Dean's first haircut

A few weeks ago, I finally talked Jorge into letting me take Dean to get his hair cut. Jorge has a thing about the boys' hair; he seems to think they are little Samsons (Samsonites?), and that their power is in their hair. Also, Jorge refuses to let a woman cut their hair, because, according to him, if the hairdresser happens to be pregnant, the boys' hair will be ruined. He will tell you his own tragic tale, of the thick, luxurious wavy locks that were magically transformed into tight little wiry coils, all because his mother took him to have his hair cut at a woman's salon instead of a barber shop.

But my mother-in-law Dora and I put the full-court press on him, and he relented. On one condition - he got to pick the place.

We went to Doran's, a barber shop just up the street, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.

It was a fittingly manly place, and also charmingly Irish, with a handful of men sitting around on benches just chatting. Everyone was very excited to see Dean experiencing the coming-of-age ritual, and quietly taking bets as to whether or not he'd cry.

I'm proud to say he did just great, not a tear, or a cry, and certainly not the agonized writhing that Milo used to whip out on such occasions.

I have to admit, I have been clinging to Dean's baby-hood much longer than I did with Milo. and it's always a little bittersweet to see your baby's little locks go, but now he looks so much more like the little boy he is becoming. My handsome little guy.

Things that are strange here

In many ways, I'm experiencing far more culture shock moving to Europe than I ever did moving to Africa. I often find myself saying to Jorge or Milo, when explaining why we can't do something they suggest, "This isn't Africa, OK? People are weird here." (Come to think of it, that was a frequent phrase while we were in Seattle as well. But not New Orleans. Hmmm.)

So, here's a short list of some of the things I just find strange:

• There are computer repair shops and internet cafes, and there are many of them. I thought those sorts of compaines went out of business in the Western world ages ago.


• We had out first parent-teacher meeting with Milo's preschool last week. His report said "Milo is enthusiastic in making friends. Hopefully that will improve in time."


• Movie theater seats are assigned, and if you decide that you do not in fact want to sit in one tiny cluster of people, while the rest of the theater sits empty, you will be reprimanded.


• However, if you nearly run over someone, blatantly litter on the street, or start fighting while walking home from school, everyone will look away and pretend that you don't exist.


• Although unemployment is at an all-time high and wages have been stagnant for years, everyone still seems to have enough money to drop $1,000 dollars on a stroller.


• The government pays you for having children. You just have to pop out kids, and voila, 200 dollars in your bank account each month, for every child.


• You cannot buy rubbing alcohol at the drug store without a prescription.


• Restaurants somehow get away with charging 25 dollars for a cheeseburger, plate of pasta, or pizza - and yet remain full of customers.

Now, this isn't to say that people here aren't lovely, and for the most part quite friendly, but it's still all so very different. I think it will be a long time before we stop feeling like complete and utter foreigners here, despite the fact that, for the first time in half a decade, we look like everyone else on the outside.

Ho ho ho!

This may sound strange, but we’re kind of rookies to this whole Christmas thing. I mean, I left home when I was 18, and came home a handful of times for the holidays, but for most of the past 15 years both Jorge and I have just drifted from one friend or family member’s home to another at Christmas (or even better, spent Christmas at a luxury safari lodge. One year I spent Christmas wrapped up in blankets, sitting outside in a cold Darfur desert winter, sipping smuggled-in whiskey. Another year I’m pretty sure I went to my sister’s in-laws but it’s all a blur. And there’s even The-Christmas-That-Must-Not-Be-Named that we try not to speak about in our house.

We’ve never really had a chance to establish Christmas traditions. One year, two years ago, we just decided to stay home. It was me, Jorge, and Milo, and we opened presents, went to the park, and then cooked ourselves up a huge turkey dinner and invited our one friend unfortunate enough to have nowhere to go over for dinner. And I have to say, that was an awesome Christmas.

One of the draws of moving to Ireland for the winter was for Milo to experience the holidays the way I did as a kid – carving pumpkins at Halloween and going trick-or-treating, decorating a tree and peeling back the little paper doors of the advent calendar. Never mind that the tree is about 4 feet tall and plastic, and that the advent calendar is covered with pictures of Lightning McQueen. This is the real Christmas here, people.



Last weekend, we thought we’d go really conventional and take Milo to meet Santa Claus. Now, I don’t remember ever doing this as a child; I suspect my parents couldn’t be bothered to try to get three wild, unruly girls to stand in line for that long. But it seems to be the thing to do these days, and since we’re trying to fit in, you know, we went for it.

