November 16, 2005

Hello to all. It's been a long time since our last entry because our school's internet service is down and the service in town is so slow that I can't get onto my blog site.

Hope that everyone is well. We've received a few letters and are reading them over and over. It's great to get news from home. Please do write if you have the chance. We've been very good at answering our letters. We also have a new email address, eatburns@yahoo.com. It seems to be a lot quicker than hotmail but it still takes way too long so letters are best.

Here's the news from Eritrea:

Everyone is well. The big highlight of the past few weeks were the Eid celebrations. Following a month of fasting during the day, everyone has a big celebration and eats and eats and eats. We attended the prayer in the soccer stadium on the first day. It was beautiful to see all the women in their colorful robes and headscarves. The men weren't too bad either, all in white. If I haven't mentioned it, Eritreans are very beautiful!!

The first night of Eid, Maya and I were invited to a student's home for supper. We had injera (the sour pancake-like main meal of Eritrea ) with meat and more meat and more meat. It was all pushed into my corner of the "pancake" and I didn't have the heart to say I'm a vegetarian as it was a big expense for them to serve it (I think it was goat). We also had lots of sweets and coffee. It was very nice.

The next day we were invited to a collegue of Kim's for a coffee ceremony and three hours of satelite tv. We watched some american shows and got our fill of junk tv for a while. The coffee ceremony takes several hours. Coffee beans are roasted over charcoal, then ground with a mortar and pestle, then boiled in water in a gourd over the coals. One set of beans makes 3 or more rounds of coffee, served in little cups with lots and lots of sugar. I think we must have had about 10 rounds! It was good.

The next day Kim and the kids attended a wedding with the same colleague. They missed the dancing and celebrations but were served injera. I was sick at home (too much coffee??).

It was a great celebration. Everyone was very happy. The streets were full of people buying goodies to eat and of goats being brought home for something less happy. Speaking of goats, we now have a yard full each day. We've moved to a home with a big yard and we let some neighbours pasture their goats here. We get to enjoy them without worrying about who's going to eat them. They're quite fun to watch. Sometimes they end up in our house though, if a door is left open. One day, we were saving lunch for our landlord and when we went to get it. we found an empty plate. Kim discovered the culprit was one of the goats.

Things have calmed down now since Eid. Back to the routine of school and work. I have just discovered that my girls are very good at copying work from their friends. I thought from their notebooks that they understood the work we have been doing, but after last week's test, I discovered that most of them didn't have a clue about what we were doing.

So we're starting over with the basics. Tests are a big joke, with 60 students crammed into a room, 4 per desk, it was difficult to control and I got many identical papers which were all given zeros. Hopefully next time things will go better. But I really enjoy them. They get right into our jazz chants, laugh lots, and are really quite sweet.

Language is coming. We have weekly Tigrinha and Arabic classes and things are going very slowly. Tigrinha has about the most complicated grammar in the world. Luckily Arabic is easier but some of the sounds keep our tutor in stitches when I try to pronounce them.

I must rush off now to my afternoon class.

Please keep those letters coming.

Love,

Barb, Kim, Maya, Lukas and Simon