Merry Christmas and My First Days of School:

   Merely to make you all jealous, I got to celebrate Christmas twice this year. :) Last Thursday (January 7th) was Ethiopian Christmas. While I didn’t exactly spend Christmas with an Ethiopian family, I did get to witness the biggest Ethiopian tradition: the slaughtering of the cows. (Ok, so maybe you wont be jealous that I got two Christmases this year).

At noon on January 6th, the Ethiopian workers here at Bingham took two fat cows down to the forest and everyone walked down to watch the tradition take place, including myself. One cow at a time, the
Ethiopians knocked the cows over and slit their necks open.The cows were then left to bleed to death as they throbbed all over the place, seemingly trying to stand up again. Once they stopped throbbing and the reflexes were gone, the Ethiopians skinned them, cut up the meat, laid the meat on some tarps, and buried the heads and the feet in the ground. All the kids under 10 who were present were simply fascinated by this
“show” and wanted to keep the tail and the horns as a souvenir. They were granted that request…so now there are adorable, rambunctious kids walking around campus with cow tails and horns trying to gross out as many people as they can. While I did not get a picture of them, I did manage to get a picture of the cow.

   The day after Christmas, school started up again. I have 18 kids in my class and they are all mini-geniuses…literally. Last semester, I had a group of first graders who didn’t know 2+2 or the sound that the letter A made…and they were very misbehaved. My first graders this semester are on the verge of learning multiplication and division, they can write five sentences easily with no grammatical errors, they are super obedient, and they read at least at a 6th grade level. Not only are they a bunch of geniuses, but they are also hysterical. Simply hysterical! Today they found a dead bird squished against our classroom window (on the inside) and they all wanted to wake it up and keep it as a class pet. :)

   In other news, the men in Addis Ababa allegedly like to have races around the city carrying large stacks of mattresses on their heads. I saw five of them the other day. You can only see half the stack of mattresses in this picture and it does not adequately portray the fact that this man was running… as fast as he could… strategically around the people on the sidewalks and miraculously dodging all the crazy cars.

More stories to come.
~Nicole