The first thing that hit us was the sticker shock. 8 Euros (10 dollars) per kid? Sorry Dean, you’re just going to have to mail in your requests to Santa, my friend. But we paid up for Milo, and then wandered through the underwhelming “grotto” to the North Pole, where Santa sat, fake beard slightly gapping away from his chin. Milo was nervous, naturally, but stuck his hand out to shake hands with Santa like a little gentleman. It took some prompting, but finally Milo warmed up and told Santa that for Christmas he wanted “Everything.” Well done son, I like how you think.



Then we took some obligatory photos (tossed Dean in there for good measure), Milo and Dean got gifts from the elf (which were actually pretty cool gifts), and then waved goodbye to the jolly Big Man.



I selected a photo, and then continued on with my shopping. A few minutes later a very helpful capitalist elf found me and apologetically told me she’d forgotten to collect the money for the photo. That’s OK, I told her, we paid already. Very embarrassed, she told me that no, it’s another TEN EURO for the photo! I said thanks but no thanks, I can take a photo with a DSLR set to Auto just as well (and as it turns out, better) as you elves can. But since the photo was already printed, they let us take that baby home for free anyway. And indeed, it was about as good as I’d have gotten with a camera phone; I suppose Santa’s standards are slipping what with out of control population growth. But all in all, thanks to our chutzpah and shameless stinginess, our Santa’s visit turned out to be a success. But next year, Milo’s just gonna have to yell his requests to Santa from outside the building.



Good lord, we’re cheap.

Home is where the beer is

Greetings from Ethiopia.

People keep asking me, “What are you doing in Ethiopia? I thought you worked in Ireland now.”

Shall I remind you that I work for a humanitarian organization, and that, while Ireland certainly does seem to be on the edge of a crisis, it’s been a loooong time since the potato famine. And that yes, a diet based primarily on cured pork and potatoes is probably not the most nutritious, there are still plenty of children out there in the world not getting even that. So indeed, I did not actually move to Ireland to lead an emergency nutrition intervention there; Dublin is just a base for me to be able to travel out to other countries with more pressing needs.

Last week I attended an international conference on nutrition, and met many accomplished and fascinating people from governments around the world, as well as universities, the UN, and donor agencies. This coming week I will be helping our Ethiopia office develop their program design for several new projects.

It’s nice to be back ‘on the continent’. While I can’t say I miss the traffic, or the pollution, or being conspicuously foreign, I have been reminded just how friendly and the expat community is, how easy it is to fall into comfortable conversation over a cup of tea or a glass of local beer. The challenge of working in difficult contexts still feels like an interesting puzzle to solve, rather than a frustration.

This is my longest trip away from Dean I’ve ever had to make, and I’m a bit worried the little stinker will learn to walk while I’m gone, but travel is just one of the things I’ve become accustomed to over the years. I miss my boys, but I know they will be fine until I get home.

At the moment I am staying in my organization’s ‘guest house’ in the city of Addis Ababa. It’s been a very, very long time since I stayed in a guest house like this, and it brings back such funny memories of the months that I lived in Sudan. Guest houses are funny places. They are filled with odd little remnants of past guests, such as nearly-empty jars of Nutella with only a bit of dried out paste left in the bottom. At the same time, there never seems to be enough of the most basic items, as no one wants to buy stuff only to have everyone else use it up. We’ve been out of sugar for days now.

Guest houses are always bare and undecorated, but also usually have extensive libraries of paperback novels and gossip magazines. People drift in and out, sometimes stopping to have long talks over the dining room table, sometimes not seeming to return to the house for days. There is always a vague feeling of it being a fraternity house – as if not too long ago, someone threw a kegger and no one ever got around to completely cleaning up afterwards.

While I’m grateful for the space and the comfort – a kitchen to cook my dinner in, internet access a BBC on the TV – I have to say I will be most delighted to return to my pokey little Dublin apartment in a week.

Say what?

Well, what do you know... there was a presidential election in Ireland yesterday! And I had no clue.

I suppose you could say that this fact speaks volumes about my civic engagement and interest in my new home. I would argue, though, that it has much more to do with my consumption of Irish media (or lack thereof).

First, we have no television. We haven’t owned one since Hurricane Katrina wiped out ours 6 years ago. No radio, either.

