My Child is Dead and You Laugh?

This was probably our favorite of the stories we learned in class, partially because it very well characterizes the unfortunate fate of donkeys in Ethiopian stories. My question is, what is the moral of the story? Record your answers as a comment to the blog.

 

One day, the hyena’s child died and word quickly spread throughout the countryside of the coming “lekso” (an Ethiopian funeral that lasts for many days as family and friends come to grieve together). So all the animals gathered together and at the same time, arrived at the door of the hyena’s cave. The donkey arrived first but stood at the threshold, fearfully whispering to all the other animals who were filing into the cave, “Be careful, hyenas are not trustworthy.” When everyone had entered the cave, the donkey slipped in but stayed in the shadows right near the door. Sometime later, the hyena father of the deceased looked up and said “Who is that standing over by the door? My eyes are covered with tears so I cannot see well.” The donkey said, “it is me, donkey,” to which the hyena responded “please come and give me a kiss to comfort me after my child has died.” Fearfully (as hyenas and donkeys are not friends), yet out of respect for the dead, the donkey approached the hyena. As the donkey was kissing him, the hyena bit off the donkey’s upper lip. Startled, the donkey jumped back and looked around the room, at which point the hyena angrily remarked “My child is dead and you laugh?” (if this doesn’t make sense, picture a donkey without an upper lip). Upon hearing of this great disrespect, the donkey was immediately attacked and eaten by the hyena family and other guests at the lekso. The End.

 

Now it’s your turn. What’s the moral of the story?

 

Fluent or Not...Here We Come

It’s one of the most emotion filled moments in a child’s life as the sound of a school year’s final dismissal bell is overwhelmed by the cheers of students finally released from nine-months of academic captivity. Remember that feeling? Andrea and I relived a form of it yesterday afternoon as we have officially completed the two semesters of Amharic language school as required by our organization.

 

Back in early February we paid for our last 6-week block of classes, one week of which remained after the mid-March Spring Break. Even after having two weeks of “break,” we both returned to class tired and unmotivated to dig deeper into Amharic. So instead, this final week, we used a large chunk of time each day to learn and practice saying the gospel message from the creation, to the fall, to God’s plan of redemption being declared through prophets, to Jesus’ birth, his life, ministry, death and resurrection, to the way of salvation by grace through faith and finally the judgment day and eternal destinies of all mankind. This was very good practice. Yesterday’s final day of class, we read the Resurrection and Emmaus Road stories, our teacher told us some interesting stories of Ethiopian political history, and then we just sat around talking (all in Amharic of course). When the quitting time came (4:30pm), none of us wanted to say goodbye, so we used the fact that it was raining cats and dogs as an excuse to hang out for another hour with our favorite teacher and friend.

 

When the rain stopped, we began our 10 minute walk home, starting to process what it meant to be finished. It is very obvious to us that we are NOT fluent in Amharic, as we are reminded of each Sunday at the Amharic church we attend. On the other hand, we definitely can communicate and given enough time, we can say most things with accuracy. Although the classes have finished, the learning has not. Language learning truly is a lifelong process. Nevertheless, we walked away from the Joint Language School yesterday afternoon feeling the exact same relief and excitement that I remember as I rode my bike home from Horace Mann Middle School at the completion of eight grade. Well I suppose it wasn’t the exact same feeling. First of all, I wasn’t riding a bike, I didn’t have any “Book It” coupons to redeem at Pizza Hut on the way home, and I wasn’t excitedly anticipating investing more time and energy into finally beating Mike Tyson’s “Punch Out”. Nevertheless, we were ready for some rest and surprisingly excited about tackling ANOTHER language.

 

Looking back at the language school time, we definitely had high mountain top successes and low valleys of discouragement, both of which we expect to continue. One thing that kept language learning fun was the frequent use of Ethiopian traditional stories. It’s been fun to see the patterns within these stories, such as how many characters are killed at the end, how donkeys almost always get the short end of the stick, and how happy endings are not required, or even expected. To give you a glimpse into the minds of Ethiopian story-tellers, we will share a few of our “favorite” stories with you in the next series of blogs.

 

Halloween in March!

This story is quite strange so it MUST be shared as a blog entry, so here it goes. Monday afternoon, we walked into our organization’s “work station” to check our mailbox. Sitting on the floor were a bunch of packages that had arrived earlier in the day and so, as usual, we eagerly scanned the names. Nope…nope…nope…nope…oh wait, this one is not very clear, but I recognize that return address to be my parents. I looked at the mangled customs form and read off the declared contents of the box – kitchen supplies (bowls and plates), snacks, a belt, etc. Wait a second, those were the same contents of the last box that my parents sent during Christmastime. I looked at the date of the customs form and immediately guessed what had happened. Let me back track to give you the history.

On December 4, my parents put together and sent a special Christmas package. About 2 weeks later, that package was “returned to sender” because it lacked the necessary customs form. My parents, confident that they had attached the correct form only to have it torn off in the mail, took the package back to the post office who resent it without further charges. That package arrived in late-January. Now, in late March, three and a half months after the original package was sent, we received a package with the missing December 4^th customs form that had been ripped off. When we asked my parents about this second package, they knew nothing about it. It turns out that this package-less customs form somehow found a customs form-less package and the two were wed.

Knowing that there was no way to find the rightful owners (there were no markings on the box itself), we took great joy in opening what HAD BEEN someone else’s mail (and now was ours). So that evening, we slit the multiple layers of packing tape and immediately caught glimpses of some of our favorite candies – Butterfingers, Baby Ruths, Twizzlers, M&Ms. I started to dig down, and down and down only to discover that the whole box was filled solid with candy. No notes, no personal items, no nothing except somewhere around 30 different kinds of fun size candy, showing remnants of a Halloween long gone (which was confirmed by the occasional skeleton or ghost wrappers on chocolate pieces and a personal favorite, “toenail fungus”, aka banana Runts). For a few seconds, our hearts were deeply troubled knowing that some kid somewhere probably spent his Halloween candy-less due to this mistake, but that didn’t last long. So, like children on Halloween night, we all (our housemates included) relived the childhood memories of stomach aches after eating too many sweets. So the big question is, how old is this candy? Well, we’re hoping they are about six months old having come from Halloween 2009, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of it having sat in the corner of a post office building for much longer than that.

 

The Smell of Freedom

This past week, I (Travis) had the HUGE privilege of taking a short 2-day trip out to the Gmz area. What? A two day trip? How is that possible when it takes at least one full day to drive there? Well, it is possible in partnership with a Swiss-based helicopter organization that provides helicopter service to remote areas with radically subsidized prices for those doing front-line evangelism. In my conversations with the pilot, Matthew, I found this to be exactly where his heart lies. He told me one morning in his German accent, “my ultimate dream would be that we drop into a village, evangelists share the gospel with the last people group on earth, Jesus comes back and I don’t even have to fly the chopper home. Oh that would be awesome!” Such passion is definitely contagious.

So how did this all get set up? We have built some very good relationships with those working among the Gmz so that when one church planting team hired Matthew and his helicopter for two days, I was invited to join them. So, early Monday morning, I rode my motorbike outside of Addis Ababa to the place where the helicopter would pick us up. The 18 hour car drive out to this particular Gmz area was shortened to 2 hours of flight time and a birds-eye view of Ethiopia’s beautiful mountainous terrain! Upon arrival at our friends’ remote house, we ate a quick lunch, fueled the chopper, and took off again, this time accompanied by three Gmz evangelists. After a 15 minute flight we landed in a VERY remote village, a good TWO DAY’s walk from our friends’ house. We left one evangelist there and brought the other two to a second village in that same valley. These evangelists had been trained in telling stories using the chronological Bible storying method of evangelism which had seen very good responses in other Gmz villages. Two days later, when the chopper dropped in again, it was exciting to hear reports that in each village, over 200 people attended the story telling and showed great interest in learning more.

