Hi friends!

Hi friends! Sorry it’s taken me a bit to send another update. Internet here is not the greatest :-) A special thank you to my brother Brian for updating my blog for me. Blogs are blocked here in Ethiopia, so I have to email him everything and he has been gracious enough to post it for me since I can’t.

We finished our first week in Ambo, and spent the weekend in Addis preparing for another big week. I wanted to give you a glimpse into how our time is spent here.

Typical day in Ambo:

We wake up and meet for breakfast at 8 am, and are out the door of our hotel by 9 am. Before we leave we put on our mud shoes or boots. We walk to the bus and greet Sammy our driver, and his assistant Yeshuas.

We drive a mile down the road to the compound, and before even entering the gates, our ears are greeted with the sound of children shouting and cheering that our bus has arrived. Shouts of, “You, you you!”, frantic waving and running alongside our bus is the typical greeting. The moment we step off the bus we are swarmed by very physically-affectionate aggressive children. We greet them in Amharic (hello sounds like “Sa-Lam”) shake their hands or hug them. There are plenty of them to surround each of us Americans. We often have 4 or 5 children walking with us, grabbing our hands or putting their arms around us as we walk. We spend the morning with them, dividing them up, with the boys usually playing games or doing crafts first, while the girls have English class and then after an hour or so we switch. We have a total of around 200 kids on a daily basis. We break for lunch, go back to our hotel to eat, and then return for the afternoon to repeat the morning routine. When we leave for the day, the children follow us to the bus, saying Ciao (goodbye), shaking our hands, or, very often, kissing us. The girls are fond of kissing goodbye, and they love to grab our faces, kiss us on each cheek, and I even taught some of them the sound of “Mwuah!” as you kiss. They love that and have used it often as they kiss me over and over again. We often have a hard time making our way to the bus, as they all want to shake your hand and kiss you repeatedly before you leave. We feel so loved! :-)

During the week we also spend a few days with the street boys instead of the school children. We usually do a Bible lesson with them and then some stay for English class, while the rest go outside and play soccer, volleyball or kickball. We also feed them lunch when we are there for a half day, and both lunch and dinner when we are with them a full day. We do this because when they are at the compound with us, they are missing out on making money during the day. These are boys that have no families, usually no home and are doing their best to survive on the streets of Ambo. We alternate our time between them and the school children during the week.

At the end of the day, our team then heads back to our hotel where we have about an hour or so to collapse on our beds and rest a bit and then we meet for dinner downstairs in the hotel. We pretty much have the menu memorized as we eat at the hotel for breakfast, lunch and dinner. (some favorites of our team are the “Peeper Steak”, “Fillet Migno”, or the “Mixed Grill”...which the name isn’t funny, but the ‘mix’ is…Jeremiah had mystery meat again but did find out on one occasion he was eating the liver of some animal) After dinner we have a team meeting where we debrief and give our “Highs and Lows” of the day, end up laughing over the experiences we’ve had, and then we discuss what our plans are for the next day. We then head back to our rooms and pass out, only to wake up the next morning to do it all over again. :-)

Is it weird to think one can get used to a foreign country in a matter of weeks? Even thought this marks my 2nd full week in Africa, I’ve grown accustomed to a great number of things already. I am used to riding on our mini-bus with Sammy as the driver and hearing his horn blare at everyone in the road that he’s coming (I like to think of it like Fozzie Bear…wakka wakka wakka…that’s what his horn sounds like).

A few more things I’ve gotten used to:

Vultures flying overhead in the air…all the time.

Roosters crowing…all day long.

Being woken up at night from loud music outside. Or trucks honking their horns. Or the chanting. Some dude chants every night/early morning. Often through a loudspeaker. At first it was weird and annoying. Now it doesn’t even faze me.

Rain everyday and the subsequent condition of being muddy. The first day in Ambo, all of our feet were caked in mud. Oh, and there were fire/biting ants in the grass too. A few of us (myself included) got attacked by the ants. Mine were just on my ankles, but painful nonetheless. Some team members literally had ants in their pants. On day 2 we went and bought rain boots. This was to help with the mud issue but also the ants. We are often stared and pointed at while wearing our boots. Apparently a person in Ethiopia only wears them if they are a plumber and are going to be stepping in crap. So the people here think we are weird to walk around in them. I don’t care, I think they’re a blessing.

Being laughed at/stared at. See above.

