We’ve been here 17 months now. For me it’s the time when I realise that I’ve taken on, albeit very superficially, a veneer of Eritrean-ness. As in (in no particular order):
It feels wrong to not at least shake hands with someone when we meet, more often than not it’s three kisses and occasionally a shoulder bump (before coming I’d read that this is only for men on meeting, but that’s not true.) This is in addition to the verbal greetings and enquiries into the state of work, health and general condition.
I seem to consume vast amounts of sugar, at least in comparison to before I came here. Always in tea and coffee, on my porridge in the morning, and as for the daily cakes …
Coffee ceremony without popcorn? Unthinkable.
I will always take great pains not to walk through the middle of a conversation, even if the parties involved are taking up the width of the pavement, just step into the road.
With the coming of the high temperatures I’m eagerly awaiting the beles (prickly pear) sellers on every street corner.
I can accept sitting and having a conversation over a bottle of fizzy water.
It no longer seems so important if a meeting doesn’t happen at its planned time, maybe later.
Ful and fatta, two dishes that are always on the menu in cafes are also my favourites.
Getting up at 6.30 every day to blue skies and sun ……….. doesn’t everyone?
A lunch-time siesta is a necessity.
It’s raining? (actually it's not yet) We’d better wait at home and head off to work when it’s stopping.
C
Wednesday 24 June 2009
Thursday 18 June 2009
Waiting for Rain
The rains are coming any day now. The air is heavy and sticky (though not in a lowlands kind of a way) and we're getting a daily build-up of cloud which isn't yet becoming heavy enough to produce rain but everyone's hoping that it's going to happen soon.
We've said it before but the rains are very important in this part of the world both for agriculture and for domestic water use and it'll make all of highland Eritrea very happy when they finally arrive – well possibly all of Eritrea given that a lot of the water runs off down to the lowlands eventually.
In the meantime we're getting on with our placements and daily Asmara life in which we meet many people and exchange the mandatory Tigrinya greetings with them (Kemay we'lkhum? Dehan do? Kemay kherneknum?... Tsebuq, Eghziabia Yemesgen, Dehan ina ... and so on). Which brings me to one of my slight disappointments with my time here – not having learned more of the local language.
Tigrinya, the language of the Eritrean highlands, is a member of the Semitic language group (which includes Arabic and Hebrew amongst others) and, only being spoken by about 7 million people as a first language (I got that number, well 6.7 million, from Wikipedia so it may not be reliable), there is not really a fully developed learning system so there's my first excuse and people in Asmara are keen to practice English and that's my second.
Now, I'm not too bad at languages (something I discovered long after school, just in case anybody remembers my dismal performance at the time of 'O' levels) and can hold my own in French and Spanish but only after attending organised night-school classes and now I'm (mainly) admitting defeat in Tigrinya having already admitted partial defeat in efforts to learn Japanese a few years ago.
Tigrinya and Japanese have both made me realise that learning another European language is relatively easy (“swimming in the shallows of language learning” to borrow a quote from the blog of another VSO volunteer). If only there were adult education language classes to take advantage of in Asmara, though. I think that learning Arabic at a later date may be a good compromise and we'll just have to continue with the basics during our stay here.
Boruk Me'alti or Boruk Mishet (depends on time of day).
P
We've said it before but the rains are very important in this part of the world both for agriculture and for domestic water use and it'll make all of highland Eritrea very happy when they finally arrive – well possibly all of Eritrea given that a lot of the water runs off down to the lowlands eventually.
In the meantime we're getting on with our placements and daily Asmara life in which we meet many people and exchange the mandatory Tigrinya greetings with them (Kemay we'lkhum? Dehan do? Kemay kherneknum?... Tsebuq, Eghziabia Yemesgen, Dehan ina ... and so on). Which brings me to one of my slight disappointments with my time here – not having learned more of the local language.
Tigrinya, the language of the Eritrean highlands, is a member of the Semitic language group (which includes Arabic and Hebrew amongst others) and, only being spoken by about 7 million people as a first language (I got that number, well 6.7 million, from Wikipedia so it may not be reliable), there is not really a fully developed learning system so there's my first excuse and people in Asmara are keen to practice English and that's my second.