Shortly before lunch on Wednesday, I climbed aboard the helicopter for the return trip to Addis Ababa, joined by two Gmz teens and two little Gmz boys coming to receive specialized medical treatments in the capital. As we flew home, I couldn’t help but notice the huge smile on Matthew’s face. “Do you smell that?” he would ask several times a day, with reference to the burning jet fuel, “that’s the smell of freedom.” I knew what he meant...helicopters provide the freedom to bring the Gospel to anyone’s backyard!

Winning Trust Through Laughter!

About a month ago, a Gmz lady came from her rural area into Addis for a surgery. Since the surgery a few weeks ago and subsequent recovery time, she has been waiting for a ride back to her home area, where our friends from another organization are doing medical and church planting work. When we heard of her delay in returning home, we asked permission to visit with her in order to begin our initial Gmz language learning and so last Friday (March 5) we were brought to the community where she is living and introduced to Inkonj, a beautiful young Gmz lady. From a distance, it was easy to pick out Inkonj, even though she was surrounded by 7 or 8 other women. You see, Gmz people have a very dark skin color in comparison to the lighter skinned highland Ethiopians. She stood and greeted our friend who had brought us. Then she greeted Andrea with a warm hug before offering me (Travis) a very distant handshake. Right away, I knew that I had a lot of trust to gain. After all, I am a big burly man…ok scratch that. Believe it or not, I’ve actually lost significant weight since coming to Ethiopia (probably because we are eating so much healthier!).

That first day’s language lesson was fun, but not really very productive. The four of us (Us, Inkonj and our friend Caleb – a med-student from the States) sat around a table and had a hard time getting Inkonj to respond. We suggested that Andrea and her go for a walk which really helped her to feel comfortable. Caleb and I watched from a distance as Andrea would point at things and pick things up to elicit Gmz vocabulary. They came back with a handful of items: a rock, grass, a stick, a flower, a seed, etc. I started our digital recorder which for the next 67 minutes captured our attempts to learn our first Gmz words. Andrea was clearly the hero of the day as Inkonj seemed to cling to her like an old friend. It was funny that whenever I would ask a question, Inkonj would either be totally unresponsive or she would lean over and quietly speak the answer into Andrea’s ear. So, my job quickly became cueing Andrea with the questions I wanted to ask, which seemed to work much better.

The second visit was some better. It was fun that we arrived when a bunch of women were peeling fresh garlic for their dinner. Inkonj was super excited to see us. I still received a handshake as compared to Andrea’s warm hug and kisses upon arrival. After the greetings we sat down with the garlic-cutting ladies for a while and Inkonj squeezed herself between Andrea and another lady just so she could sit by her friend. As for me, I was happy that I was getting more eye contact at least. That day, it seemed like Inkonj was catching on to what we were wanting. We reviewed some of the vocab from the first day and then added some more – body parts. My natural reaction to people being uncomfortable around me is to try to get them to laugh. The first day, Inkonj wasn’t having anything to do with it! This day, I did get some giggles when Andrea elicited the word for “lip.” I wanted to make sure that the word she gave us was really the word for “lip” and not the word for “mouth.” So I grabbed my bottom lip and started wiggling it around, while trying to say the word (that’s not easy). Her laughter was encouraging to me.

Today was our third visit with Inkonj and once again she was thrilled to see us come – I even got a small hug as a greeting! We reviewed the body parts, then added the names of clothes. Then we tried to get household items: chair, table, bed, blankets, fire, door, window, etc. We were mildly successful in this. Our big goal for the day was to get some verbs like hit, jump, go, come, pick up, see, eat, drink, drop, and throw. Eliciting the word for “throw” ended up turning into the biggest joke I’ve ever told. You see, I had been acting out each of the actions in order to find out the words. I had hit a tree with a stick…I had jumped in the air…I had dropped my pen, but I guess I didn’t think through my action for the word “throw.” You see, I threw my pen quite a ways away and turned to Inkonj in order to carefully hear how she pronounced the word “begwegobesha.” Then I turned to write the word down and realized what I had done. On the video/audio you can hear this event as I first make a sound effect of the pen flying, Inkonj is amused by my throw and then I say “Oh, I need something to write with.” I run over to retrieve the pen and Inkonj realizes what happened and she busts up laughing. When I returned, she was still laughing and Andrea says “she’s laughing so hard she’s drooling!” If laughter is truly a way to make friends, Inkonj and I are buds now.

