This has been our first weekend in Addis. It has been quite busy, but every day we are getting more and more settled.

Friday night we ate at the Bryan's house. Dawn Bryan is the Recruitment director at Bingham; she and her husband Steve have been living in Addis for 14 years. Steve works at a graduate school (which has a seminary) for Ethiopians. She's from Denver and he's from Oklahoma City. They have three boys. Dinner at their house was a fun and rambunctious night. The boys are 10, 9 & 7 and a lot of fun. After the boys headed for bed, we had some good conversation. We learned a lot about them and life in Ethiopia.

Saturday morning we took it pretty easy, doing laundry (which FYI takes 10 times as long in Africa than in the US), making breakfast and trying to clean up (cleaning here takes 50 times as long!). Daniel worked some on his classroom prep, and I made my first high-altitude lunch failure. We both ate it, but there was way too much water in the rice and it totally overcooked -- so our 'chicken and rice' dish looked more like overcooked chicken and rice soup. Of course, there was not enough chicken and the rice had turned mushy; the tomatoes I added ended up turning the dish an alarming shade of PINK. At any rate, the Pakistani directions on our basmati rice are plainly not for 7600 feet.

Saturday evening, Erin & Jared Miller took us out to dinner at a place called 'Family Restaurant.' They had many things on the menu -- Nachos, Falafel Burger, Veal Souvlaki, Sweet & Sour Pork, Bacon Cheeseburgers, etc... Basically all genres of cooking that ferengis might order (ferengi is Amharic for foreigner). It was cheap and pretty good, but it was fun to get to hang out with the Millers. They are close in age to Daniel & I, and we got a lot of the low-down on Bingham. The Millers are from southern Ohio and very Midwestern (their son Trussell is named after the 2004 OSU football coach). Jared is the Bingham Athletic Director. Erin grew up partially as a missionary kid, so she has lived in Ethiopia during the Dergue (communist regime) and France and Western Africa. She moved back to Ohio as a 7th grader and her father is now a pharmaceutical director. Quite an interesting couple. Needless to say, they are adventurous and know a lot about Addis, even though they have only been here since August.

After dinner the Millers' took us to Shoa (a ferengi supermarket -- the term supermarket is used loosely), where we bought clean tupperware (the stuff furnished in our apartment as been here for too many decades) and large coffee mugs with Amharic letters on them.

Sunday morning we got up and had breakfast, but had to be ready at 945 to go with a couple of girls who invited us to church. We had to get there a bit early so that Erica could practice singing with the worship group. Remember what I said about everything in Africa taking a lot longer than it does in the US? Well, the service didn't even start until 1115, and it lasted a solid two hours. Then there was plenty of hanging around and chatting afterwards. We didn't head to lunch until almost 2 PM. Beza, the church we attended, was more like an Ethiopian evangelical service (aka, fairly charasmatic and long) in English. It was very international, with just as many Ethiopians as westerners. It was great to get a chance to go and see how Ethiopians worship. Everyone was very welcoming, and the girls who took us (who are probably older than me -- why am I calling them girls?), who are teachers at Bingham, are friends with lots of Ethiopians and speak very good Amharic. In fact, they took us and a couple of Ethiopians out to a traditional Ethiopian restaurant after church. Our table had the only white people in the building. But the injera (Ethiopian crepelike-pancakes made of teff) was delicious, and we had beef tibs, botswa shiro, and tomatens (tomato, jalapeno, vingar salad) all heaped on injera. We sat on stools and ate off low injera-tables. Our table of 6 ate for 18 US dollars. It was delicious.

Tomorrow, I am starting language school in the city. I will be studying Amharic every morning for a month. It really is crucial for me to be able to speak some Amharic so I can relate to the beneficiaries of the project. Daniel starts school tomorrow with Grade 8 Social Studies. In fact, he is at the teacher's lounge right now, working on his lesson. Do be thinking of him tomorrow, as he descends into his first week of teaching middle-schoolers.


PS: We never found high-speed internet this past weekend; whenever we get something besides shared dial-up, we will upload pictures.