@brittarnhild
I have not yet told you the reason why I am here in Ethiopia, have I? Short story: the diocese of Nidaros and the Western Synod of the Mekane Yesu church in Ethiopia have a friendship link. As part of this, we have just started a four year project where we will look at food security, both in Norway and in Eritrea. The name of this project is Give Us Today Our Daily Bread.
We were supposed to be a group of 4-5 people travelling from Nidaros down here, but plans are sometimes hard to make, and in the end there were only two of us, pluss Hans Birger, or kez Hans as he is called down here. A Norwegian pastor, now senior, having spent half of his adult life in the area of the Western Synod.
We have a long list of things to do while we are here, one of them is to look at food traditions. And when you talk about Eritrea and food, except for coffee, injera is the first thing people will mention.
Injera is a kind of huge pancake, made of taf, water and yeast, or rather a kind of sour dough. As you know I have been to Eritrea twice and got used to injera there. I love it, though it tend to be hard on my delicate stomach.
Since we are here collecting food tales, we have been taken into kitchen, we have helped making the injeras, and we have of course eaten them, again and again.
One thing which has stuck me along our way is the darkness of the many kitchens we have visited. And not only the darkness, but also the heavy smoke where the girls and women have to spend long parts of their days.
I have asked about this several times, but there seem to be no answer to why. Though personal I wonder if the answer is that the kitchen huts are all built by men and men never spend long hours inside them, cooking.
I am reading a very interesting book these days; The Lure of the Honey Bird, The Story Tellers of Ethiopia, by Elisabeth Laird. I have written more about this book over in Books on the Menu. Today I discovered that Laird has seen the same as I have seen:
Abebe pushed me through the matting screen, behind which the girl had disappeared, to show me her cooking area. This was so surrounded by walls that not a chink of light could penetrate from the outside
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We are in Addis Ababa now, and last night a Norwegian here took us to a restaurant we would not in a million years have found by ourselves. On the menu: injera of course.
And with the injera came traditional music and dances.
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