Adoption Bookshelf: Ethiopian culture

Showing posts with label Ethiopian culture. Show all posts

Vote for Ethiopia Reads as CNN's
Hero Of The Year!

Got an extra minute? Then click over to CNN.com and vote in their CNN Hero Of The Year contest. Ten finalists have been selected for Hero Of The Year, among them Yohannes Gebregeorgis and his Ethiopia Reads project.

It takes only a moment to vote, and you don't even have to enter your email address. Best of all, the finalist with the most votes receives $100,000 for his/her work.

And if you're not familiar with the work of Ethiopia Reads, I encourage you to check out their website and this short video about them. This project, which strives to "develop a reading culture in Ethiopia by connecting children with books," is more than deserving of your vote.

**One minor awesome point about this video--my favorite children's book ever, Rabbit's New Rug, is featured in the background of the first shot! Awesome!

***And thanks, S, for the heads-up on this story!

Happy Ethiopian New Year 2001!

On what is otherwise a very sad day in America, there's a reason to celebrate from the other side of the world: it's Ethiopia's New Year's Day for 2001.

No, that's not a typo--today is the first day of the year 2001, according to the Ethiopian calendar, which is based on the Coptic calendar system. Rather than me trying to explain this (and no doubting botching my explanation!), check out these descriptions of how the Ethiopic calendar system works. (Also, for adoptive parents who might be interested, the Amharic Kids website sells Ethiopian calendars and makes them available for parents to sell themselves as an adoption fundraiser.)

And to celebrate the day, I found a beautiful collage on flickr from a user named mcandrea, with all her favorite ways to celebrate Ethiopian New Year:

"Celebrating the Ethiopian new year would not be complete with out a few of my favorite things:
~yeubaunna afeulal (coffee ceremony)- classic for every celebration!
~happy new year cake- yum italian inspired goodness.
~raw meat- is in an Ethiopian thing, Kitfo-Hollar! But these special huge cube are raw cow which are prepared especially for the new years.
(correction 2007- this meat is tre-sega, kitfo is processed)
~grass on the floor - the green freshness represents the new beginning!"

Happy Ethiopian New Year, everyone!

Ethiopian Reading Recommendations?

Super quick post: I just subscribed to Helm Magazine, an "Ethiopian fashion and entertainment magazine." If you know me in real life, you may find this strange because you would know that I typically run the other direction from "fashion and entertainment" magazines. (I'll take my feminist response to pop culture magazine instead, thanks very much. And Dell Logic Puzzles. Yes, I'm that cool.)

But I like the idea of having positive images of Ethiopian beauty and culture in our house, however I can squeeze them in, so Helm looked like a good choice. And--impressive for a magazine that claims to cover "fashion and entertainment" issues--the majority of stories on their current cover are not about either fashion or entertainment. Only one story is devoted to "Summer Trends," while the rest appear (at least from their titles) to discuss real, substantive topics like the work of prominent Ethiopian scholar Dr. Ephraim Isaac (the first professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard University) and the consequences of early marriage traditions for young Ethiopian girls (like those discussed in the PBS Nova special, A Walk To Beautiful). Here's hoping that future issues of Helm prove equally insightful. I'm excited to get it in the mail!

Does anyone have any suggestions for other Ethiopia-centered reading in English? Any Ethiopian literature in translation, perhaps? That's what I'd really like to find, but so far, I'm totally striking out. Yet another reason to revisit my learning Amharic post below, I guess!