In Kitchens and Churches

I blame my semester in Uganda for lots of changes. But the main change I brought back to the states was a contempt for shortcuts, an irritation for anything superfluous, a general distaste for unnecessary machines. And this change can partly be traced back to a book called Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (Ronald J. Sider). I recommend this read.

It makes sense that we apply our own change of ideas to where we are, how we spend our time, our money. For me, since becoming a wife and falling in love with every corner of a kitchen, my place of change has been the one room in the house that holds the stove and fridge.

This has generally translated to various tools I refuse to see in my kitchen, or various pre-made foods I refuse to buy. There was a 6-month stint when we were living in Marion where I refused to buy bread, convinced it was just as easy, much cheaper, and more heartfelt to make my own loaf each week. And it proved exactly that, inconvenience in tow. But I can’t say I ever expected a semester abroad to someday shape my ideas about whether or not I’d ever let a machine knead my bread for me.

There is just some sort of enjoyable mystery about toil and labor that hasn’t been made convenient, or given shortcuts, for a high enough price. There is something about refusing to pull out your wallet for trivial things, in exchange for doing the work with your own hands. (This could be why we never eat out). And it’s not about toiling for the sake of toil itself—rather, it’s not letting a brainless machine take the satisfaction that should be my own, not letting it cheat me out of that feeling in my bones and cramped hands, that tangible knowledge of a job well done. And it’s mainly about being wise and short and picky with your money, in order to be fully, unabashedly generous in the areas that really matter.

My longing to someday achieve stay-at-home-Mom employment doesn’t stem from a distaste for office work or a 9-to-5 (maybe it does, actually)—but I think, mostly, it stems from a desire to be fully content and fulfilled; and when I think about what that means for me, I picture various forms of household toil: jamming fruits by the stove; hunching over a vegetable-filled garden; hand-scrubbing cloth diapers; tromping toward a bee’s nest with an empty honey jar; rolling bagel dough in sesame seeds; processing homemade baby food; making cards from paper and fabric; crocheting hats and socks and purses for little ones; and spending the rest of my free time in the church and at a writing desk. Doesn’t that just sound heavenly?

But it’s certainly interesting, and different, to think about what this means for us now, in Ethiopia. With no fridge, no oven, no washing machine or dryer, no way of getting milk or butter in this city, we have to come up with new ideas and habits. We learned this week how to make an oven on your stove top (take a larger than large pot, line it with empty tuna cans, and sit a small baking pan within, on top of cans, and voila, you can make a delicious quiche); we’re considering bringing a goat home with us next market day (and do we name her Minerva or Tonks?) to solve the milk problem; and our “refrigerator” has consisted of our pots and pans sitting on the stone kitchen floor overnight, for our leftovers. Who knew you could still plan and buy for a week’s worth of meals, without having refrigeration? We are enjoying the challenge of living with less, with the exception of the pad we’ve been dealt, and witnessing how this changes our diet and lifestyle. And we wonder what it means for our future. Will the two-year-long lack of tools and common comforts delve us further into the desire to do things the hard way, the old-fashioned way?

What’s interesting is that our challenges here do not align with the old-fashioned country America I guess I’ve been trying to achieve. This is old-fashioned Ethiopia. So it’s not simply that I can make the foods I’ve always made, and get the pleasure of completing every step from scratch. Instead, all the usual taken-for-granted provisions have been scratched. There’s no oven, no brown sugar, and no molasses to even make brown sugar if I wanted to. So what I hoped would be a place and a time that offered me the freedoms of doing everything the way it was intended, the long and meaningful way, without having to answer questions like, “Why don’t you just do it the quick and easy way? It will give you more time to do other things”—is instead a place that’s given me a list of things I can’t do, things I have to wait two years to do again. All of this mainly due to the fact that there is no Meijer or Giant Eagle, or even any grocery store larger than the tiniest corner convenient store, in sight.

This means not being able to revert to favorite recipes and habits, having to wait for my mom’s package of ground cinnamon and proper vanilla, realizing I really can’t make bagels or cinnamon rolls or appetizers or cupcakes or cookies or pickles or candied fruit peel for two years, and having to figure out how to be a hostess to our Ethiopian neighbors—what meal do you prepare for someone who eats so entirely unlike you? And if inviting a new person over for dinner every two weeks was my form of love in the states, and no one’s tastebuds here would appreciate what an injera-less “dinner” means to the ferenjis, I just have to get creative; I may just have to sit on a stool on the floor, with my French press in front of me, popcorn beside me, grass strewn across the floor for beautification—and give each guest three tiny cups of really thick coffee. If that’s what hospitality means here.

