Moving to Yabelo

Mike Toso just posted some photos on Facebook from his "early years" in Madagascar... and it made me think about how I can't wait for Cora to have similar photos of her own.

Africa, here we come!

My goal for the next couple months is to share bits and pieces of the ad hoc research I'm doing in preparation for our January move to East Africa. Today, I'll start by sharing our tentative plans and my limited knowledge about our future home in Ethiopia, Yabelo (also spelled Yabello).

The plan at the moment is that we'll spend Christmas and New Years in the Midwest. We'll come home to Ithaca for a week or two and then head to Addis Ababa (the capital of Ethiopia) in late January. Nate is working with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), so we'll stay on their campus in Addis for a week or two while we stock up and get ready for the move to Yabelo.

Yabelo is a pretty small town situated on a main road from Addis to Kenya, so it gets a lot of truck traffic. Yabelo is likewise along the routes of two types of tourists - people on bird safaris, and Cape-to-Cairo trekkers. Nate describes the town as two parts: the expat/touristy area where there is a nice hotel and NGOs like CARE International have their offices, and the main part of town where the locals mostly live and work.

We don't know where we'll live yet - it could be in an apartment on the compound of an NGO, in our own house, in a hotel... we're really not sure what our options are yet. Nate's contacts at ILRI are going to help us locate something suitable. Our criteria: we have 2-3 rooms to ourselves, cement walls, locking doors & windows, a private bathroom, and (probably) access to a guard. Nate thinks we'll likely have electricity and some limited (slow) Internet.

The region of Ethiopia where we'll be living is inhabited by the Borana people. Borana is a word for the people themselves and a type of cattle (which gives you a pretty good idea what the Borana people do for a living). The Borana speak Oromia, while the most-used language in Ethiopia is Amharic. I have the impression that English is pretty well-used in the capital, too.

 Huts in Yabello area, our future home. Photo from here