A Day in the Park

22 Jan 2012 4 Comments

by Jessica Goldman in Uncategorized

Well…what does one do when the news is loaded with political heat and chaos? Have a day in the park!! My friend Bridget came for a tour of the bio park, so we ran around with my friend Birkinish and took silly animal photos. Lovely outing. The other picture is my host family making their annual batches of cooking spices, bere bere and mit mita are used for cooking sauces and meat flavoring. I helped shred up bucket loads of spices with the girls in the afternoon. The weekend has been wild from the Ethiopian Holiday of Timkat/Epiphany and Asella was flooded with people coming to visit relatives. The schools all have exams now and will be on holiday for another week so I will be going out to visit farms NGO’s and the health centers this week. I sat in a 4^th grade class as an observer last week to take notes on teaching approaches in Ethiopia. They were doing a review on health and nutrition and the class was being taught in Amharic. I became unreasonably excited when I understood the questions and raised my hand to answer. The teacher and students were so happy that I answered the question correctly that I got a wild round of applause. Are you as smart as a fourth grader?