Teaching Ethiopian Children Pride and Knowledge

Tiya Booker

International Studies 261 01

Professor Turner

28 November, 2016

Teaching Ethiopian Children Pride and Knowledge

Interacting with the Ethiopians that are apart of the community of the Ethiopian Orthodox church called MM, has been an overwhelming experience. My ethnographic project is focused on learning the culture of Ethiopians and what issues are important to them by focusing on people who are a part of MM, which is a small Ethiopian Orthodox church located in a medium sized city. There are not more than seventy members that attend service regularly. Maybe as a consequence of the church being small, there is clearly a family-like atmosphere there. By doing this study I have learned that the Ethiopians at MM care a lot about preserving their culture. Their unique Ethiopian Orthodox culture is so prevalent within their communities, and they present it with such pride and assertiveness that I even felt the draw to assimilate. The Ethiopians involved in MM hope that their youth feel that draw toward Ethiopian Orthodox culture as well, since they are actively focused on teaching their children pride and knowledge of Ethiopian culture.

Perhaps an unconscious way that Ethiopians assimilate their children is through the very distinctive Ethiopian cuisine. Eating Ethiopian food is a huge aspect of how the people at MM identify their culture. One Sunday morning after the church service, I asked a woman in her forties named GA, who is a very involved member of MM, if she was Pentecostal. GA said that the Ethiopians who are Pentecostal eat the same food as the Orthodox Ethiopians and speak Amharic, but they dress in a Western fashion to church unlike the Orthodox. Therefore, GA communicated to me that one of the commonalities that help GA members identify the Pentecostal Ethiopians as Ethiopians who retain some of the Ethiopian culture is through eating Ethiopian food. Every Sunday after service there is home-made Ethiopian food, tea, and coffee available, so that most of the congregation can eat and socialize with each other downstairs. The food consists of barley bread and a box of injera with vegetables like kik alicha, doro wat, and abesha gomen, and sometimes firfir. On occasion the women also serve salad. The container of injera usually costs five dollars, but I only had to pay for it once. Usually someone else at the church would pay for me, or they would give me the food for free since I am a guest. This reveals that the MM members believe that sharing food is a demonstration of their hospitality. Their youth will watch the adults demonstrate that hospitality and mimic that behavior.

I have witnessed the hospitality of members of MM by sharing food on many occasions. After talking with a young woman named WS in MM’s cafeteria, who I knew as a waitress at an Ethiopian restaurant I frequented, WS introduced me and my sister TA to the priest. The priest, assistant priest, two deacons, and a few women on the dance team were sitting down at a table on an elevated platform eating injera and vegetables from a large communal plate. They welcomed us, and I sat beside the priest. I asked the priest for permission along with everyone there to do my ethnographic project, and he said yes. Then, while we were talking through a translator, the Priest honored me and my sister with gursha! My sister and I would have been bewildered by this practice if we had not watched a documentary on Ethiopian food customs the day before this visit. The priest performed gursha, which means “mouthful” in Amharic, on many of the other people sitting around the table as well. However, the priest kept feeding TA and I gurshas which would have been fine if we had not just finished eating the injera that WS gave us before she introduced us to the priest. In between gurshas, the deacon sitting beside TA persistently encouraged us to eat. TA and I repeatedly politely protested eating anymore food, and we explained that we just ate and are full. However, the priest gave us gurshas at least four times until we got up and politely left.  

One of the main ways that the Ethiopians in MM pass their culture onto their children is by passing down their language. The vast majority of the Ethiopians and Ethiopian-Americans at MM spoke Amharic regardless of their age; everyone who was able to speak Amharic preferred to speak it rather than English during and after church service. The priest and assistant priest could not speak English, this reveals that this community values Amharic and tries to make an atmosphere so that their children can speak Amharic even if they are raised in America. GA said that the church was working on a program to teach people Amharic not only because I asked for it, but another person did as well who was a member of MM. This is significant because even though the demand to learn Amharic was not high, GA makes it a necessity to supply one. That means it is important to know Amharic to be apart of the community. When I informally interviewed SE over the phone, we discussed what influenced the teenage and young adult generation leave the church. He said “there is also the aspect of a language barrier that is making the kids leave.” The reason why there may not be many people at MM who do not know Amharic or even Ge’ez is because those who did not know those languages left the church. Perhaps this is because they did not have a basic level of connection to it—clear communication.

