Coffee Ceremony
As I sit and enjoy my morning coffee, I daydream about Ethiopia, and the wonderful coffee we had daily while we were there. What I loved most about our trip ( tied with the adorable children I was able to hang out with) were the coffee ceremonies. Everyday after Luke and I were done teaching we would go over to Genet's home for an amazing lunch and after we were done eating we would sit for an hour and drink the freshest coffee you will ever have.  Before you can enjoy a cup of coffee in Ethiopia, you first roast the beans, grind the coffee using the mukecha and zenezena ( which act as a mortar and pestle). By this time the water to brew the coffee is ready in the jebena (decorated traditional coffee pot) - adding the water and recently ground coffee to let boil together and then served. We were able to enjoy this tradition daily, sometimes twice a day and for Ethiopians, the coffee ceremony can happen 3 times a day, it is an important social event to gather the family and community to talk and be together - I find is wonderful and I miss sitting in Genet's compound listening to the ladies talk to each other in Amharic. Here is a series of images that I took of all the wonderful women who invited us to coffee ceremonies.
UKG Photography
Happy Ethiopia Monday! It seems these will sadly end soon since I only have a few more things to write about but today I am very excited to share with you some of my students work! If you weren't aware, while I was in Adama, when I wasn't photographing for Seeds of Africa I was teaching the children photography thanks to a handful of wonderful friends who donated their old digital cameras to me to give the children. So today is all about the UKG (upper kindergarden) class and my favorites of their images. I tried to teach the children some simple composition and maybe you can pick some up in these images but my amharic is, well pretty much nonexistent and they were just starting to learn english - so communicating was a bit challenging and by week two I was just letting the kids go wild with the cameras to I ended up really enjoying the outcome:
