchase them dried and still in their hulls (black round things in the lower left of the photo), or already husked, green beans (upper right).  

Fun factoid: Ethiopia consumes half of the coffee it produces.  That's an awful lot of buna!  The rest is exported and then roasted for lucky people like me.

Jah bless this bathroom! God bless this fly-whisk!

One of the cool things about Ethiopia is that many different religions seem to coexist fairly harmoniously.  This may be a disillusioned tourist farengi perspective, but neighboring mosques and churches are a nice thing to see, plus a little Rastafari presence for extra love.  The orthodox church is definitely the official, state-sanctioned version of godliness, and I suppose the Falasha Jewish population (who basically all moved to Israel) may not feel so much "harmonious coexistence"?  The evangelical church is pretty, well, evangelical in the south, and the traditional animist practices are fading fast...  So, well, maybe it's not all so harmonious, but it is diverse. 

We all loved the iconic orthodox art; just look at those angelic faces!  The boys used their spending money to buy themselves ornate meskel (cross) necklaces -- and soccer jerseys. (Soccer is a religion of great fanaticism worthy of a separate blog post.)  The city churches are surrounded by beggars and relic vendors: candles, robes, prayer books, crosses, iconic paintings, gum, bananas, pop music CDs, umbrellas...  I secretly coveted a sparkly processional parasol, but since I don't attend many Christian pilgrimages, I refrained from that purchase.

For the Rastafaris:
Ras Tafari, as commander Haile Selassie, addressing a group of students.  

ሸንቲ በት  
The imperial shenti bet 
(the palace is now part of the University)

The Holy Trinity Cathedral is pretty spectacular.  Commissioned by Holy Trinity himself (Haile Selassie), the artwork is impressive.  The church grounds include little museums full of relics and official gifts, including things like royal crowns, Olympic medals and fly-whisks. (Now that's a religious artifact I get! The damn flies probably deserve their own separate blog post, too.)

Sorry not to have a closer/better pic of the cool Holy Trinity mural above the altar,
but it is a functioning church and they were preparing the altar for services,
so it seemed a little gauche to run up with a flashing camera, no?

Gorgeous stained glass (if a little Euro-centric!)

Empress throne.

Kiddus Giyorgis slaying the dragon!  This icon is famous more because of the omnipresent billboards for St. George Beer [ቅዱስ ጊዮርጊስ ቢራ], but still a favorite icon for the non-beer drinking family members.  

St. George Cathedral drum.

A drum-shaped grave marker

Ancient Sidama warrior gravestones at Tiya.

Faces of Common River

Our family spent six days at Common River, an organization in Aleta Wendo, Sidama that runs an independent, non-tuition-based private elementary school (sound familiar, Harmony School?) - you can read all about it on their website.  They also have a successful women's literacy program, a working farm and a coffee production enterprise, and they host volunteers in their "eco-lodge."   We were lucky enough to be hosted by the warm and caring executive director, Tsegaye, and his delightful staff, including their dedicated teachers and the boys/teens that have made Common River their home.  They have created a lovely community of cooperation for the most marginalized in the area, with plenty space for kids to play and flowers to grow.

We'll save the stories for other posts, meanwhile here are some portraits of the beautiful kids, students, mothers, etc. of the community (plus Shebo the dog), some of which were taken during the graduation ceremonies. Not much else to say for this post, just lots of beautiful Sidama faces.  Enjoy!

Betam Amesegenallo! Many thanks!

Horizon House (former)

 Many thanks, betam amesegenallo, to all of you who donated stuff for the different orphan homes we visited.  The first we visited was Horizon House, where we adopted Amare and Zenebe.  Since adoptions have slowed down in Ethiopia (yay for more government fact-checking!), Horizon House has downsized considerably since our boys lived there.  In fact, the house where we all stayed was no longer part of the organization, and they have now consolidated the kids' home and offices.  We were glad to have a couple days at the old Horizon House as they got ready to move.  

Most of the kids in the above photo were adopted between our first visit in early June and our last visit in July!  We gave Horizon House all the baby-related donations (diapers, wipes, etc.).  I didn't take any photos of the roomful of babies, since they were breaking my heart (even knowing that they all had parents matched and waiting for them)!  At one point Dave was holding two infant girls playing with a plastic bag(!), Amare was snuggling on the floor with two toddlers, Zenebe was sitting in a rocker with a little dude, I was making goofy faces and goo-goo noises at four in cribs, while the nanny changed one's diaper!

