It's Cultural

The night before the Wegner family left for the Congo, we had the opportunity to experience an Ethiopian coffee ceremony in our guesthouse.  This ceremony which is done for visitors to Ethiopia, friends and also on special occasions/religious holidays involves the roasting of green coffee beans over hot coals with incense (frankincense, myrrh), followed by the grinding of the beans usually with a wooden mortar and pestle and heating of water with the grounds in a jebena over the same fire.  The coffee is served with snacks (most often popcorn here).  The coffee with thick, rich, and not at all bitter.  We sat on our back porch for the ceremony and talked shop with Stephen while Anna laughingly complained that she needed new friends until the sun started to sink in the sky.  It was a nice way to punctuate the end of their time here.

The following day, we were invited to speak at an English class for young Ethiopian students between grades 3 and 7.  We weren't sure what to expect, the only advice we received was "just talk about where you are from and show pictures if you have them."  We stepped into the small classroom on the hospital grounds and were greeted by a smiling group of clapping children, singing us a welcome song in English.  Their instructor, Paulos, asked each student to stand up and say their name, grade, and school and then ask us a question about ourselves in English.  We were asked our names, where we were from, about our siblings/husbands/families, and about our favorites (food, colors, activities, etc).  Then we showed the kids pictures on our phones of our family and our dogs.  Paulos asked if we had other pictures of animals and I happened to have photos of a duckling and of a moose on my phone.  The kids recognized the duck easily, but the moose was a tough one -- cow, horse, and buffalo were popular guesses, only one little boy in the middle of the room recognized it.  Turns out, the word "moos" in Amharic means banana.  We all learned something in English class!

The meaning of names is important to Ethiopians and being asked what your name means after an introduction to someone is not uncommon.  We had to do a little research when we got here because neither of us really knew the origin of our names -- Kelsey means "ship's victory" and Auna means "grace."  Ferengi names can be hard for Ethiopians to pronounce, so when Jeremy first introduced us to people here, he tried to help by comparing our names to Amharic words -- Auna is similar to the word for "and" and has sounds common to Amharic.  Kelsey is closest to the word "kalsi" which means "socks."  Awesome.

Probably our favorite cultural discovery here is the Ethiopian gasp.  It wasn't obvious immediately, but as we became more accustomed to listening to our patients speaking Amharic and interacting with Ethiopian consultants, we started to really notice the gasp.  It is a noise that indicates agreement, kind of like our "uh huh" in conversation, but it is startling, especially in an emergency room!  Every time we heard a gasp, we'd look around for a femur fracture,  profuse bleeding, impending death but we would find...NOTHING!  Just a happy, agreeable patient before us.  This blog post really sums up exactly how the gasp strikes you when you first hear it: https://aloneinastrangetown.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/the-ethiopian-gasp/.  Please forgive us if you notice us gasping when we get back...it also seems to be contagious. Gasp!

English Class

Coffee Ceremony