When the Rain Stopped

One or two of our previous blogs have referred to power outages that we’ve experienced as a regular part of life here in Ethiopia, but it wasn’t always that way. You see, the electricity here is hydroelectrically generated. We arrived just a month before the rainy season was supposed to start, therefore the time of year when the rivers are low and not as much electricity is able to be produced. However, shortly after our arrival the government decided to regulate what had been an unpredictable schedule of “power-on” and “power-off” days to a consistent every-other-day schedule. Different areas of the city (or countryside) would have power while other areas would not, but we could reliably predict when we would have it. Finally, in the middle of June, the rainy season commenced, which unfortunately was a month later than usual, but our hopes for daily electricity returned.

The regularity of every-other-day electricity cuts changed at the beginning of 2002 (see previous blog to understand how 2002 just started last weekend). At first we thought the extra days of power were because of the holiday weekend. We thought, “The government must be giving out extra rations for the city to be able to enjoy celebrations together with friends and family.” The whole weekend with power came and went, without much surprise since it was the New Year. But when Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday came and went, all with power, we started to wonder, “is it possible that the power is back on to stay?” We aren’t holding our breath.

Just as the New Year has begun it seems that the consistent, daily rains have stopped. Why is it that when the rains stopped the power came back on? So now, a week and a day later we still have power…is it too good to be true? After more than 4 months of predictable, every-other-day power outages we can’t quite bring ourselves to believe that electricity is here to stay. It will be weird to get used to having power every day. Right now, it’s a luxury, though like most blessings, it will soon fade into just another thing that we take for granted, until it’s taken away once again.

Night Birds and Stones

Words can be funny at times. Why do we call a sandwich a sandwich and why is an elephant’s nose called the same name as the back compartment of a car? On two occasions, unexpected vocabulary usages gave us all a good laugh.

The first took place in our classroom as we were learning the names of some new animals. Now you have to understand that when we (especially I, Travis) learn a language, we prefer to be involved in the process. I don’t want to just sit back and have things taught to me like in a standard American classroom. I don’t want to have to raise my hand in order to speak (my apologies to all you teachers out there!). So there are times when we are learning something new that my mouth will just spit out a wild (and usually humorous) guess. Most of the time, my guesses cause the teacher to shake his head and laugh, still I try. This particular day, the opposite happened. When learning animals, we came to a picture of a “bat” and my brain cued my mouth to spit out what I immediately thought was a terrible guess ‘ye lilit wof,’ which literally means ‘the night bird.’ Looking up at my teacher’s face, I expected to get the usual head shaking and snicker at my feeble attempt. Instead, he looked at me with a totally blank face and repeated ‘ye lilit wof.’ He then put the picture to the side and picked up the next. “Wait, wait, you don’t mean to tell me that I was actually right? I was joking.” “Yes,” he replied, still totally serious in expression, “that is the real name of this animal – ye lilit wof.” We laughed at my joke which obviously fell flat and eventually moved on, missing a perfect opportunity to teach our teacher the English proverb “sometimes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut.”

The other situation occurred out in a remote town in the middle of our trip up north. This village was not used to seeing foreigners and so we attracted a massive crowd whenever we walked in the streets. Not wanting to waste the language learning opportunity, we tried doing a little bit of talking (which only gathered an even bigger audience). I saw one young man holding an old radio so I asked what now seems like a dumb question “radio ale?” (Eng: radio it is?). He responded “ou, gen aiseram” (Eng: yes, but it does not work”). I followed up with another profound question which showed off my not-so incredible range of Amharic grammar, “le min?” (Eng: why?). “Dingai yelenyim” (I have no batteries). Seizing an opportunity to become the town comedian, I bent down, picked up a stone and offered it to this man “addis dingai tefelegaleh?” (Eng: a new rock do you want?). The whole crowd of spectators burst into laughter repeating my words to each other for those who had not heard. No doubt, my joke would have made headlines had this small town ran its own newspaper. You see, the word for battery (dingai) is the same as the word for stone. He said he didn’t have a “dingai” so I offered him one. Why are batteries and stones called by the same name? I have no idea. Maybe it’s because the word “battery” is already taken to refer to a flashlight. So, if you go to a store and want to buy a flashlight, you have to ask for a “battery,” but it won’t do you any good unless you get some “stones” to put inside!

