We started work on Monday, it freakin sucked. I didn’t really want to go. It was raining. It was muddy. We sat around in the clinic pretty much all day. The woman we have as our data collector also works at the clinic and we got maybe 10 surveys on Monday, the busiest day. He she didn’t have time to get all the surveys done and do her job. Most of the women are illiterate so we need someone to read them the survey and mark their responses. The survey is translated from English into both Amharic, the national language, and Oromifan, the local language. We walked back home. In the mud. It sucked. We are working in the immunization clinic and aren’t getting enough mother-child pairs, or at least enough mother-child pairs where the kid ... read more

The other day my companion and I both saw this kid pushing a metal hoop with a stick and we didn’t talk about him until today. She thought it was funny that kids here play with those 1950s type toys and I told her about that playstation 3 commercial, that talks about pushing hoops with sticks. People write into sony and they show the person acting/reading out their letter and they have their spokesperson who responds. Anyways, the kid is like, “help, my grandmother has hijacked my playstation 3 and I cant play it.” The spokesperson says “you should thank your lucky stars you live in the day and age of the playstation, when your grandmother was a girl her fun was pushing a hoop with a stick.” “But.” “With a stick.” “But.” “A STICK!” ... read more

In the beginning of the film, the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart buys a lotto ticket from a kid on the street. The kid finds him later and tells him he won, and with this new wealth the group is able to finance their mining trip. Lotto tickets are sold in the exact same way here. I will be sitting in a café and kids will come up and try to sell me lotto tickets. It worked for Bogie, maybe I should take a chance.... read more

The main thing we wanted to do in Addis was see their famous market. We tried to follow the Lonely Planet map which was helpful in getting us from the Immigration office to the general area of the market, then we were sort of lost. There were some traffic cops so I asked them, “Merkato?” and they pointed to a side street. We walked up and were still kind of lost. A professional looking guy was asked us what we wanted, and I replied,”Uhh…souvenirs.” He took us up to what I would learn to be the antique district and dropped us off at his cousin’s store. The stores were mostly small, narrow, shacks. Looked around at all the cool junk. Most of the shops had more or less the same stuff: the walls would be covered ... read more

Most of these events went down during the time when the two girls were missing. Earlier Sunday one of the students noticed that $200 of hers was missing from her money belt. She was fairly certain that the money went missing in the Jimma hotel. I doubted this but said alright, lets tell management that some money might have went missing here just so they know. The Jimma hotel has individual door locks and there is only 1 key, the maids need your key to clean the room, but Hotel Abebe in Assendabo has pad locks that were jimmied open on at least 1 occasion when a student was locked out. When they got back to Assendabo one student could tell that her stuff had definitely been gone through and stuff was missing. They went to ... read more