From Jan 13 General Update:
 

Hello Friends. Here's a link to my latest pictures. I hope it works. Emailing pics takes too long, so this will be the route I take for the moment. If you can't click on it, copy the entire address and paste it in your Internet browser.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=58242&l=00d14&id=526567637

I-net has been sketchy recently, so I end up writing things down on Word and pasting them an email.

This from Jan. 6:

I rode around in a car for a few hours today--the pollution is bad here. I choked a couple of times. And it's funny, sometimes you'll be going down a newly paved road (thank you China) and then suddenly there's a 20-yard section of gravel--and it's been like that for years.

We (the people at Bingham and I) went a few days without water, and around 24 hours without electricity. Everyone here says in response "Welcome to Ethiopia!" with a huge smile on their faces. Great, so this is what a developing country is like. All things considered it is nice to be able to empathize with the people around the world who have shoddy electricity. You just get used to it, like anything else. For example when you do have electricity you put a bunch of water into plastic bags and throw them in the freezer, so when the electricity goes out, you throw whatever you'd like from the fridge into the freezer.

But when you see the people around here, and the conditions in which some live, you wonder a lot. But then you quickly come to realize that they have always been used to it—they've never known life otherwise. To generalize, you see lots of people on the street (they literally are always on the street in my neighborhood because sidewalks are for rich area--you just have dirt here) who seem to be happy.

(Next day)The water came back on today—hallelujah! What a luxury...

I'm having my first home-cooked meal tonight—spaghetti with tomato sauce. For this week I bought everything I was used to buying in the States: mayo, mustard, "deli meat", cheese, bread, potatoes, peanut butter (it's the natural kind, not Peter Pan, so I just end up adding sugar, but thank you Lord for PB!)…No difference yet. In fact, last night I met the MTW team (all Americans) for dinner. We had scrambled eggs, pancakes and waffle syrup (I was amazed at the waffle syrup. I can get more "American" items here than in France.) And the night after I arrived a group of teachers took me out for some Tex-Mex. Really. I did finally go to an Ethiopian restaurant for Sunday brunch to have some Ethiopian food. It was excellent, and pretty much the same as Ethiopian restaurants in NYC, although the flat bread was spongier.

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