Personally, I have received requests from members of the the congregation like the church mother, OL, to learn Amharic. She even offered to teach me. After I received permission from the priest to conduct my ethnographic project in his church, even the priest said that I must learn Amharic and Ge’ez as well as learn by memory all of the many songs that they sing. These instances prove that it is beneficial and expected for people in the MM community to know the common language there. Speaking Amharic is also a marker of Habesha identity. The only time I was asked if I was Ethiopian at MM is after I tell the Ethiopians there that I cannot speak Amharic. Otherwise they assumed I was Ethiopian, since I look similar to them and dressed like the women at church. PG, a young woman at MM, thought I was Ethiopian when I first met her at a Friday night service since I said “Salam” to her after she greeted me first. Since a lot of the important figures at MM do not know English well, it is important for the youth to know Amharic so that they can still have that basic connection of language with the older generation. Therefore, the non-English-speaking older generation is able to more effectively teach the youth Ethiopian culture.

The adults at MM not only want their children to know Amharic, but they want them to learn Ge’ez as well. GA says that Ge’ez is the “church language,” and that it is similar to how Latin was used in the Catholic mass instead of the common language of the people. I found this metaphor that GA gave me enlightening, because it reveals that GA sees in her horizon that there is a commonality between the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Western Catholicism. However, I have come to the conclusion that most of the Ethiopians in this community believe that the Ethiopian Orthodox interpretation of church more preferable to them than the Catholic version on the basis that the Orthodox Church is more original to how church was conducted in the early first century. AE, a middle-aged professor who is a pillar at MM, told me that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was “the original Church that did not change.” He also said that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is formed the way Jesus taught his disciples to form their church. When I was interviewing a family of Ethiopians that I have known for a few years since they were my next-door neighbors, KY expressed pride that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church does not change. KY is a woman in her thirties with a Masters degree. There also seems to be a belief among the members of MM that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is rich in Ethiopian culture compared to the culture of the Protestant churches in Ethiopia. When I asked GA if she was a Pentecostal Christian, I realized there must have been a misunderstanding between me and BT, GA’s son, who told me that information. GA and the blended couple who I was talking to shook their heads and said no. GA said “If I was Pentecostal I would not be here.” GA and the African-American man’s wife said that Pentecostalism was more of a “Western religion” and that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is more Ethiopian and contains more of the culture of Ethiopia.

When I visited a class at MM that was teaching Ge’ez one Friday night, I realized that Ge’ez is a source of pride for BT, a thirty-year-old man who volunteers to teach Ge’ez to the children. He told me that the creators of the Latin alphabet copied some of their alphabet from Ge’ez. He later showed me a chart to prove it. He said that Ge’ez was used five or six thousand years BC, and Latin was first used only six hundred BC. I noticed that this is a common trend in many of the Ethiopians’ horizons; they find pride in being original. BT has a deep appreciation for Ge’ez since he believes that “every letter is connected to nature.” For example, he pointed to a letter in the Ge’ez alphabet and said that that letter “looks and sounds round because the earth is round.” Even though BT claims that “nature” is his religion and not Orthodox Christianity, he still volunteers in that community to “teach the culture to the kids.”

Since the Orthodox religion is an important aspect of MM’s culture, their biggest focus of evangelism is not toward non-Ethiopians, but their own children. SE, a twenty-one-year-old youth pastor, emphasized to the youth he was preaching to that it was important for them to share the gospel to the next generation. GA also admitted to me while we were conversing in MM’s cafeteria after church that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church mainly focuses their attention on Ethiopians. Since more than one person voiced these assertions, it validates that MM’s horizon is focused on evangelizing children into the Orthodox faith and culture. Since there is obviously such a concern that the youth will leave the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, I asked SE how many young people have decided to leave the church and how many are coming in. He replied that generally it is “about fifty fifty.” GA also said that there are not any members of MM who are my age. She said that they are either “much younger or much older.” Thus, the college aged Ethiopians at MM must have drifted away from the church. I suspect that this reality must have disturbed MM’s community, so they decided to focus their attention to evangelize the youth.

Encouraging the youth to participate in the church services, is another notable

way the members of MM preserve their culture. A fourteen-year-old adolescent named YU participates every Friday and Sunday as an usher’s assistant. He holds an open umbrella over the priest when he is reading the bible. He also walks to every individual with a bible covered in cloth in his hand to let each individual kiss and place their forehead on the bible. I think the reason why he is in such a high position at such a young age is that the congregation wants him to stay involved in church and not leave it after he goes to college. Even the children participate by singing one of the weekly prayers in front of the congregation. When the children sing, they all have colorful capes and crowns on displaying the colors and shapes of the Ethiopian flag. This demonstrates that the adults want the young children to be patriotic toward Ethiopia even though they are being raised in America. I also witnessed two young children playing mini kaberos in the special prayer ceremony during an early Sunday morning church service. An example of the small children participating in service in small ways is that sometimes a parent will give money to a child to put in the offering box. When I saw a mother and child do this, the scene was met with joy and smiles from the man carrying the offering. They do this so that the child will feel like he is contributing to the community. When I mentioned to AU that I noticed a lot of the adults at MM proactively make their children involved in the service, she replied laughing “Yes of course, we have to” otherwise they will stray away.