Happy New Year

2002 will be a year that I look back on with joy. It is the year that I graduated from Moody Bible Institute and consequently started my first full time ministry position as a Sr. High Director with Campus Life. I’ll look back on 2002 as the year that Andrea and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary shortly after moving out among the Gmz people in Ethiopia. 2002 will also be the landmark year that we turn 30 years old…yikes! Wait a second. All that will have happened in 2002? Absolutely. We are learning that we can accomplish a lot in one calendar year, especially when you have the opportunity to live it TWICE!

This past weekend, we participated in the Ethiopian New Year celebration, which according to their unique calendar, welcomed in 2002 (FYI: Ethiopians also use a different clock so that the sun rises between 12:00 and 1:00, they eat lunch at 6:00, and get off work at 11:00 in the afternoon. Time confusion is a daily occurrence for us.). Great excitement was building all last week as chickens and goats were bought, butchering knifes were sharpened, families were invited and preparations were made for the New Year’s parties which spread out over 3 days beginning on new year’s day - Sept 11^th).

“inquan aderesachu” (Eng: Hooray, he caused you to arrive) would be the standard greeting during this time, to which the response would be “inquan abro aderesen” (Eng: Hooray, he caused us to arrive together). The “he” in these statements implicitly refers to God, which is yet another example of how Christianity (namely, the Ethiopian Orthodox church) permeates this culture. These greetings not only reveal the Ethiopian perception that God is the one who granted them the blessing of reaching a new year, but it also shows the importance of community (we arrived together).

Saturday night, we were invited to the house of an Ethiopian friend for a celebration. Yenesao (whose name means “my man”) is one of our favorite teachers at the language school so we were eager to meet his family and spend this holiday with them (along with a few other foreigners who were particularly good friends with Yenesao). As guests at this party, we were treated with such great honor. There was an amazing spread of food, including “doro wot,” a chicken dish that is served only on very special occasions. As is typical, the guests eat first, with only Yenesao joining us in eating. The rest of his family would eat later after we were full. In the corner of the room, some of the women of his family were performing a “coffee ceremony,” a very traditional manner of serving coffee which includes washing, roasting, grinding, boiling and serving the coffee all with traditional tools. When the coffee came after the meal, I made the mistake of drinking all the way to bottom – forgetting that coffee filters have no place here. Needless to say, I spent the next 5 minutes or so trying to discretely pick the coffee grounds out of my teeth – Yum! All in all, it was very, very nice to be able to spend an Ethiopian holiday with an Ethiopian family. It made the celebration much more real for us.

So in conclusion, we would like to wish you a Happy New Year and would you join us in praying that God would give a prosperous 2002…again.

Learning to Take

Learning languages can be difficult as one often must think outside the linguistic categories of their mother tongue. This is especially true in the area of semantics – the range of meaning that a given word possesses. For example in English, the word “green” is obviously a color, but it is also a certain part of a golf course. It’s used metaphorically to refer to something environmentally friendly and also found in an idiom which describes an envious person. So, our semantic domain for the word “green” contains some strange things that are somewhat related, yet still disconnected from each other.

When we approach a new language, it is important to shed these semantic extensions in order to not make assumptions on the semantic domains of the new language. We find ourselves doing this automatically, so much so that when there is a corollary between Amharic and English, it catches us by surprise. An example of this is the verb “wesede” (eng: he took). Now, just like the English word “took,” “wesede” refers to the action of grabbing something in one’s hand, bringing it to oneself or possibly to another location (ie. He took a cookie from the cookie jar). This is the most normal meaning. One day in class we were talking about a meeting that lasted for several hours so we said “sibsibachin sost se’at…” (Eng: meeting-our three hours…) and we paused not knowing what verb to use. To our surprise, our teacher shrugged his shoulders and finished our stalled sentence with “wesede” (Eng: he/it took). What? Meetings don’t take things, people do! Oh wait, we say the same thing in English but it never crossed our minds that this meaning of the “took” verb would carry over into Amharic.

