Our African abode

Our moving truck on Saturday with all our African goods

Started this post on Sunday... We moved into the house in the middle of town yesterday. I am sitting in the living room as I write this. Cora is napping in her tent in our bedroom nearby. I can hear what sounds like a wedding going on somewhere in the neighborhood. Nate is working, even though it is Sunday. They are working every day this week to get the first survey done, but he took yesterday off to help us move and get settled.

Now it's Tuesday:

Internet has been sparse and slow. Once again I'm going to try to post just words and if it works (or on another day) I'll try to post a couple of corresponding "moving" photos.

The new house and yard

The new house is great, now that I've gotten used to it. As I told my parents on the phone today, the big downfall is that it has cockroaches. Our landlord seems to have bombed the house for bugs before we moved in, so we find dead ones every morning. But after a couple days now we're seeing some live adolescent ones at night, too. Ick.

Other than that, it's better being in Yabello town, with shops and cafes nearby. We haven't figured out the weekly market yet, by the way... on "market day" Saturday we didn't see anything approaching what I'd call a market when we showed up at 9:30am. Birhanu tells us that markets often start in Ethiopian towns at 11am or even 4pm, so we'll try again next week.

We have nice neighbors and lots of kids stop by on their way to school to visit Cora. The littlest ones come by all day to play - there is one little boy from the shop down the road who is perhaps 3 or 4 named Alemayhu who is so sweet and funny, and he comes over to play and then sits down and fiddles with sticking a leaf into a piece of random metal he's found, or plucking apart a hybiscus flower to see all its parts, or whatever. He's very industrious.

I met our neighbor Lagusay yesterday morning when our soccer ball was kicked over his fence by Alemayhu's ball-hog friend (who couldn't slow down long enough to tell me his name or pull up his pants). Later in the day as we sought a "bajaj" taxi (a three-wheeled tuk-tuk that runs between the Yabello Town and junction) to come home from failed Interneting at the Motel, a little blue van pulled up honking next to us and Lagusay was the owner/driver! He put me and Cora in the front seat and drove us all the way to our front door (not to the usual drop spot on the main street). 

Part of Nate's survey team in our living room (Shabeea, Wako, Guyo, Steven, Cora, Nate, and Golgallo)

Our neighbor on the other side is a woman named Gannett, who has three kids of her own and what seems to be a lot of nieces and nephews living with her. She is friendly and helpful so far - she was the one who came running over to help when our new water tank was overflowing onto our roof the first day at the house.

We've been organizing our kitchen and cooking 2 of 3 meals a day. I try to go out for lunch to get out of the house and see what's going on, and it works with Cora's nap schedule (still fairly reliable at 2 hours in the morning starting at 9 or 10am, and an hour or more at 2 or 3pm).

Nate has had the past two days off, and most of tomorrow, too. The Kenyans returned to Nairobi two days ago, and the Ethiopian team went for an overnight in the field to finish the herd migration survey and said Nate didn't need to come (thank goodness - I wasn't ready for a night "alone" in the new house on the second day!). Tomorrow the team is awaiting the arrival of an American colleague from the USDA to work on the cattle collaring project, which will involve retrieving GPS collars from far-flung cows, collecting the collar's data, and fixing any broken collars.