We also visited AHOPE for Children, a home for HIV+ kids made famous by the book There is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Green.  The bulk of our donations went here: one tub full of medications and medical supplies, and another one full of games and toys for older kids.  These kids behaved very differently from the Horizon House kids, who were so desperate for attention and love -- their dreams for "mommies" and "daddies" were very much alive.  The AHOPE kids were much more reserved (resigned?).  The upside is that the home was much bigger and more kid-friendly, with lots of things available to play with with.  The kids also played so well with each other that there was not a single conflict during the entire afternoon of our visit!

All the soccer players rushed out of the AHOPE compound gate after an exuberant kick sent the ball over the wall and into the highway.  There was some kerfuffle as not one, but two, guards were deployed to retrieve the ball from whomever had managed to catch the escaped precious ball.  Really, who is going to steal a ball from a mob of ill children?!?!

Visiting AHOPE was very much a sobering, educational experience for Amare and Zenebe.  Though I had explained how this orphanage was different from theirs, the boys were a little clueless till they noticed how some of the kids had visible skin lesions, and they all had to take breaks to get medication from the nurse or just to rest.   They have since had a lot of questions about HIV (and malaria), as they try to understand epidemiology of these pervasive diseases.

The educational supplies that we collected went to the school at Common River in Wendo, Sidama.  We'll have more on this amazing organization in future posts, but here are some photos from the students' graduation performances. 

Ato FirFir and Ato Shiro eat their way across the country

Happy boys polished off yet another ear of roast maize.

Oh, how we miss the food!  And the prices of the food!  We each discovered new favorite dishes beyond our beloved injera with wots.  Amare ordered firfir for almost every meal, and Zenebe couldn't get enough shiro, earning them the nicknames Ato FirFir (Mr. Injera-mash) and Ato Shiro (Mr. Chick-pea-sauce).  I fell in love with chebchebsa, which is pastry, fried in berbere butter and served with yogurt and honey; a specialty at our favorite little chain restaurant, Yeshi Buna.  Dave rediscovered a whole new world of enset kocho (see below).  

Ato FirFir and Ato Shiro meet our dear friend
Zoe's sweet family, who have given us plenty
of delicious ingredients for firfir and shiro!

The boys ate SO MUCH, almost like they were making up for three years away from unlimited, all-you-can-eat injera.  Plus there was good pizza (thank you Italian occupation!), and we were blessed with not a single major illness or injury to strike our family in the entire month of our visit.  Phew!  A little gurgly tummy business here or there, some sports-related ouchies, a couple of sinus issues, and some malaria medication side-effects, but nothing that required medical attention. Of course I should not forget the infamous vomit-on-the-nation's-most-valuable-hominid-fossil scene (wherein Zenebe barfed all over the display of the Australopithecus afarensis specimen Lucy).  

Below are some of our most memorable meals:

LUNCH (before)

LUNCH (during)

This was our Fourth of July feast with the family in Sidama.  What you see is that dear white and brown goat rendered as stew, poured over buttery delicious enset wasa, cooked with eggs and served with strips of enset bread.  Enset is also known as "false banana," since the plant looks like a banana tree, but there the similarity ends.  Banana trees make a fruit that you simply peel and eat raw.  But enset trees require an entire culture of cooperation and months of work to become edible kocho.  You can only eat the starchy stem after some poor woman laboriously scraped it into a pulp, dug a hole in which to ferment it,  wrapped it in leaves, hauled its heavy mass from the farm to the kitchen, kneaded it, sifted it and then cooked it.  

LUNCH (after)
Amare loved the milk cultured in smoked clay pots.
It's a little bit like kefir, but richer and a bit bubbly!  

This photo is to remind us of some lessons learned: 

1. The only Ethiopian beer worth drinking is St. George. Just because the other beers are more expensive or use the word "premium," it does not mean they are better.  Don't waste your time.  
2. Only drink the amazing avocado-lime juice from fancy, touristy hotels.  Sure, it looks sooooooooo delicious and tempting in all those cute little jus bets, but don't do it, even if you are an invincible American teenager.  Microbes will cure your hubris. 
3. Those cute monkeys (lurking just off-screen) will hop right onto your table and take your dishes if you give them so much as a friendly glance.  Dining while armed with slingshots is approved.

Who does eat these giant bugs?
And what about all those termites with their huge mud colonies and all those wings they leave everywhere?!!?   What eats them?
Answer: Ants!  The ants also have a taste for human, so watch out.

Ethiopians are hygiene geniuses and have a fancy hand-washing ritual to make sure everybody has clean hands before they go sticking their fingers in the communal plate. 

Toasting our last night in Ethiopia with tej (honey wine) for the adults and "soft beer" (malt beverage) for the underage.

(Amare and Zenebe had an dramatic collision in their final neighborhood soccer battle, resulting in a sprained wrist and perhaps yet another concussion(!) for Amare -- thus his glassy stare above.  Poor dude, but he instantly recovered upon setting foot on US soil the next day.)