However, not all of the Ethiopians raised in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition stay in it. I have noticed one of the main culprits of stimulating the loss of young church members is education. SE said that most of the younger people who leave the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in America is during college. This is ironic, because most of the Ethiopians in America and in MM highly value education. RL, an 18-year-old young man who attends another Ethiopian Orthodox church called MY, said “Ethiopians are normally straight-A students” after I asked him in person how seriously do most Ethiopians in the District of Colombia, Maryland, and Virginia treat education. When I informally did an over-the-phone interview with one of the priest’s daughters at MY, a heavily populated Ethiopian Orthodox Church in a big city, I asked if education is important for Ethiopians in America. She confirmed that it is true, and that most of the younger people plan on going to college or are already in college. I also know that most of the adults at MM have college degrees’ like BT. BT texted me that after he has been “enlightened” that the church and the bible has been misconstrued by Westerners from its original African roots, he “hated” to be around church and left the church “for a long time.” This happened after he came to the USA and took a religion course in college. That is when he “[started] questioning about religion,” because he realized “many of them have similarities of their basic teaching.” He said he came back to the church to bring knowledge to the children that Ethiopian “history is the beginning of [mankind’s civilizations] including [that] the Ethiopian alphabets were the base of any language including” English.

            I used the Hermeneutic method to conduct this ethnographic project, and it was effective for me. The methodology associated with it was mostly conducted naturally, since I received a lot of my information from asking questions to my informants in a rather casual conversational style interview either in person or through the phone. However, sometimes I did interview people like SE, EE, and EL by asking them questions that I had already written down on a piece of paper to organize myself. Usually, I would take notes after I have left the field, but at the beginning of my investigation I sometimes would take notes during an interview especially if it is over the phone. I did not constantly keep a reflective journal, but I mixed my reflections into my raw notes. Talking with my sister about my experiences on the field that she often experienced with me helped me to discover some “challenges.”

I placed myself in the “one-down position,” because I treated my informants like they were the experts of their own culture like Michrina and Richards suggested (Michrina and Richards 23). As I became more familiar with some of my informants, our relationship became more “symmetrical in power” (23). For example, GA asserted her power to end an interview that I had with her by saying that she had to go. My aim for this project was to understand what the Ethiopians that I talked to liked about their culture and what is important for the members of MM through an emic perspective. I accomplished some of my goals with regards to understanding my informants’ crucial desire to celebrate their Ethiopian heritage and to pass their pride and knowledge of Ethiopian culture to the younger generations.

            I made plenty of mistakes while conducting my research. One mistake is that I had trouble centralizing on a “focus of interest—a common theme, issue, problem, celebration, or concern” like Michrina and Richards suggested which would have helped me better organize my interviews with informants (45). Previously I investigated how my informants thought about the trends of Ethiopian politics, the 2016 presidential election, the differing views on Mariology, and black identity. These were all interesting topics for me to explore, but they were all controversial and required more time than I had to investigate them fully. Therefore, I quickly became overwhelmed and confused about the direction my ethnographic project was going while I was considering all of those topics. I could have been more efficient in conducting my research by choosing my focus of interest earlier than November.

            The biggest challenge for me to narrow down my focus of interest was that a lot of my best informants rarely attend or did not attend MM at all. I preferred to talk to SE, who is closer in age to me, and the people that I met at his Ethiopian Orthodox church called MY in a bigger city where more of the congregation spoke English. I still used some informants who are not members of MM because they still have a very similar horizon being under the same tight-nit organization of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in America. I formed deeper relationships with some of the people at MY and other Ethiopians who did not attend MM often like EL and my previous Ethiopian neighbors than the members at MM. I could more readily identify trends that both those informants and I were interested in like I listed before, because I could understand their social location better. I think my preference to talk to the informants who did not regularly attend MM was mostly due to the language and age barrier. However, I could have tried to make more frequent contact with the members at MM, since many of my informants at MM who could speak English gave me their phone number.

            In conclusion, my informants understand the importance of caring about the future of the Ethiopian youth in their communities. They know that the youth is the future, so they take many measures to ensure that the future is bright. In order to have a bright future, the community at MM believe that it must instil pride and knowledge of Ethiopian culture into its children. The people in Habesha communities try to accomplish this by bringing the youth to an Ethiopian Orthodox church, feeding them Ethiopian food, teaching them Amharic and Ge’ez, and encouraging them to participate during church services. Only time will tell if their efforts are successful.