Saturday, July 5: Exploring Addis

On Saturday morning, Juan Pablo decided that he was ready to move up in toy world, and started to play with the stacking cups. These have been his favorite toy ever since. We were impressed at how well he did from the very beginning, putting the smaller ones in the bigger ones. He also loved to knock down the towers we made, and watch Jeff roll the cups on their sides on the tile floor in the living room of our suite. He is also very adventurous and determined when it comes to pulling himself up. The coffee table in the middle of our room had very rough, uneven edges and only three legs. This did not stop our little guy from trying to pull himself up as often as he could get over there. We started hanging out around the coffee table a lot, and between Jeff, Sebastian and I, made sure that someone was holding the table down so Juan Pablo wouldn’t pull it down on himself, and that someone was close enough to make sure that he didn’t poke his eye out on one of those jagged edges.

Juan Pablo with the stacking cups and coffee table

In the afternoon, while Juan Pablo napped, Jeff and Sebastian went out to explore our area of town. We knew we were near the Piazza, an area in the northwest part of the city full of shops and restaurants. All three of us being seasoned travelers and having a pretty decent sense of direction, we didn’t think we’d have any trouble getting around. It soon became clear that we had been overconfident. First of all, we had no idea where we were. The owners of the guest house had given us a general idea of how to get to the Piazza, but we didn’t know the name of our street, or how to begin looking for it on the map. On their walk this particular afternoon, Jeff and Sebastian came across a very important looking church, which, based on the guidebook, we assumed to be Holy Trinity (an Ethiopian Orthodox church), as it seemed to be the closest big church in our area. After several days of being thoroughly confused and not seeming to be able to find anything, we discovered that the church was actually St. Mary’s, the Roman Catholic Cathedral, which apparently the writers of the guidebook did not find significant enough to mark in the guidebook. Also contributing to our lack of sense of direction was the street signs. In 2005, Chinese contractors who built Ring Road, a road going around the perimeter of the city, gave street signs to the city as a gift. However, many of the names of the road were misspelled, and, as we already knew from seeing our son’s name spelled in about 5 different ways by various members of our agency’s staff, Ethiopians don’t seem to be too picky about spelling, so the signs were gratefully accepted. However, this meant that the map in our guidebook often had different street names than what were on the signs, and several of the streets on the map weren’t even labeled. Since our guidebook warned that there were no other existing maps of Addis Ababa, we didn’t even try to go out and find a different map. Eventually we did manage to get a sense of where we were in relation to things and find our way around, but those first few days were a little frustrating.

After stopping for a snack at the Pizzeria Italia, Jeff and Sebastian experienced their first taste of Ethiopian winter. It started to rain just before they were going to head back, so they waited a little bit for the rain to slow down. On their way home, they got caught in a downpour. There wasn’t anywhere to go and get out of the rain, so they just made a run for it and arrived back at the guest house soaking wet.

That evening, the rain had stopped, and we were hungry, so we decided to venture out in search of food. Our guest house owners had given us directions to a nearby restaurant, so we went off to look for it. This was Juan Pablo’s first ride in the baby carrier, and he did really well. He loves to be held and cuddled, so being close to us in the baby carrier was no problem. Not far from our guest house, we found the restaurant, called the SEPDA Club. We walked in, and everyone turned to stare, but didn’t really do anything to help us figure out what to do. We walked through to the next room, where there were a few people seated at tables, some of them eating. We went ahead and sat down at an empty table, and after a while, someone brought us a menu. Here was our first problem: the menu was all in Amharic. Since we had absolutely no idea what anything on the menu was, we called over the waiter, and tried to ask him what the restaurant served. Here we ran into our second problem: no one in the restaurant seemed to speak English. Juan Pablo was getting a little antsy, so I did my best to distract him with toys while Jeff and Sebastian attempted to find a way to communicate with the waiter to hopefully order something safe and recognizable. In the end, we were presented with three plates of pasta, with a side of a tomato meat sauce, and injera, which is an Ethiopian bread. We each also ordered a soft drink (which was much easier to do since we were sitting right next to the refrigerator where they were kept), and at the end of the meal we were presented with our bill: 45 birr, or $4.50.

At the restaurant, we also discovered something that would make meals difficult throughout the rest of our trip: Juan Pablo was obsessed with food. His distended belly and incredibly skinny arms and legs had clued us in to the fact that he was probably a bit malnourished. The day before he had drunk his bottles so quickly and greedily, crying when the bottle was over, and not knowing how much he was accustomed to eating, we had fed him a little more, only to have him spit up all over the place. We started controlling his food intake a bit more, feeding him smaller amounts every three hours. But for a boy who sometimes didn’t get enough to eat, and never really knew when his next bottle was coming and if it would be enough, the sight of any kind of food was just too much to handle. Every breakfast, lunch and dinner, he would become obsessed with trying to reach the food. We handled this by trying to time his bottles during our mealtimes, so that he would be eating while we ate, feeding him little pieces of bread, injera, or vegetables while there was food in front of us, or taking turns eating so that one of us could always be trying to distract him in another room or another part of the restaurant. It is amazing to think back and realize how much this has changed since we’ve been home. Now that Juan Pablo consistently gets an adequate amount of formula, and sits in the high chair eating rice cereal, baby food and Cheerios while Jeff and I eat our meals, things have improved greatly. Only two weeks after coming home, he refused to eat lunch because we had a friend here visiting and he was too distracted with her to want to eat. I am so thankful to see this change happen so quickly- not only because it makes mealtimes more peaceful for Jeff and me, but also because it means that Juan Pablo has begun to realize that we will always provide enough for him to eat, a step towards gaining his trust and allowing him to form an attachment to us.