The Interview: A Window into Life

Our language school uses a unique method of teaching Amharic in that it tries to duplicate the way in which children learn language. Well, as with children, there comes a time when baby birds need to be pushed out of the nest to test their wings. For us, that came last December when we began phase four. A mandatory part of phase four involves the students going out and collecting interviews in Amharic. So, trying to collect at least one, if not two interviews a week has been our task these past few months.

 

We started with the man we refer to as “The Happy Beggar.” He is an old man who begs on the side of the road near our house, but unlike most beggars, he does not yell at us to directly ask for money. Instead, his face lights up when he sees us coming and very formally greets us with “tenayistalign” which means “may God give you health on my behalf” (it is a formal greeting that you would use when meeting someone for the first time). When other beggars near him would call out to us for money, he would scold them saying it was rude. Needless to say, all the foreigners living in our area know and appreciate this man because he sticks out like a rose among thorns. So we interviewed him to find out his life story, taking our recording back to class for reviewing and clarification of unclear words/phrases. The most memorable part of the interview was when some teenagers stopped and stared at us for a while. Finally, the Happy Beggar, addressed them in Amharic saying “Go away, nothing to see here, they are people, just like you!” We had to laugh as we often don’t feel like normal people here in Ethiopia.

 

Later interviews included Dereje, a man who works in the government and church relations part of our organization. His interview was especially difficult as he used many government words (mayor’s office, signing a contract, registration, etc.), so we slowly hacked through that interview in class. Then there was the gardener at the school, Mola, who grew up outside of Addis Ababa, but ran away from home as a teenager when a cattle disease not only killed his family’s “wealth,” but also his dream of inheriting his father’s herd. He sought work all over Ethiopia before coming to Addis. Today, Mola is slowly putting his life together as he gardens during the day (earning about $40 a month) and attends night school (he is currently in sixth grade). His goal is to finish school and move back home to farm like his father. We interviewed a national Bible translator who grew up in the Orthodox Church and even attended priest school before coming to know Jesus as his Savior. He allowed us to see an inside perspective on the Orthodox faith and how it relates/differs from the Christianity we know in the Bible. We also interviewed Fasil, Travis’ co-teacher in the Greek class. Fasil’s story was an amazing one of a rough childhood (being unwanted and given away by his mother) turned around by Christ in his late teens. His testimony blessed both us and our teacher as we listened in class. This was especially nice following the previous interview of our landlord’s house-worker, Tadelech.

 

Tadelech, like the Greek teacher, was given away to relatives by her parents because she was unable to be cared for (the practice of giving children away to family members is not uncommon here). However, unlike Fasil, Tadelech was not given an education and not treated well by her caretakers (I can’t honestly call them parents because they did not parent her!). As a teenager, she left that life and began to try to make it on her own. She, like Mola above, recently began school in the evenings and is now in third grade. During the interview, as she was describing her schooling and her dreams of one day finishing and becoming successful, she broke down crying. Tears came to our teacher’s eyes as she listened with us later that day and her comments hit home - “Tadelech’s tears are the realization that she hasn’t and will not ever become successful…it is very hard.” Thankfully, the interview ended on a high note as Andrea asked about her religious faith and Tadelech responded “I am a born again Christian.” Andrea lovingly embraced her as a sister in Christ. 

 

Interviews are a window into the lives of real people and the culture in which we are now living. Through them, we learn far more than mere language. We learn Ethiopian history better, we learn Ethiopian culture better, and most importantly, we learn to love Ethiopian people better – hopefully one day loving them as Christ already does!