African Time

I am home.

Praise the Lord. For the blessings, the lessons, the laughter, the tears, the sickness, the health, the journey.

Partly because I'm still fairly jet lagged, so original thought is kinda hard, and partly because it's just so good, I'm going to share with you some musings from my journal.

Tid-bits of Africa:

1. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is 9 hours time difference than Central Time zone. Subtract 3 hours and change the AM or PM. Easy enough.

2. Ethiopia has 13 months of sunshine. That's their motto. Their calendar is quite different. Same number of days in a year, but months are different. Somehow, that makes it possible for them to still be in 2004. Not sure how, but whatever.

3. Their time of day is 6 hours later than ours. They start their 12:00 AM at our 6:00 AM when the sun is rising. Creates a bit of confusion once in awhile, but they are used to adapting to foreigner's time. It was a bit harder for us to adapt.

4. Saturday was their Christmas. Everyone was still selling trees and Santa hats. Really threw off my 'no Christmas until after Thanksgiving rule' since I had already celebrated once, but teammates told me to get over it.

5. Africa uses color well. Shops and store fronts and buildings are brightly painted, lots of green and yellow. Very strong colors as well, like purples and blues and reds.

6. Traffic. Wowza. The entire time we were there, we stopped at one stop light. No such thing as stop signs, the stop lights that were there didn't work. It was crazy, but there was a system. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but you make your presence known, the person coming won't necessarily stop, but they will slow down, causing people behind them to slow down enough that eventually you can turn or merge or whatever. It was chaotic, but we didn't see one single accident. That's what happens when drivers actually pay attention to what they are doing.

7. Power surges are quite common. They happen whenever. Once during a performance. And when it goes out, it gets really dark.

8. Bathrooms rarely had toilet paper or soap or paper towels -- if they even had toilets.

9. Everyone has style. But it is very intentional, very functional, very personal style. Some of it very Western, some very traditional, some very strange. Nonetheless, everyone has a style.

10. There is such an interesting mix of new and old. There will be new construction going up with wooden scaffolding around it. There will be a new store front with a corrugated tin shanty shop next door.

11. The average age of Addis residents is 17 years old. It has a whole lot of young people.

12. Showers are often cold.

13. The elevation of Addis is over 2,300 feet. That is not easy to get used to. It is possible to get elevation sickness. It sucks. We know, some of us had it.

14. Africa time. They run at a very different pace than we do. Much more laid back, often resulting in lateness.

15. Not a single of our performances started when we thought they were going to, and not because we were running late, but because the times got changed. Some were half an hour earlier, some were half an hour later, and we never knew what time things were actually happening until we got there and the time change was made.

16. 1 burr is 17.5 U.S. dollars. That was a hard currency exchange to do in our heads as we were in the market.

17. Bartering is not terribly easy for me. But it's even harder for Jeff. He bought a map for 350 burr, or $18. It was a lousy map.

18. A high school full of girls love watching a performance with three cute American guys in it.

19. There are over 85 different languages spoken in Ethiopia. Luckily, many also speak English.

20. We took Ethiopia's story home. They absolutely loved the play. It was fantastic. An amazing, amazing experience.

I think that's enough for now. More to come, but now I'm off to bed to further my jet lag recovery.

Until next time, stay in peace.