Selected Photographs

A candid shot of me, GezaHAGN, Yewbidar (Ema), and Desta.

A thumbs-up shot where Desta is distracted.

A candid shot where everyone is happy! Gezahagn is a star. Added siblings include Nati, Kademt, and Sosi.

I saw Desta making this face out of the corner of my eye, so I copied it. Added sister: Gilliane.

The quality on the rest of these is poor because they're from my phone. I'm sure you're all happy with whatever you can get, though. This is a science lab followed by a dope library in Yirg Alem two places that I visited within the first week of being here, and two of the only places to give me immediate homesick pangs.

Happy Birthday for Benjamin!!! Aug 5, 2013

This was my first dinner. Don't neglect the popcorn!

I don't remember what I was worried about here. Sosi was being pretty funny taking a picture of it though.

I wasn't worried about anything here. Everything was right with the world.

Gilliane jumped in front of the kids. She always steals the spotlight. These were the kids who were in Butajira at Mekicho school for our two-week practicum. See how many other foreigners you can spot!

Dinqo taught us Afan Oromo. I'm so excited both my thumbs are up. Gilliane makes that face in every picture she has adequate time to prepare for.

This is Daniel Okubit. He has all the answers. Those are maps of the four different regions in Ethiopia that Peace Corps Volunteers go to. We are all eagerly awaiting our town placements.

That's me putting my picture up on the Oromiya map, right up there next to the border. Dara's on the right, looking on curiously. You should really meet Dara.

Sometimes we would have language session on the third story of unfinished condos. Sometimes it would rain.

This is the first crater lake I went to, south of Butajira. It's really a baby lake compared to the one near Wolisso.

These are some pictures of our classroom. It was pretty tiny. If you study these enough you could become as good in Afan Oromo as I currently am!

I made a family tree!

This is Kidane. And way in the distance is Mendida. We're about a 45 minute walk away at either Yeyi or Tiyo school. I never remember which one is closer. That outhouse building was built by Glimmer of Hope, who's also building two new blocks of classrooms at my assigned school.

These are some mannequins in a shop in Debre Birhan. They're crazy for this one.

"A- Why not other days?

B- It is possible - every day

-every time, too!

Well-Come Mendida elementary"

People say "It is possible" a lot here. This is hidden in the Director's office, so no one really knows about English Day.

That's a cow outside the staffroom. That's a ping-pong table that's used as such. More toward the beginning of the year, though, when no one has any idea what's going on.

This is Asfaw. He's the vice-director and does a lot of the paperwork.

The high school football (soccer) team won a woreda-wide (district-wide) competition. I got invited. This is what they ate.

This is Fekadu. He is my Once and Future Afan Oromo tutor. He has the cutest daughters. We are waiting for the high school football celebration to start.

This is lens-flare. This soccer game was fun to watch. One goalie had zero experience and would just bat the ball back out to the opposing team, not realizing that he could catch it.

This is the school that's not Yeyi or Tiyo from before. I mean, it's the other one. It's one of those two.

It looks like have of this picture didn't upload. But this is a visual aid hung up in a classroom.

This is a sunset on the way back from Deneba.

I don't know if this has audio or not. But it's me walking to language class on my last morning in Butajira. Or halfway, before it gets boring and I shut it off. Sorry there are no cute babies running up to greet me to look at.

My range of emotions about a trip I took to Wolisso UPDATED: now with pictures and a narrative structure!

I took a trip to Wolisso!
I have pictures!
Check 'em out!

We stayed in Brittany's house, see? Look at the built in shelf/seat along the wall.
Her whole house is solid concrete (I think.), compared to my mud walls.
She also has a hula hoop, and a good story to go along with it!

This describes our relationship pretty well.
None of these pictures were taken by me. But together they tell an important story.
We started off so happy. So innocent to what our day would entail. "We're going to a LAKE!"

Can you see me? Surely you can see Hailey. I mean, she's right there.
Here we're on a regular bus. Still, we're pretty happy.

Again, a pretty good bestie relationship picture.
Here, we're on another form of transportation. See if you can figure it out.

The wind was blowing in Brittany's hair. Logan's in the background, and that's Simon's hand and hat.
R.I.P. to Simon's hat, which was stolen by a hawk three weeks later.

This one may be out of order, but we have to introduce Habtamu.
We met Habtamu after unsuccessfully negotiating a decent price to contract a van for all 10 of us.
He turned out to be a supremely helpful guide who knew his way around.
He got us on the two above modes of transportation.
Brittany affectionately dubbed him "Lil Buddy" and handled most of the English/Amharic interactions.
Simon and Eric bringing up the rear.

