Exabier I Mesken!

Today has been a very good day. After two weeks in the classroom, today was the first day that we were allowed to speak. Sure, stumbling through our first sentences was painfully slow, we mis-conjugated most verbs and mispronounced most other words, but our encouraging teacher was pleased with our initial attempts. With new confidence, we hit the streets on the way home. Turning the corner we encountered Boaz, a shoe shining boy who is extremely outgoing and friendly toward us. Noticing his recent hair cut I said “segura kurit? Betan tinish segura!” (Eng: hair you cut? Very short hair!). Once again, this is terrible Amharic but the message was communicated. He corrected my sentence with the correct words (which I don’t remember now) and encouraged us in our learning. Later down the road, we stopped at our milk and egg store. Andrea stepped up the plate and ordered “hulet witet ena sedist encolal afelagalo” (Eng: Two milk and six egg I need). Oops, she forgot the plural markers on the nouns, but it didn’t matter, the milk and egg man smiled as he collected our order. Next door at the bread store, Travis imperfectly communicated his point as well, “Hulet dabo afelagalo” (Eng: Two bread I need). Once again the missing plural marker on “bread” didn’t cause miscommunication so we received exactly what we wanted. Effective communication is a simple success compared to how little we know, but it still feels good!

(Side note for you linguistic geeks, all the rest of you can skip to the next paragraph: what do you notice about the sentence structure in the examples above? Specifically, how is the relation between the major grammatical elements (nouns and verbs) different from English? What about the relation between the adjective with the noun that it modifies? Is it different or similar to English? These are the kind of grammatical questions and observations our brains are starting to pick up as we begin to speak Amharic.)

Feeling pleased by our simple conversations, our excitement level doubled as we arrived home. As soon as our guard opened the gate, we heard an amazing sound – the sound of rushing water! We both asked at the same time, “Wuha ale?” (Eng: Water there is?) The guard responded with a huge smile on his face, “Wuha ale!” (Eng: Water there is!) You see, here in Addis Ababa, pipes frequently break causing water outages for whole neighborhoods on a regular basis. Usually they are resolved in a day or two; however, this particular time we were without water for eight days. We have two 1000 liter reserve tanks that were gone by day four. Thankfully, the other guesthouse down the block did not have its water shut off so we would occasionally transport water in jugs. But still, no water coming in means serious conservation. It means minimal hand washing and certainly no showers (unless we go to the other house). It also meant dirty dishes piling up, and probably the worst given our GI sickness this past weekend, it meant only flushing the toilet once a day! “Wuha ale” was the best news we could have heard upon arrival at our gate. Equally excited, the guard then launched into a long string of Amharic, 97% of which went right over our heads. But at the very end he said “Chiga ri yelem” This very common phrase means “there is no problem.” Both Andrea and I excitedly repeated this phrase with thumbs up! I opened the lid of our ground tank to see the water rushing in! Ahh, “chiga ri yelem, wuha ale!”
So today we were doubly excited. Not only do we have water coming to our house again, but we were able to use Amharic to share in that exciting news with the guard and later, the house worker. Our language learning progress is slow, but the Lord is answering our prayers for positive attitudes and encouraging interactions with Ethiopians. For that we say “Exabier i mesken” (Eng: God be praised)!