Although they spent most of a 16-day trip to Ethiopia providing dental care to children, Olds dentist Jared Ord and his wife Lindsay, a dental hygienist, also got to take in some of the country's culture and cuisine.
They were part of a team that provided dental care to about 230 children and a few of their guardians.
For that, those people were very grateful, despite the initial shock of the cleaning, freezing, and occasional pulling of teeth. So the Ords and other team members would be invited to their homes.
“Some of them would offer us coffee. And in Ethiopia, coffee ceremonies are a really big deal. It's a traditional kind of way to welcome someone,” Jared said during an interview with the Gazette. “It seemed like everyone wanted to have a coffee ceremony for us.”
“They lay out leaves and grass and they pop popcorn, which we thought was quite interesting, and they burn incense. It's quite a processs.”
“They roast the coffee and then they grind the coffee right in front of you with a mortar and pestle, and then they brew it over this little cooking fire,” Lindsay added.
They also tried some of the local food.
“We ate traditional foods several times. So we had goat and lamb and then we had the normal stuff: beef and chicken and things,” Jared said. “But it was very highly spiced. They have a spice called berbere and they use it in almost everything. It's red; it makes everything bright red.”
Jared noted at one point the project chefs who prepared meals for the kids, prepared a special meal for team members featuring traditional food. There were no utensils. Diners had to utilize traditional Ethiopian injera bread.
“They do a hand-washing ceremony first,” Lindsay said. “You go around to each person; there's a bowl and they make you wash your hands. Then you eat everything with your hands and they turn nice and red,” she added with a small laugh.
“You tear off a piece of this injera and then you grab a piece of lamb meat (for example) that's in spices and stuff and then you just put it in your mouth. It was actually really good. I enjoyed it a lot,” he said.
Ironically though, Jared also had some injera at a local restaurant there and “we'll say it went through me,” he said with a small laugh.
However, team members had been warned that water in the country was not safe, so they didn't eat anything like salads.
Everyone was careful, they said.
“No one got sick from eating bad food,” Lindsay said. “Any sickness that anyone felt was just because things are so highly spiced that it's just our Canadian stomachs aren't used to that. But it's not like anyone got bacteria or a parasite or anything like that.
“And because in our group we had an emergency doctor and we had a retired physician from Lethbridge and his wife's a nurse, we felt like if anything happened we would be well cared for,” Jared said.
Near the end of their trip, the team's drivers took them to a resort just outside Addis Ababa.
“It was on a lake. They call them crater lakes because it's volcanic in the area. In the Debrazee area there are six or seven lakes that are created by volcanic (activity),” Lindsay said.
“Some UN delegates were there. We saw some vehicles with the big UN logos on them,” Jared added.
They toured around that lake.
“We were told we could swim in the lake, but we weren't taking any chances,” Lindsay said with a laugh. “It looked sketchy.”
“Our travel doctor basically said don't go into any open bodies of water because there are parasites and other things (in them) that can create problems. So we didn't do any of that,” Jared said.
"We were told we could swim in the lake, but we weren't taking any chances," Lindsay said with a laugh. "It looked sketchy."LINDSAY ORD
