Good News!

I've been waiting a week for Saba's baby to be born. So I finally decided to leave for a workshop in Asmara and that did the trick. He was born yesterday morning, a big healthy boy! Saba is well and the whole family is happy.

It's been a long time since I wrote. Somehow, the blog I wrote after Easter got misplaced. That's probably a good thing. We were struggling with some behaviour issues with one of our children and I got into too much detail about it. Now things are going better. The child in question is keeping busy with the neighbourhood kids. They play for hours in our yard, climbing the tree, picking those awful gaba fruits, and getting up to other things. It's nice that our last month and a half will hopefully go smoothly as there are no counsellors for struggling parents to consult in Eritrea.

It's been a busy month. We've spent the last week or so getting in final reports and typing up our references and now that that's all done we can just enjoy the last bit of time with our friends here. Measuring the impact that our work has had on students and teachers is a fairly impossible thing to do, but we've done our best. The hard thing is, that a lot of progress with supporting the teachers has happened in this last term. It's taken this amount of time to get to know them and for them to be interested in what we're doing. Another year here would be perfect as we could probably accomplish a lot. But the kids and Kim are set to go, so we'll save that work for another time...

We've just come back from a great weekend in Asmara. Last night was our friend Kevin's engagement party. Kevin is a volunteer with VSO who has fallen in love with an Eritrean. They had a big fancy engagement party at a hotel in Asmara, and it was lots of fun. We had good Eritrean food and danced for hours. There was live music and some traditional instruments were played, including the wata (like a one-stringed violin) and another instrument that looked liked long plastic plumbing pipes that some men blew into and made an amazing variety of sounds. One member of the band was dressed traditionally and spent the evening leaping around the floor and putting us all to shame. We began the evening dancing the traditional Tigrinya style, which involves shuffling around the floor in a big circle and jiggling your shoulders a bit. This was all to the great amusement of the Eritreans, because we can't do it right at all. Luckily, some of us started moving a bit more freely when the beat of the music picked up and soon we had a group of younger Eritreans join us for some western style dancing. It was really a nice evening. (If you're wondering, Lukas and Simon couldn't be coaxed onto the floor, but Maya got up once.)

Last week I also was finally given a taita lesson, which turned out to be one of my best experiences ever in Eritrea. Adem, my Arabic tutor and a student at our school, persuaded his mom to teach Maya and me. I really wanted Adem's mom to be our teacher because she makes the best taita we have ever tasted. The first afternoon, we went to Adem's home and his mom showed us how to knead the dough, a mixture of water and millet flour, ground from the millet they grow on their farm. While she showed us, she also served several rounds of coffee ceremony, so I went home buzzing. The next morning, I woke up early for the second lesson. She brought over a bit of the risen dough and cooked it up with water over a fire that she build in our yard, stirring constantly with a thick, long stick. During this process and the next step, when the fire got too hot, the coals were removed and even the tiniest coal was doused with water and saved to cook with later. Wood is scarce and very precious here. I wondered what Adem's mom would think if she could see us all sitting around a roaring campfire back home. Anyway, after that, the cooked dough was added back to the original mixture and allowed to rise a few more hours. It's about 35 degrees here these days, so rising time is short. Later, I went over to Adem's house to watch his mom cook up the taita. This is done on a mogogo, which is a stove made of clay with a round metal plate in the middle to cook on. The bubbly batter was poured onto the hot magogo and covered with a lid to cook. Then a big, round flat thing woven out of reeds is gently stuck under the taita to lift it off. I watched Adem's mom make a few then I gave it a try. It was really hard to make the taita round with no holes and to lift it up without breaking it. I gave everyone in the family lots to laugh about. This is one of my favourite Eritrean families. Adem has two sisters and three brothers and they're all very sweet, especially his younger sister, Muhassen, whom I'm planning on taking back in my suitcase. I had a really good time with them and now I'm hopefull that once we get our electric mogogo in Canada, we'll be able to cook up some taita for anyone willing to try.

Next lesson: gaat, that porrigy like delicacy served with yogurt, chili powder and rancid butter. It's an aquired taste that isn't aquired by most VSOs or Eatons, but I really like it. Supposedly Adem knows how to make it, though his brothers and sisters burst out laughing when he offered to teach me!

A few weeks back, we had another trip to Asmara, this one for a VSO leavers' workshop followed by a supper and party at a fancy hotel in Asmara. It was nice to see all of our VSO friends as the ones who aren't close to Keren don't tend to get up here much due to travel permits. Kim and Lukas want everyone to know that their team came in first place in the Eritrean trivia contest. They gloated about that for several weeks but I think they're finally moving on.

The rainy season is beginning. It is so hot in Keren these days that at midday you just laze around and sweat a lot. Then it gets really humid and usually in the middle of the afternoon, we get a good rainfall, which is really a relief. We were caught in a shower yesterday in Asmara and Simon rushed out into the street to get a good soaking. I'm thinking about bringing my soap and shampoo outside for today's rainshower. The town water supply has been reduced to once a week in the middle of the night. Luckily, Kim caught it last time and filled up the barrels, but we still have to be careful. An outdoor, natural shower might be nice, except that our yard is crawling with kids right now.

Simon has been at us to get some cats, but time has run out, so we've finally convinced him that it's not a good idea. But last week he came to us with another plan. A bunch of the kids in the neighbourhood are raising and selling maros, a small black and white bird that's a bit like a pigeon. They make a little house on a rope for it out of a tin box so that the cats don't get it at night. Supposedly, if you buy a male and a female, after a month or two, you'll have two more. Simon's not sure what they're for, but he's eager to try raising some, or at least he was last week. Maybe he's forgotten about that now.

Right now, he's chatting away with his friends in Tigrinya. After a year and a half of resisting, he's finally gotten up the courage to use it. Somehow, I don't think he'll have anyone to practice it with at home though. It would make a really cool secret language for him and his friends to use though, especially if they learn the alphabet, which is really special. There are 37 different letters and each one has 7 different forms, depending on the vowel that it's attached to.

Guess that's all the news. Time to go and visit the baby. I'll try and write sooner next time.

Barb