Pittsburgh’s East Africans celebrate new year, old tradition

Today marks the beginning of a new year: 2002.

Pitt student Weenta Girmay will call her grandmother who lives in Eritrea, an East African country where the Julian calendar marks the passage of time. There, the clock runs from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Western time because the sun rises earlier. People operate, in a sense, seven years behind Americans.

Today marks the new year in Ethiopia and Eritrea, two countries that share a history dating back almost 2,000 years.

Girmay won’t go to church today and then come home to feast on homemade coffee, wine and injera, a gray flatbread made from a native Ethiopian grain called teff. She won’t pick the yellow flowers that grow in neighboring Ethiopia, where her parents once lived, and take them door to door, as Seifu Haileyesus, owner of Tana Ethiopian Cuisine in East Liberty and himself an Ethiopian native, remembers watching the girls in his town do.

“You know, it’s sad,” Girmay said in an e-mail, before flying off to study abroad in Bolivia. “A lot of us are Americanized in the sense that we’re running on American schedules. You can’t just call off work to celebrate an all-day new year.”

So instead, she’ll settle for calling her grandmother, who lives in Eritrea and speaks the national language of Tigrinya. Girmay never learned the language, “So I try my best to understand her, but the conversation is short, and mostly it’s just about hearing her voice.”

Back in Ethiopia and Eritrea, people will gather around a table with a large communal plate covered with the injera, which they’ll pepper it with different stews made from ground chickpeas or lentils and ambasha, a type of round bread they cut into triangular pieces, almost like a pizza.

They’ll grind coffee by hand, brew tea and burn incense as they eat until all the food is gone.

This all occurs, of course, after they’ve gone to church to celebrate the beginning of the new Julian year, which most of the world used until the late 16th century, when the Roman Catholic Church created a new one to better align Easter with the spring equinox, hence the gap between the Ethiopian and Eritrean new years and the American one.

Many Ethiopians and Eritreans will wear traditional clothes today: light, often handwoven, cotton garments with colorful designs. The women will wear scarves and braid their hair into cornrows that run from their scalps to the bottom of their necks.

“When my mother was growing up, variations on this hairstyle would signify married, unmarried, married with children, etc,” Girmay said. “Although, this is much less prevalent now that we’ve ‘modernized.’”

Ethiopians and Eritreans prefer to celebrate the new year all day long, rather than than waiting until midnight on New Year’s Eve, as the Americans do.

“Basically, we celebrate it in the light, Americans in the dark,” Girmay said. “It’s a more family-oriented holiday. You visit your relatives that day since … we have an extended family structure.”

“Americans,” she added, “make it more about partying and drinking and making out.”

Haileyesus said he’s grown accustomed to the U.S. New Year. He moved from an Ethiopian suburb to the United States in the late ’80s to study, so he’s had plenty of time to adjust.

Still, he fondly remembers celebrating the new year as a child living near Addis Ababa, the captial of Ethiopia.

He remembers the girls in town dressing up in traditional clothing and going from door to door singing. The townspeople would welcome the girls into their homes and feed them Ethiopian honey wine, called tej. The girls would hand them a yellow flower, which only blooms near the new year, before heading on to the next home.

In the evenings, Haileyesus said, he and his parents and siblings would visit other family members, drink traditional beer called tella, and thengo spend the money they’d earned.

“I think that’s very much what it is, enjoying each other,” he said. Tomorrow night, when Pittsburghers have off work, Haileyesus will offer a dinner buffet at his restaurant to celebrate the Ethiopian new year.

His staff will dress in traditional clothing and serve almost all the traditional food — with a few new dishes, to keep people surprised.

If they’re in tune with Ethiopian culture, his clients will greet their servers with “melkam addis amet,” which means “happy new year.”

And Haileyesus will welcome in the new year: 2002.