Culture Camp

Yesterday, Tim and I went to an Ethiopia Culture Camp that the group we meet with in Mason arranged. It was great! We met a lot of great people at the camp. There is actually a small Ethiopian community here in Cincinnati. They meet for fellowship every week and keep their culture intact. They are all very nice and helpful and will be a great resource for us and our child. It is so awsome that we can continue to learn about the culture and to incorporate it into our everyday lives so that our child will not loose these roots and connections to Ethiopia. We also want to learn Amharic, and were shown some good resources to get us started with this. We are also hoping that someone from the Ethiopian community will help us learn, as well. We shall see how that works as Amharic is a bit intimidating. We attended a coffee ceremony at the camp and it was great. The coffee was really good, nothing like our puny coffee!! I want to get a coffee set while we are in Ethiopia and learn how to do the coffee ceremony. Once I learn I want to do the ceremony every week and invite friends and family to come. I am also thinking that I want to learn how to cook Ethiopian food to serve at least once a week, as well. We will see how that turns out!! We also had dinner with Ethiopian food and some music at the camp. It was really neat and everyone from the Ethiopian community dressed in traditional Ethiopian clothing, many of the children and parents also wore traditional Ethiopian clothing. We also met a woman and her daughter who are part of the Ethiopian community and live right down the street from us. We really enjoyed speaking with them and hope we become friends, so I can rope them into teaching us some things!! It was a great time.