29th Birthday Celebration in Ethiopia

I’ve heard African Americans say they’ve come to this incredible continent, Africa, and have a feeling of being at home. I’ve visited several countries all of which I instantly loved and none of which I felt instantly at home.

It has sparked my curiosity of my ethnic background though.

This will not be a sad post, but I want to say this, if you are able to trace your ethnic background to your country/countries of origin that is incredible. To be able to say you’re Greek or Haitian places you in a location and it gives you tradition. It is incredibly painful to be asked where your family is from and only be able to respond with a blank stare, or my most recent coping mechanism of just picking a brown country so I don’t have to say “I don’t know”.

….but when I got to Ethiopia and walked around Addis I kinda had that at home feeling. Not just because people kept coming to me speaking Amharic, well maybe that’s part of it or because it’s a universal thought that Ethiopian women are drop dead gorgeous and I want to be too…well maybe that’s also part of it. I don’t know what it is, we just looked related and I’ve never been to a place where 1/3rd of the country looks like they could be my cousins.

The trip was in celebration of my 29th birthday and I was able to fly in on my actual birthday and might spark a trend of me celebrating my next birthdays on new soils. I went with a couple of my closest friends and fellow volunteers, in physical location and in heart.

It was a trip filled with delicious coffeer, an incredible amount of culture and some luxury. We saw Lucy’s Bones, the Lalibella Rock Churches which I’m pretty sure has made it to one of those wonder of the world lists, climbed the Semein mountain, got amazing and affordable beauty services at Boston Day Spa, visited the Yirhamne Kristos church which is carved out of a cave and is the home of over 500 skeletons of past pilgrims, ate at Ben a Beba restaurant and enjoyed it’s incredible architecture, saw the most amazing shoulder dancing in Bahir Dar and we made friends in every city we went to.

…don’t get me started on the juice. I almost want other countries to call their stuff liquid from fruit or fruit flavored beverage…juice should be reserved for Ethiopia.

I loved it there and I hope life takes me back time and time again.

Stomp Out Malaria in Africa: Day 1

A lot has happened in the last couple months that I promise to write about soon. Today, I’m on day 3 of an intense 11 day training, Stomping Out Malaria in Africa. In less than 2 weeks we, 32 participants, will  learn a considerable amount about the epidemiology, prevention strategies and evaluation plans for malaria, the disease that kills over 800,000 people annually.

I wrote an article to review the first day.

“I can tell based on the first day that Stomping Out Malaria in Africa Boot Camp will be unlike any training I’ve participated in before. I suppose that’s because it is not just a training, but it’s what Matt McLaughlin, Stomp Program Manager, intentionally calls a “boot camp.”  Both the word and the accompanying picture on the introductory presentation of a commander yelling at a trainee communicate the intensity we are embarking on. I feel like a soldier learning the habits and habitat of the enemy with the solitary goal to eradicate it.  Of course, the enemy being malaria.”

Read the whole article on the Stomp Out Malaria in Africa website.