Settling In

So the excitement of me being a “new arrival” has died down quite a bit. I finally got the town to call me “Nikki", rather than Frenji (foreigner), as I walk by... mostly anyways. Of course if I try to leave my home I usually get about 20 greetings, and sometimes people simply follow me. Everyone wants to know how my day was, and where I'm going. And sometimes they will call my name simply because they want me to look at them before they run another direction. If you ever want to know what being a celebrity is like, move to a small African town. Just last week I was walking back from work when a man shouted at me to stop so he could take my photo.

*I took one of him as payback!*

 While I was waiting for the bus, a little girl said, “Hi Nikki, Hi Kiki” repeatedly every 30 seconds, for like half an hour. And then when I visited my hub town Filaket, me and another PCV

Alben, got swarmed by a dozen kids wanting us to sign our autographs...Autographs!

On the plus side, I FINALLY found peanut butter! A local variety, but still absolutely craved. I also found a way to get the wax and bee bodies out of my honey! I had been having nightmares about eating honey and getting stung by dead bees stuck in it. Turns out melting it down and cooling does the trick. Now I just need to get some bread. Other culinary joys, I finally got charcoal! Which means I can actually cook full meals! It still takes a few hours, but it is way faster than the electric stove. I only use the stove in the mornings now, for when coals take too long to start, or to reheat soup. I usually get a little visitor during the mornings... a young cat, which I have named Sammy. Technically I’m not allowed to own any pets, but since I don’t own it and it

simply stops by for grub I think I’m fine. He's let me touch him like twice. But I think I’m slowly winning him over. Tell you what, dogs got nothing on cats that beg.

I'm starting to really like certain Ethiopian dishes, such as Doro Watt. I only get meat like once every two weeks and not much even then. So Doro Watt is a special treat. Basically it's a ton of onions cooked in oil, then lots of chili powder added along with a bit of salt, water and surprisingly cumin. Then you put in chicken and hard boiled eggs, and eat with Injera. Though really you only get one small piece of meat and a single egg, you still crave that savory bite of protein.

I've found myself consistently adding to the number of eggs I eat a week. I started out buying 10. Then 15. Now 20. And I honestly don't think it's enough! Admittedly the eggs are rather small. It takes about three eggs to equal two American eggs. But I eat about three eggs scrambled with onion each morning, and if I want more protein I have add egg to my lunch and dinner. In the end, I really need to double my egg intake. But people are already shocked at how many I buy…

I finally visited the tree nursery in my Kebele (town administrative district). It's about a 3km hike

down a cliff (which once you start hiking you realize you've been on a plateau the whole time).

 It takes about an hour, and it was muddy since the rainy season has started. I was laughed at the whole time because my guide hadn't even broken a sweat, yet I was breathing hard and chugging water! Half way down the cliff I spotted a few small monkeys called Tota and am told the larger monkey called Zinjiro is also around, though I have yet to see it. The cliff side had a bunch of native plants that I hadn't seen yet due to everyone just growing eucalyptus everywhere.

At the bottom of the cliff is a valley and a bunch of farms with rather clever flood irrigation systems.

They store the stream water in a large water catchment then guide it into their fields and close the water at night to store more.

As we reached the bottom we found the tree nursery site. Basically only three tree species are grown by a single family. A few thousand are grown in flood irrigated beds.

 And transplanted onto hillsides at three months old. Luckily the other two tree species are actually native, unlike the Eucalyptus. Still I'll have to look into the diversity available. I did find out that somewhere in surrounding Kebeles there is a more diverse tree nursery for fruit trees; I'll have to check it out.

Visit complete, we began our trek back up the cliff, which was much harder because going up is harder than down and I was already tired. By the time I got back I was starving and collapsed into bed for the rest of the day.

In other news, I finally started my permagarden!

Of course I was supposed to teach a single group how to make a permagarden over the period of a week. Instead I had no translator and a new group of farmers every day.

 I'm pretty sure they thought of it as "help the foreigner because she can't dig", rather than a lesson in gardening skill. Also the sheep herd got into my compost pile and started eating it. I’m worried about them eating my plants once they start to grow. I’ll have to build a fence. I've only actually finished one of the two beds. And I don't have any perennial plants to go in the berms so it's still gonna take a lot of work. But at least it is a start.

It's two and a half weeks till IST, which is a weeklong reconnect with PC and my fellow G12 trainees. Gonna be fun! I finally received my first package in the mail. Which is good and

means my mail box works. According to the date it takes around 4 weeks to get to me. So plan ahead and don’t send anything that would spoil! For those of you who forgot my mail address is;

Nicole Stinchcomb

Box 41, Filakit

Semen Wollo, Amhara

Ethiopia

I don't expect much, a box of one or two items from the list below would be great!

Things to send LIST:

Food: beef jerky (great as a straight snack or maybe added to my cooking!), chips (doritoes or pringles), seasonings, ramen, mac n cheese, powdered milk, oatmeal breakfast pouches, pancake mix, flour, chocolate chip cookies, powdered drink mixes (koolade, hot chocolate or those crystal light peach tea would be great [I have sugar]) trail mix, nut mix,... [you get the idea the list goes on]

Toiletries: deodorant, razors, face wash, lotion, face cleansing pads

Entertainment: Games, movies, drawing pad, or books (sending a flash drive full of music, ebooks, movies, or a TV show would be awesome and not much space... if you have a computer game you don’t want any more, I would love to have it!)

Most of all Pictures and letters about home. I share photos off facebook all the time trying to explain who my mother and father and aunt s and friends are.

Miss you all terribly. Hope you're all doing well. <3 

PS you better enjoy the photos they took like 3 hrs to upload.

PSS comments are apreciated