Ok, so armed with this new understanding of the verb “wesede”(Eng: he/it took) a few days later we took a stab at another usage. Andrea was recounting her previous afternoon saying “tinish inkilf wesed-ku” (Eng: small sleep I took). Sounded good to me as I gloated in my wife’s brilliance! Our instructor, on the other hand, paused for a minute, then started to shake his head and laugh “That works in English, but in Amharic we say ‘inkilf wesede-ny’ (Eng: sleep took me).” What a concept, we don’t take a nap, instead the nap takes us! After all, in the Amharic mind, it is sleep that performs the action in taking us to another place or another state. If you think about it, they’re right. We are quite passive as sleep acts upon us. And so our understanding of ‘wesede’ is shaped by each new usage.

Every word in every language has its own unique semantic domain that must be understood in order to use it properly. At times, it’s frustrating to bend our minds into the new shape of a different language. Other times, it’s intriguing. And, at other times, its down-right funny. Our next blog will share two funny stories. First, of one sarcastic guess turning out to be correct and second, of a strange vocabulary overlap that got a whole crowd of people roaring in laughter.

Scarred by Missionaries Who Took

“Hey, why are you here?” a guy yelled at us as we turned the familiar corner on the walk between my house and the language school. I had never seen this guy before, but it was clear that he was addressing me and the American friend beside me. As I stopped to answer his questions and engage in conversation, a crowd quickly formed to listen in. He continued, “Are you Christians?” to which we confidently responded “Yes, are you?” “No, I am not Christian, I am not Muslim, I am nothing. Are you missionaries?” Knowing that the term “missionary” is a loaded term that I would much rather avoid, I responded to him with the truth “I am a linguist.” He asked all sorts of questions about my intentions for coming to Ethiopia which I answered carefully sensing that there were some deep emotions behind this pointed interrogation. Eventually, this well-educated Ethiopian man shared his story of having worked with a mission organization for 14 years, only to walk away with a very sour opinion of missionaries and their so-called good intentions.

“They come saying that they want to help Ethiopians, but all they do is take; they take people’s money, they take people’s clothes, they start businesses and take away jobs from my people…(and on and on).” I can’t remember all of the examples that he gave in his charge against missionaries, but I can’t forget the gist of his argument – they came promising to give, but in the end they took.

The first missionaries in the New Testament spoke about this very situation a number of times. Sure, Jesus commanded his disciples to go out without provisions for the journey, expecting God to provide through the hospitality of others – Matt 10:5-14, yet both Paul and John were very clear in stating that they did not take anything from those whom they were ministering to (2 Cor 11:7-9, 3 John 7) and Paul lamented those who peddled the Word of God for profit (2 Cor 2:17).

Likewise, I lamented the fact that these who called themselves missionaries had tarnished the name of Christ. I thought to myself: these were either bad Christians (using the message of the Gospel for their own gain), or they were bad missionaries who failed to see how they were perceived by the nationals, or they are simply victims of one man’s judgmental perception and now slander. When it came time for me to respond, it was obvious that this man’s mind was not going to do a one hundred and eighty degree turn as a result of anything that I said…so I decided to start simply by acknowledging that I heard his frustration and agreed with him that these things as he described were in fact wrong. However, with a bold confidence that I normally lack in such confrontational conversations, I strongly challenged him with the idea that even if these men claiming to be missionaries had totally corrupt motives, that that did not meant that ALL who claim to be missionaries follow suit. Then, launching out from the sin he had noticed in the “missionary’s” lives, I asked very pointed questions so as to talk more broadly about sin and God’s need to punish it. When I couldn’t get him to talk about Jesus through my questions, I launched into my own emotional monologue about the REAL gospel message that these so-called missionaries so poorly lived out to him. He listened to my words (as did everybody else nearby), though it seemed he heard very little. In the end, as he was returning to his examples of “missionaries who took,” it was time for me to go and so I thanked him for his thoughts and talked of the possibility of doing coffee sometime. He seemed open to talking more, though not open toward my message.

As I and my friend walked toward home, I was lamenting what appeared to be a very closed heart, yet thankful for the boldness and confidence the Holy Spirit gave me (that definitely did not come from me). I was lamenting the scarring on this man’s life from the so-called “missionaries who took;” yet thankful as it served as a reminder to me of my need to watch my actions, knowing that they are being taken into account not just by God, but by the people I am here to serve. For, although I am a linguist serving here in Ethiopia, I am still a Christian and therefore Christ’s ambassador no matter what geographical area I live in and what type of work I am engaged in. I pray for this man, for the Holy Spirit’s work to heal some of those scars. And I also pray for Andrea and myself, that our lives would point others to Christ, not drive them away.