Now, I'm not too bad at languages (something I discovered long after school, just in case anybody remembers my dismal performance at the time of 'O' levels) and can hold my own in French and Spanish but only after attending organised night-school classes and now I'm (mainly) admitting defeat in Tigrinya having already admitted partial defeat in efforts to learn Japanese a few years ago.
Tigrinya and Japanese have both made me realise that learning another European language is relatively easy (“swimming in the shallows of language learning” to borrow a quote from the blog of another VSO volunteer). If only there were adult education language classes to take advantage of in Asmara, though. I think that learning Arabic at a later date may be a good compromise and we'll just have to continue with the basics during our stay here.
Boruk Me'alti or Boruk Mishet (depends on time of day).
P
Tuesday 9 June 2009
Our Situation
Well our regional director has now been, won (almost) all of us over with her direct, open, professional, knowledgeable and cheerful approach and gone back to the UK. From information obtained in meetings the latest best guess is that we will be able to complete our placements as planned and so we'll be here until the end of this year / early next. Good news, particularly for me, since we're coming up to the busy season for the ICT unit (summer teacher / school director training) and we can now go ahead with preparations. It looks, however, as if VSO's contribution as a whole will be diminished whatever the future holds as scaling back seems to be necessary - for me this is the real shame because living amongst, and working with the people has always been VSO's strength.
Across Cultures
------------------
This was the posting I was going to make while we were waiting for potentially more momentous news but we got caught up with meetings last week: I thought I'd catalogue a few random cultural differences that we've seen or heard reported.
We mentioned before that this is a hand-shaking and hand-holding culture, this goes right down to very young children who will offer a small hand as part of a greeting in the street and sometimes a very shy 'hi' or a response to "men shimka / shimki" - the Tigrinya for "what is your name". Amongst adults handshaking just goes on all the time (between males, females and amongst the sexes) and there's even usually an offer of a wrist if the person you're greeting happens to have been working and hasn't yet washed their hands. I still haven't got used to having my hand held throughout a conversation ...
In order to attract somebody's attention say, a waitress's, you can just shout out "haftei!" (my sister) or, more politely, "men shimki!" (what's your name?) - I can just imagine the reaction to "oi what's your name!" in the UK but it really is the polite way to do it here.
Finally we heard a (possibly apocryphal) story about local embassy staff who were once given food left over from an embassy "do" - blue cheese and smoked salmon - both are items we would kill for particularly if we hadn't had them for a while. However, not knowing what to do with smelly, mouldy, cheese and raw fish (eating them certainly wasn't an option) it was decided that the best course of action was to bury it all in a corner of the embassy garden.
P
Across Cultures
------------------
This was the posting I was going to make while we were waiting for potentially more momentous news but we got caught up with meetings last week: I thought I'd catalogue a few random cultural differences that we've seen or heard reported.
We mentioned before that this is a hand-shaking and hand-holding culture, this goes right down to very young children who will offer a small hand as part of a greeting in the street and sometimes a very shy 'hi' or a response to "men shimka / shimki" - the Tigrinya for "what is your name". Amongst adults handshaking just goes on all the time (between males, females and amongst the sexes) and there's even usually an offer of a wrist if the person you're greeting happens to have been working and hasn't yet washed their hands. I still haven't got used to having my hand held throughout a conversation ...
In order to attract somebody's attention say, a waitress's, you can just shout out "haftei!" (my sister) or, more politely, "men shimki!" (what's your name?) - I can just imagine the reaction to "oi what's your name!" in the UK but it really is the polite way to do it here.
Finally we heard a (possibly apocryphal) story about local embassy staff who were once given food left over from an embassy "do" - blue cheese and smoked salmon - both are items we would kill for particularly if we hadn't had them for a while. However, not knowing what to do with smelly, mouldy, cheese and raw fish (eating them certainly wasn't an option) it was decided that the best course of action was to bury it all in a corner of the embassy garden.
P
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