My Daily Bread

The middle-aged man behind the ticket booth looks at up at me and asks “Dabo?” I nod and he smiles.

“How much?” Asks his assistant. She’s sitting behind the cake counter and I wonder if she’s related to the ticket cashier. She’s always here, and I wonder why she isn’t in school. I wonder if she has brothers in school. I wonder if she will go home this evening and have to work for several hours.

“Three.” I say, which is what I say almost every day. The ticket man throws three black plastic tabs under his counter and hails a teenager in a block smock. The young woman hands him a thin plastic bag and he goes running out of the back of the shop to get my bread. I don’t know where the bread originally comes from.

While the boy is gone, I pay the equivalent of eleven cents for the bread. I walk away with three relatively fresh bap rolls in the bag and head back towards my office. I like the swishing sound that the bag makes as I move. Also, for whatever reason, people make less comments about me when I’m carrying bread, which is nice.

This is what I eat during the day now. I eat roll for breakfast and one for lunch. At home, I’ll eat the simple but tasty meal prepared by my housekeeper and eat the third piece of bread with a little (precious) butter. With water and vitamin pills, it’s a plenty sufficient diet.

Now that this is my regular routine. It makes me think about the words “Give us this day our daily bread.” In the Lord’s Prayer. So much of life here is, for the average Ethiopian, filled with mundane tasks.

Every morning, right after dawn, I take a bus from the city of Harar to the main campus. We go through two major towns and about eight villages. I play a sort of “Bingo” during these trips. There is almost always a woman washing clothes in a large bucket full of dirty water. There’s almost always someone using the bathroom in public. People chewing chat with their eyes closed, pregnant goats, animals that have gotten loose, people deep frying things over coal braziers, cake sellers with a food trays on their heads, kids who have invented a new game or are fighting due to sheer boredom, and a confused looking police officer,laughing women....woman with a baby on her back while carrying something else, BINGO!

This place is always moving. People spend hours doing little manual things every day. If people can’t walk on their feet here, then they walk on their knees or hands to get to the store. But, dang it, they get to the store.

It’s humbling. I feel extremely privileged and lucky to get to go sit in a relatively clean and quiet office. When my housekeeper makes shero for me (a typical dish made out of boiled lentils) I know that she spent time picking through those beans so that I wouldn’t crack a tooth on a small rock. This is a task that I find so mind-numbingly monotonous that it can only do a small amount of beans at a time before my eyes hurt and I start to feel sleepy.

When I meet women who are my age but have three babies, keep their huts and children clean, and have to do all of the cooking and washing and fetching by themselves, I am in awe. Could I do it if I had to? Could I be happy if that was what my life looked like every single day?

I eat my breakfast bread at my desk. It doesn’t have much flavor, but it’s quick and filling. And I am incredibly grateful.