Some Days Are Stranger Than Others....

Don’t get me wrong.  Each day hear is full of it’s own adventures.  But today has been fun.  I walked into the kitchen to find a strange young man standing with an electric injera cooker on his head.  Apparently, we are now the proud owners of an injera cooker – which is indeed a good thing.  Our wonderful help, Tigist, knows how to make injera, which is better than buying it.  Cool.

I then headed out to our “market street” just a block from our house with Tigist and all the kids.  We stopped at the “teff house” (teff is a kind of grain.  It’s teeny tiny, and is used to make injera.  We would call this place something like a mill.) to buy fresh wheat and teff.  There are tons of bags of various grains sitting around.  Tigist pulls out a handful of teff and shows it to me looking for my approval.  I stare blankly back at her, my eyes pleading with her to handle this and just pick!  I have NO clue what I’m looking for!  She then askes me if I want red teff or white teff.  Again, blank stare.  She proceeds to buy 10 kilos of white teff, along with 10 kilos of wheat.  We then leave the grains to be milled into flour. 


We made a few stops on the way home (including stopping to buy barley, when again, Tigist dutifully shows me the barley, only to be met again by a blank stare), and finally came through our gate into our compound to find a man with a pick-ax breaking up our driveway.  Hmmm.  But the owner was here, so I assume he’s supposed to be doing this.  Upon closer surveillance of the scene, I realize that they are patching the potholes in the driveway.  Here’s how it happens:  1: use pick ax to make an even bigger hole in the cement driveway.  Step 2: clear away the debris from the hole.  Step 3:  fill the hole back in with the rock and broken cement you just used the pick-ax to remove, starting with large chunks, then adding some small chunks.  Step 4: mix cement by hand,  Step 5: fill in remainder of hole with cement.  Step 6: finish off cement, making it smooth.  Works well!

I went past the window and saw a man entering the gate with a bag of cement on his head.  Must be a day for things on your head.

Then, Joshua went out with Tigist to go back to the teff house and pick up our flours (the first time any of the kids had gone out with her alone).  It’s maybe a 5 min. walk away.  After a half hour passed, I began to worry.  Jerry happened to call and told me to give them an hour.  After an hour passed, I rounded up the other kids and we headed out to try to find them with a sinking feeling.  We walked to the teff house and I looked in the gate to see Joshua sitting at the door of the teff house surrounded by Ethiopian woman, and he was sorting wheat.  I found out later that the wheat we bought was not “clean”, but had some pebbles, etc in it.  So, they were sitting sifting through the wheat by hand picking out everything that didn’t belong.  Joshua said he wanted to stay, so we went on to pick up a few things we needed.  It turned out to be a 2 hour adventure for Joshua –but he got to watch them mill the wheat into flour (above), and seemed to enjoy his time.  Tigist said that people would walk in and do a double-take, then say “What?!?  Foreng (foreigner)?!?!?  Working at the teff house?!??!”  Only Joshua!  :)

Here's a video of the teff house.  The first scene is of the room where they grind peppers into a much-loved spice called "berbere".  The orange stuff all over the ground is berbere. 
http://www.vimeo.com/8174557

This video is of Tigist buying wheat.  The videos are choppy because I was trying to keep the camera discretely in my hand while shooting video.
http://www.vimeo.com/8174808


~c