Happy Easter!

I hope everyone has had a wonderful Easter and has stuffed themselves on chocolate and other goodies. It’s funny imagining Zellers now. This time of year they usually sell off excess chocolate Easter goodies for pennies. I remember one woman a few years ago who had two shopping carts full of Easter chocolate and I think it cost under ten dollars. It’s such a contrast to things here, where dessert doesn’t exist and the only sweet thing that people have is the sugar in their tea or coffee and the occasional treat from the bakery if they’re well off.

We had a wonderful Easter visiting our friend Phil in Halhal, a small village about 50 kilometers away. The trip up was the only difficulty. We spent five hours on Thursday waiting for a bus which never showed up. It was fairly entertaining, watching the stream of people traipse by. Two young children kept themselves amused for hours playing in the dirt with stones, razor blades, and whatever else they could find. Other kids stopped to practice their English with us. One boy asked questions similar to those he must have seen on his English tests. “My name is “dash”. I am from “dash”. It took me a while to figure out what he was saying. All this kept us entertained for a while, but we were pretty exhausted, especially since it was one of the hottest days yet. After a much deserved smoothie in the local bakery we headed home and promptly fell asleep, all but Kim that is. He had headed off on his bike at noon and arrived hot and dehydrated in Halhal six hours later.

We woke up the next morning at 3:45 am and headed down to the bus station. Many people were waiting for the bus and there was no line up. When the bus came, Maya and the boys tried their best to get on but it was really rough and only Maya succeeded. Luckily, a nice man in the bus was a friend of Phil’s and he helped us to get one more seat, then the rest of us found seats on a second bus that suddenly appeared. It was a beautiful though bumpy climb up to Halhal, and Phil’s friend Abdu made sure I didn’t catch up on my sleep by keeping up a steady conversation.

We had a great few days in Halhal. It’s a small town with no running water or electricity, but we kept ourselves entertained by going out for tea and coffee, going for a long walk, and visiting with our VSO friends. The boys joined a soccer game as well. The children in Halhal were much quieter than in Keren. Our kids really appreciated no one saying “Hey you, you, you, Tilian, China, Tsada...” for a few days. Phil killed a big rooster and Maya helped him cook it up for an Easter supper for us. This was the second chicken Phil had prepared starting with a live bird, and it was delicious, served with taita of course.

The next morning we headed off to Abdu’s sister’s wedding in a small village a few kilometers away. The walk there was beautiful and there were hundreds of neem bushes growing along the path, so everyone broke off a stick and cleaned their teeth. Here, it’s socially acceptable to walk around chomping on a neem twig. When we arrived in the village, we were ushered into an ugdo, a traditional, round hut made of stones, with a roof of branches covered with hay. We were served a drink made of mint syrup and questionable water, but we drank it anyways. Later, we had a big lunch of taita with goat zigne (meat in a hot chili and tomato sauce), dulot (made of stomach and intestines…mmmm) and more goat meat with rice. We were joined by the local “crazy woman” who’d been following us around for the past day. She entered the ugdo and plopped herself down with a group of important men (police chiefs, the mayor and other important people) and started eating with them and chattering away to no one in particular. Everyone just let her be, as most people do with the large number of mentally ill people who wander the streets in Keren. It was a Bilen wedding. Bilen is one of the smaller ethnic groups here. Most Bilen live around the Keren area. Their language isn’t related to the other Eritrean languages and everyone says it’s impossible to learn and is a lot like French because of its nasal vowels. We all know about two or three words of Bilen, but when one of us said “tumitow” to tell our hosts that the meal was delicious, the woman who had followed us decided that we were all fluent Bilen speakers, and proceeded to tell this to everyone she met. Anyways, we were lucky to be able to see some of the traditional activities at the wedding. The groom’s family arrived, all dressed in white and carrying swords. They then started an elaborate dance which involved leap frogging several feet into the air while swirling their swords above their heads. It was incredible. After that, they retired into an ugdo to discuss financial matters with the bride’s family. The women in our group were allowed to go say hello to the bride, who was with all the other women from her village in a separate ugado, but the men couldn’t come. It was a Muslim wedding so the men and women were separated.

We ended up spending several hours at the wedding and had an incredible time.

The rest of our time in Halhal was spent relaxing, listening to various VSOers play the guitar, and picking rocks from red lentils for supper (which took a few hours but was strangely relaxing). At one point, the neighbour’s son showed up on his donkey with water for Phil’s barrels, so Lukas got his first chance ever to ride a donkey. The night came quickly, with no electricity to light up the streets. Electricity is coming to Halhal, but it will probably take another year. We had incredible views of the stars because of this and even saw a huge ball of fire in the sky at one point. It was too big and too slow to be a shooting star.

The ride home was uneventful except for the fact that we had to bring along Molly and Joan, two chickens that Saba had requested. Chickens are cheaper in the villages, and these ones have already started laying eggs, so Saba is happy.

Since then, we’ve had a relaxing week, catching up on our sleep and getting use to the heat of Keren again after our break in cooler Halhal.

That’s it for now.

Take care,

Barb