Waving goodbye to some people who were very important to us.

I thought these kids just wanted to give me a flower. But they wanted to sell it to me. I declined because it was a ripoff. Later we found where they got the flowers from. Their English/demeanor was pretty great. Lake Wenchi gets a lot of tourists, so that's probably why.

Remember that baby crater lake I posted a few months ago?

This ain't that.

A rare, posed picture. candids4eva

We walked downhill on a road for a long time.
It was very dusty and sandy.

Very dusty.

Later, there was no road: only this pathway.
We thought it was pretty steep. It took us several minutes to walk down.

It took Habtamu a few seconds.

Later, the path was much skinnier, and tree-filled. I broke off from the pack and booked it down the side of the mountain.
I climbed up this tree, and waited for some friends to come by.

You could make an argument that this is a posed picture.
I really wish you wouldn't, though.

This is the "path" I came down.
That's a pit latrine building AKA shint bet AKA urine house.

There were a few goats down there.
I kept my eye on 'em.

Habtamu has a hut down at the bottom of this beach place where we chilled for a couple hours.
He's got tons of lawn furniture.

Once everyone got down there, we immediately washed our dirty, dirty feet.

Even I got into the action.

There's the beach, there's the crater, there's the beach hut.
But someone is behind the person taking the picture.

THIS GUY

After we washed our feet, we just chilled in Habtamu's lawn furniture.
Part of the reason this vacation to Wolisso was so great because I had most of my favorite people there.
Simon, Gilliane, and Brittany were all my neighbors in Butajira during training in Kebele 4.
The only Kebele 4 people who didn't make it (they live far away in North Amhara and Tigray) were Sandy and Mirielle.

Several people had cameras on this day. I made this composite shot, because of my deep love of history, perspective, record-keeping, memories, and selfies. And because I witnessed both of these pictures being taken.
Also, Sarah sadly wasn't cool enough to live in Kebele 4, but she makes up for it by having a great laugh, being a phenomenal storyteller, and enthusiastically shouting "Big B!" whenever she sees me. She is cool enough to live at the end of my current road. (Enewari, her town, is two hours or so further from Debre Birhan than Mendida is.)

After chillin', our tiredness ( + our lack of any substantial lunch) caught up with us. We were dreading the climb back up.

Another thing about Simon: I'm lucky enough to have him be my Peace Corps-sanctioned, go-to guy for talking about feelings (AKA the Peer Support Network, an elected group of 7 volunteers from our group of 55). Whenever his phone network is up, he never lets me down.

Habtamu and two boys made us coffee to energize us for our trip back up. Usually it's females who make coffee, so it was very kind of them to do that. We also thought it was going to take over an hour, but they hurried things along quite nicely.
New people: to the right, Mary-Evelyn from Texas who is a little tall. In front of Simon, Khadijah in her muumuu, who is from a different state (Florida, I think), and is very tall. Far left is Eric again, from Boston.

Fairly certain, by using science and some memory, that this is on the way back. We are happy to be almost home.

On the way back we spent some time sitting on some kocho, which I think is made out of false bananas. False banana is a real thing here in Ethiopia. I googled it. Fake banana is an inside joke with my family in the States. If you google that, you do not get the true False Banana fruit information that you want. Anyway, we sat on that and it was a little wet. Here we are showing of our kocho butts. It got dark soon after this, but we eventually made our way home! Happy and tired as could be.

There was a lodge that had wifi, a pool, a tree-deck, and great food!
There were many friends!
We celebrated Brittany's birthday with a bonfire!
We rode a fruit truck to a gigantic crater lake!
We hiked (or ran) down to the lake!
We met a guy before we left who's a tour guide who has a house on the lake!
We stepped in the lake! The jury's still out on whether any of us contracted schisto! We'll be in the clear in about three more weeks!
We were very dusty and dirty but we got tibs (just meat) later!
Some people left on Monday!
We went back to the lodge and took showers that were powered by hot springs!
We slept on mattresses in Brittany's beautiful home!
WHAT MORE CAN I SAY
We sat on kocho (gross fake banana root stuff, I think) on the way back from the lake!
WE HAD JUUUUUUUUICE!
I traveled with Sarah, my pal from Enewary!
I came back on New Year's Eve and was so pooped I fell asleep at 8:30!
OHMYGOODNESS: Gilliane had a care-package that had Thanksgiving food in it that you just had to add water to, or just add canned chicken to. IT WAS GLORIOUS