But this is what makes me most homesick. One of my greatest daily joys has been drastically, completely changed. And for the next two years we’ll have to learn how to make-do and do without.

Switching subjects: If there has been any theme to our near-three years of marriage, it can be the incredible variety, and goodness, of the four churches we’ve attended together. College Wesleyan Church (July ’11 - Dec ’11) and Pilgrim Lutheran Brethren (Jan ’12 – May ’12) have our hearts for their exceptional qualities: a sincere concern for the poor, the hearts and leadership of the pastors and their wives, an emphasis on community, etc. The more “abnormal” of the four have been Waco’s Church Under the Bridge (Jan ’10 – June ’11) and now Ethiopian Catholic Church The Eparchy of Adigrat Mary Help of Christians’ Parish Adwa (Sep ’12 - ).

Church Under the Bridge is exactly what it sounds like: a 20-year-old church that meets beneath an overpass in all sorts of weather; the congregation made up of the rich, the middle-class, and a large portion of Waco, Texas’s homeless community. The sort of place that hosts a “Recovery Sunday,” where countless church members stand at the front and proclaim their years of freedom from various addictions or “professions”—and the sort of place where a handicapped man named Patrick always sits on the stage at the pastor’s feet during the sermons, whether nodding adamantly, rocking various congregants’ infants, or smoking a cigarette.

Our first Sunday here at Mary Help of Christians was all we hoped it could be: a sanctuary we could actually enter, regardless of our Christened-status (in the Ethiopian Orthodox churches, we’ve only been allowed in as far as the churchyard); the Eucharist, served beneath an ornate red and gold cloth umbrella (even though we can’t partake, not being Catholic); and the English words adorning the very-American-looking stone sanctuary wall: Alleluia, He is Risen. We felt we were stepping into home. The liturgy, the songs, and the homily were all spoken in Ge’ez (Ethiopia’s holy language) or Tigrignia—and we couldn’t read along if we wanted to, given the different alphabet to which we’re mostly illiterate; but it was a frame of reference we were familiar with, with robes and wafers and pews we were familiar with, and all this somehow made it easier to worship. Plus, Father Tesfaye translated a summary of the homily for us in English before he closed. Following the service, we met a delightful novice named Susan from South Sudan, Sister Ruth, and Father Tesfaye, the latter inviting us to tea and breakfast in his quarters and then giving us a thorough tour of the mission’s beautiful campus. Again, we felt so welcome, so at home, and so thankful at the crazy odds that landed us in one of the few Ethiopian cities with a Catholic church and mission.

Father Tesfaye then informed us of an English mass he holds for the nuns and monks on Saturday evenings (even though they’re all Italian; English is the common language between them and the Ethiopians). And this 45-minute piece of our week the following Saturday, where we sat in a small chapel with four nuns, one monk, and the stations of the cross on the wall, was our first experience in our new Christian community for the next two years. To think, we’ve been congregants of a Wesleyan church, a Lutheran Brethren church, a Baptist-ish church primarily for the homeless, and an Ethiopian Italian Catholic church that is home to an old Italian monk and cyclist named Fabio—all in only three years. We can’t ask for much more.

Unless, of course, we could ask for a home that holds a mango tree, a k’o bush (an Ethiopian fruit that resembles a hand-held less-juicy watermelon) and parrots in its yard—we think. We feel stretched in small ways, but on the whole, completely blessed for this season we’re in: in the company of people and nature we can’t find elsewhere.

Finally, we’ve included a tally on the righthand border of this blog, to document the number of coffee ceremonies we attend in the next 20-some months. We’ve been keeping our own tally at home, and thought it kind to share.

P.S. School still hasn’t begun for us (Daniel still has three more weeks of vacation); and for the first three months of our service (lasting until just before Thanksgiving), we are supposed to mainly observe and research and start thinking up plans of action. So this means lots of chapters of Harry Potter that we read to each other each day, and lots of time with our neighbors (there were 13 children in our yard one day this week, each either holding a coloring book, a children’s book, or a ball or glove. And now they pound on our gate, yelling our names, at all hours of the day).