Personal prayer is a tricky concept for the Y’tesfa Birhan girls who have been taught to be silent during prayer when attending  their churches. I wanted to prepare a prayer prompt that they might like to use. The internet is full of ideas based on alliteration and western concepts, but there was nothing that fitted culturally and with which they could really identify. I decided to base something on the national food of injera and wot, so enlisted the assistance of my Amharic teacher Sara.

Together we came up with injera (the big, flat pancake that holds all the wot) and igsiabier (God); noog (a wot made with black seeds) and nisahar (confession); mesir (a wot made with orange lentils) and misgana (praise); tibs (cubes of meat) and ticay (ask); burberry (hot spicy powder) and baitaseb (family), gomen (green leaves not unlike spinich) and guadenoch (friends) and finally ingudai (mushrooms) and inay (myself).

The craft activity was designed to create a miniature version of the popular foodstuffs from paper and fabric. From the youngest to the oldest the girls were quite engrossed as they arranged the different items. In my ignorance I had given them some attractive patterned paper on which to stick the ‘injera’ which I had thought could be the plate. However, when all the glue was dry I was surprised to observe the girls carefully cutting off the ‘plate’ that was visible around the edge. I remembered later that injera always reaches the edge of the tray on which it is served. Apparently if the tray is visible around the edge it is considered baby food which would be a small or lesser portion.

Sara told me that the government is encouraging personal enterprise, and one such endeavour is to cultivate mushrooms. An advantage of this crop is that it can be grown in a variety of containers. Mushrooms don’t require light and the raw materials on which they could be generated are readily available such as sawdust, chicken dung, teff (the grain used for making injera) and coffee seed husks to name but a few. Although in Addis fresh mushrooms are rarely on sale, I’m told that the dried variety are becoming more popular with local people.

Sara also related the story of a friend whose neighbour was apparently cooking mushrooms in their home, which smelt so good as she lay on her bed the other side of a corrugated iron dividing wall, that she asked for some. Sadly all those partaking became ill. It was not ingudai they were cooking but a different variety of the aptly named ‘tinish gentella’ (little umbrella), - the poisonous kind.