Our Egyptian Friends

Life has been continuing on as usual this week. Maya and Simon are getting on with their home schooling. A box with books and assignments arrived yesterday so they have plenty to keep them busy. Lukas is continuing at school but is working hard to convince us to let him stay home too. Otherwise, things are pretty much the same. But every once in a while, you notice something new and interesting that makes you excited about being in Keren. The latest was a glimpse of hundreds of camels walking down the river bed on their way into town. We’ve never seen so many at once and it was very beautiful. Just past this, Kim and Simon and Lukas stopped to look at a young boy riding on the back of a camel. Apparently he was just as fascinated to see three “tsadas” (whites) on bikes as they were to see a young Eritrean on a camel.

The highlight of our week was our visit to the “Egyptian family”. We’ve started visiting these friends every Thursday. I help the oldest girl with French, (they’re all taking courses from Egypt as well as their classes here) and Kim and the kids trade English for Arabic with the rest of the family. We’ve gotten to be quite good friends with them and have an invitation to visit them in Egypt on our trip home, as they’re finishing their stay here at the same time as us.

Every time we visit this family we are treated very nicely. We are served juice or kirkaday, a sweet drink made from hibiscus flowers, followed by very sweet tea seasoned with cinnamon and cloves. But this time, they also insisted that we stay for lunch. We ended up spending much of the morning and early afternoon there and were finally served a humungous meal with about a kilo of goat meat each, as well as rice, potatoes in tomato sauce, several other sauces and arrugula salad. It was very delicious but after a huge meal and several hours of trying to communicate in Arabic, we were totally exhausted and spent the rest of the day doing nothing. Now I’m racking my brains trying to think of an equally nice meal to serve them. Our difficulty here is that to be respectful and polite we should serve meat, but this involves killing something as you can’t find chicken, goat or lamb in a butcher store. None of us is quite ready to slaughter anything yet.

This past weekend we also attended two birthday parties. Lukas’s friend Joseph’s nephew just turned one. This is the one birthday that is usually recognized here and the parties are lots of fun. We were served taita and then joined in the celebrations as henbasha , a big round biscuit cooked on the taita oven, was broken over the back of the baby and popcorn was sprinkled on his head. (Popcorn is expensive here, but it always being thrown around as a way to celebrate. More of it ends up on the floor than is eaten!)
Then we headed off to Saba’s for Kelli’s second birthday. Saba has lots of VSO friends and is quite westernized, so she celebrates all her kids’ birthdays. Kelli was dressed up nicely and even had hair extensions braided into her short hair. Lots of the little neighbourhood kids were there and had fun celebrating with her. She has well and fully begun her “terrible twos”. Her favourite word these days is “embi”, which means, “No, I won’t!” Fortunately she has many other nicer words that she uses, mostly in English as Saba uses English at home with her. I’m sad to admit that her English is better than that of most of my students!

So that was our weekend. I’m now an expert on birthday parties, having attended several since we arrived. I’m not at all an expert on weddings though. I’ve been invited to several but something has always prevented me from going. The last one was in Zigib, a small town outside of Asmara. We’d learned that a good friend was getting married and we arranged with VSO to rush through a travel permit for Maya and me. I also had a VSO workshop in Asmara that weekend, so Maya traveled down with Saba’s family and I planned to meet them after my workshop. After the workshop, I rushed to catch a city bus that would take me to the bus to Zigib. It was fuller than any city bus I’d ever been on, but I crammed myself in, my head crushed against a bar, only managing to find enough room by standing on my tiptoes. But I was determined to get on in order to make it to the last bus to Zigib. I got off at the last stop as I had been instructed, then looked for the bus to Zigib. I found a minibus that was pulling away and asked a lady if it went to Zigib. As she said it did, I squished on and waited and waited, but after several minutes I started having doubts about where it was headed. Ten minutes later, I confirmed with someone else on the bus that it wasn’t going to Zigib and got off and caught another bus back to the edge of town.. By then I was fed up with being squished and it was getting late, so I headed back to Asmara. Maya arrived in town a few hours later. She’d had a great time but had gotten very little sleep as the music and dancing had gone on until very late the night before. They had dressed her and Yasmin up in traditional clothes and let them participate as members of the wedding party. Anyways, I ‘m now on a quest to find and attend a wedding this year. I’ve told several friends that if there isn’t a wedding soon, I expect them to get married so that I can participate in this highly important cultural experience.

Guess that’s all for now. Not quite...

The big news this week is that we are now cooking with gas! The stove that friends gave us has been just gathering dust because of a cooking gas shortage in Eritrea, but now there is some available if you know how to get it, or if you have an Indian teacher friend who lives across the street from the gas distribution center and is willing to give you a full cylinder in exchange for an empty one. Actually this Indian teacher is just an acquaintance who I (Kim) met once or twice last year and who was just very nice to us out of the goodness of his heart. So, yes, now we are using our gas cook stove which is a big improvement on cooking with kerosene. We only hope that our new, best friend will help us out when our cylinder is empty. Otherwise you must wait in line to deliver your cylinder and then do the same to retrieve it some time in the future (who knows when). It was still a little difficult carrying the full cylinder back on my bicycle and I managed to make it back to the gate of our compound before the cylinder fell slowly off my bike onto the sandy ground - no major mishap. All in all I would say the whole experience was a gas! (I will send this right away so Barbara doesn't get a chance to edit this stupid joke.)

Take care,

Barb and Kim