I tried reading the newspaper a few times since I arrived last month, but never made it far, finding the news to be incomprehensible or astoundingly provincial. Instead, I have been relying on the NPR website for my news (in my defense, I have been making a special effort to read the stories about the Euro-zone bailout. But it’s just so bo-o-o-ring).

The election was there on the periphery of my consciousness. We’ve seen signs, and I’ve read the odd headline, but was all so low-key that I had no idea the election was near. After all, in the U.S., on the day of the election stores would be loudly proclaiming their Election Day Sales; the McDonald’s would probably be selling Big Macs festooned with little American flags; no one would get any work done because they’d be glued to the web, refreshing the page every minute to see the changing vote counts and colourful state maps. Here, it was just a normal day like any other, apart from the fact that people went into their polling station (or whatever it is they do here) and turned in their ballot.

Now, don’t ask me who is actually president, my interest in the subject hasn’t extended so far as for me to actually find out. I’m told it’s the balding little man with wild, white hair fringing his head. I think it’s the guy that Jorge thinks looks like a Princess Bride character. Maybe I'll go online and look it up.

Or maybe I'll check Facebook instead. Lunch hour is only so long, you know.

Exploring, part 3

After two weeks without an apartment, we changed tactics, and decided to rent a car for the week so that we could drive around and get to places that were further afield (ironically, we ended up renting the first place we looked at that week, which also happened to be 5 blocks away from the hotel where we were staying. Go figure.) Even though we didn’t end up doing too much apartment-hunting after all, it was great to have the car, for, uh…well…IKEA runs. And weekend getaways, of course.

On our next weekend trip, taken just after we picked up the car, we went to a seaside town on the outskirts of Dublin called Malahide. There is a lovely, well-preserved Norman-era castle there, which was occupied by a noble family right up until the 70s. In fact, the name of the last owner was…wait for it… Lord Milo!

However, halfway through the castle tour Jorge started patting his pockets rather desperately, looking for the car keys. Yes indeed, just four hours into rental car ownership, my dear husband lost the keys. And of course, he didn’t lose them inside the house; no, he lost them somewhere along the 20 minute walk we took through the very spacious park around the castle.

Fortunately, the kind soul who discovered them lying on the path took them back to the parking lot, unlocked the car, looked for the blinking lights, and left our keys inside the car (thank you Good Samaritan, wherever you are!)

Jorge, not content to let me relax, ever, decided then to play a prank and convince me that the person who returned our keys had then stolen the I-Pad from the glove compartment in return, which sort of marred my joy at not having to walk home. He didn’t have the heart to keep up the scam for long, though. Needless to say, we no longer keep valuables in the car, and I hold the car keys when we go out.
In all the excitement, however, I didn’t take a single photo. Sorry.

Exploring, part 2

After our grey, wet day South of Dublin at Glendalough, we decided to go in the opposite direction, up North to County Meath.



Our destination was a place called Newgrange, which is a prehistoric site built several thousand years ago. There is a complex of tombs which are buried under very carefully constructed mounds, each rock placed so precisely that the cavern inside is perfectly watertight. To get to the tombs, one must walk down a narrow, dark tunnel. Once a year, on the winter solstice, the tomb is illuminated by a single shaft of light pouring down the corridor (if the sun comes out at all, that is). Stonehenge has got nothing on this place.




The most beautiful detail for me was the stone work. The site has been carefully reassembled with the original stones (the whole place was buried for millennia until, naturally, one day a cow farmer came along and dug in just the right place (and I mean that literally - he just happened to start digging immediately over the entrance to the tomb). The front of the tomb, which faces the sunrise, is walled with bright white stones; as you wander around the outside, more and more black rocks are mixed in, until you get around the back, where all the rocks are black. This is the shadow, you see. Incredible.




Needless to say, it was a pretty remarkable place. Jorge was extremely impressed that a) I took him someplace so cool in our first weekend, and b) I managed to find the place eventually. You see, my internal GPS seems to be in need of a bit of a tune-up these days. We spent a lot of time in the first two weeks we were here driving in circles, turning into one-way streets the wrong way, and bickering. Now I just leave the navigation to Jorge, and keep my mouth shut when he gets us lost, because inevitably, we turn up right where we intended, with no clue how we got there (I refer you to the previous post for that little magic trick).



And check it out - the first family photo I think we have taken in about 6 months!