Bread with cheese and…jam?

Recently I spent a day with Kari, who is one of the missionaries around here.  Her husband Asle is an anesthesiologist, and they just arrived a couple months ago.  Asle was raised as a missionary kid in Ethiopia, so speaks perfect Amharic, and fits beautifully here.  She hasn’t quite found her niche here yet, but has been spending her time organizing/decorating their house.  I went over there in the morning with the plan of admiring her handiwork, and ended up spending the day with her.  It was lovely.  They are originally from Norway, but have lived in the US for 2 different stints during their married life, adding up to a total of 14 years.  They have 3 children (ranging from 19-24) who will be here for Christmas.  After spending the day with their mom, and part of the day with their dad, I think I will really like them.  They are such gentle, welcoming people.  Kari and I spent half of the morning chatting, then she had to cook a bit for a dinner party at her house that evening.  I spent that time reading and chatting with her husband, Asle, who happened to come in around that time. 

When lunchtime rolled around, I felt a bit weird for just being there, since I hate imposing on family time.  They, however, handled it with such grace and made me feel very welcome.  It was so nice.  For lunch we had bread and cheese, and they said that I could put some orange marmalade on if I wanted to.  Apparently it’s a Norwegian thing.  I think that my face betrayed my inner feeling of, “That sounds disgusting!” but they gently encouraged me to try it.  I’m not an amazing fan of just bread and cheese alone (sorry Kristi!), so I went ahead and tried it.  It’s surprisingly very good!  We started talking about the different things that they think sounds gross—things like peanut butter and jelly, and caramel corn.  Can you believe it?  Apparently, according to Asle, the Americans are the only people in the world who haven’t figured out that caramel and popcorn don’t go together.  I assured him that we will continue to be ignorant of that “fact.”

After lunch, we stopped by to pick up Becca on our way out of the compound to go shopping.  We walked to the post office to mail some packages and check the mail, then went to what we affectionately call “the forenge stores” in “the bank building.”  These are 2 tiny little hole-in-the-wall stores that have wonderful forenge things—things like disposable diapers and cocoa powder, candy bars and packaged pasta.  They make all of us forenges happy, so we try to visit them when we can.  That day, I stocked up on candy bars.  Karmyn and I have birthdays this month, and we are planning a party that involves ice cream and candy.  I’m pretty excited about that!

One of our shopping stops included a little fruit stand across the street from the bank building.  Becca needed some avocadoes, and it took a few minutes to get everything figured out.  During those few minutes, we were surrounded by a small mob of pushing, shoving children.  And we were reminded that we live in Ethiopia.  Apparently we’re all pretty used to it though, because the only comment was, “Now imagine that, times 100 in the market!”  We were all happy that we weren’t in the market.

The shopping expedition ended with a visit to a nice little restaurant where we had soda and fruit smoothies–and my prayer of gratefulness to God for friends with whom I can spend the day!  He is so good!