Gambella: One Week In

My colleague Sara has had a rough go of it since arriving in Ethiopia a week ago. She arrived on a Friday and a day later started the 777km drive I mentioned in my last post. She has been battling jet-leg on a schedule not of her own choosing, and a couple days ago came down with something fierce here in Gambella. It could be the food, maybe the water, but I am guessing malaria. She is flew back to Addis today to get proper medical attention. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.

I have been trying to figure out how to write about the women’s leadership training that we wrapped up yesterday and am having trouble doing so. There is so much to say about it, but since I haven’t even written up the review of it that I am supposed to, I am still processing it in my mind. Basically 275 women were taught leadership skills that they had probably never understood before. About 70 of those girls were given the opportunity to actually lead part of the 3-day training, and those are the girls that I was able to see the big difference in. In just three days I was able to observe many of these timid and scared girls break out of their shell and gain an incredible amount of confidence! The best of the best will be coming back this coming week to help conduct the next round of training. I mean, how awesome is it to not only train the women, but also empower them to practice and develop their leadership skills immediately! There are definitely some women that I will share more about next week since I will get to know them better as we go through the next training.

I am progressing very slowly with the Amharic language. The most commonly used word is “ishee” (ee-she), which means, “okay”. Honestly though, I know about 8 words right now. I can’t greet anyone, but I can say “thank you”, “no problem”, “okay”, “I need to get off here”, “one coffee”, and “goodbye”. I can also ask for a small branch off a tree that people use to wave flies and mosquitos away from them, and I am working on the pronunciation for “water”. From what I understand, there is only a minor change in the influx of your voice between saying “water” (wa-a), and “I want to kill you” (wa)… I haven’t been brave enough to try it in public yet.

While I cannot greet someone with words, I am progressing quite well with the physical gesture. Most of the time it is just a common (limp) handshake. If I am greeting a male that I know well there is also a shoulder bump that occurs while shaking the hand. The curve ball came when some men in Gambella did two shoulder bumps and I was only expecting the one. Boy was that awkward. The other curve ball came when someone came up to me and instead of presenting me their hand to shake, they put forth their forearm. I was quite confused the first few times this happened. I didn’t know if I was being shunned,  but now I understand that it is common after someone washes their hands and does not want to get them dirty by shaking your hand. I am still trying to determine if I should shake their forearm or just grasp it and release.

That is the update from the past few days. I hope this finds you all doing well, and I will be sure to make another post soon!