Seeing donkeys, cows, goats and dogs walking around everywhere amongst people. At first it was like “Oh my gosh, look at that cow just crossing the street in front of us”, or “Hey look, a bunch of donkeys hanging out on the sidewalk”. Now…we walk down the street and pass a goat and don’t blink an eye.

Losing electricity. It happens about every other day here. The hotel we are staying at has a generator so it’s not out as often as in Addis. I’ve gotten quite good at taking out my contacts by flashlight though, I must say.

Things I have not gotten used to:

Seeing homeless people curled up in the middle of the sidewalk sleeping, looking barely alive.

Watching the street boys fight over food. Seeing their clothes filthy, filled with rips, tears, gaping holes. They wear the same clothes every day, some don’t have shoes, and they are just plain dirty and smelly. It’s hard to imagine their life and how they have to live, yet I go to the bus and my bag has food in it for me, I have plenty of clothes and a home and a family. They have practically nothing. And I have an abundance of everything. Hard to make peace with that. They push and shove each other while standing in line for the injera that we give them for lunch. Want the truth friends? (skip to the next paragraph if you don’t) Injera looks a big piece of a thin sponge that 3 different people pooped on, and all of that was then put on a plate for you to eat. I wouldn’t be fighting anyone over it. Yet they do, and they also go after the younger kids while they are eating, trying to intimidate them into giving them their food. It’s a sad sight.

The smells. On any typical day, I can walk into the classroom and it smells pretty bad…like rain, mud, filth, poop, body odor and mold….all rolled into one. When you first walk in the room it hits you hard, then you just get used to it and its normal. Being around the school and street boys though, you are hit with the overwhelming scent of body odor. It’s still not really something I’m used to smelling.

All that to say, it’s been a very emotional week for me. I have been having a hard time with coming face-to-face with such poverty and despair, and my emotions have been high. I would appreciate prayer friends. Also, please pray for our ministry time. Our weeks are very busy, tiring and emotionally draining. The strength of the Lord is needed. I’ll keep you posted on how this week goes! We’re having a 2 week MC team joining us, just for this week. We are already planning the hazing we are going to do with them…should be fun :-) I’ll leave you with my highlights from the week.

Highlights of the week:

- During one of our days with the street boys, I was hanging out with the younger ones while some volleyball and soccer games were going on, and we were videotaping some of them speaking English (read: forcing them to repeat what we said even though they had no clue what they were saying). In a move of sheer genius, I got one of the boys to say “Go Cubs Go, Go Cubs Go, Hey Chicago whattayou say, the Cubs are gonna win today”. This naturally led to me singing it and the boy began dancing. Pretty soon I had a dance party going on as about 6 or 7 boys surrounded me as we danced in the mud while singing “Go Cubs Go”.

- I’ve asked for prayer for the English classes I am helping to lead, and I am happy to report the Lord is working in great ways and answering those prayers! I ordered curriculum before leaving called “English in Action” and it’s based off of a method called TPR (Total Physical Response) where students learn English through physical movement. I have 5 other team members helping me with this, and we divide the students into 3 groups, so we have 2 of us to a classroom. This has been my ministry with the kids here, and they are flying through the lessons. It is extremely exciting to see them actually learning! Right now they’ve learned things such as: Stand, Sit, Walk, Sing, Stop, Turn, Touch Your…Shoulders, Head, Eyes, Mouth, Ears, Nose, Arms, Legs, Feet, Hands, Fingers, Chest; Jump, etc.

- Seeing Yeshuas get to play games. He is a teenager and our bus driver’s assistant. According to one of our translators, a bus assistant is a pretty low job in Ethiopia and he doesn’t get paid much. But if you had the privilege of meeting him, you would interact with the most joyful boy you could find in Ethiopia. He always has a huge smile on his face and is so happy. We love being around him. However, his job is to guard our bus while we are doing ministry or overnight while we are sleeping in the hotel. He even sleeps on the bus. At one ministry sight the bus was parked outside of a gate. They had the gate open and Yeshuas would sit on the bus with his hands on the window panes and a huge smile on his face and watch us play with the kids and women at the compound in Nazaret. All day long he sat and watched us play. But here in Ambo, we park the bus inside the compound, so Yeshuas has been able to play volleyball and some other games with us. He loves it! And we have loved watching him get a chance to have fun! But he is the cutest thing, he would be playing volleyball, and would hit the ball and then immediately look over to where the bus was parked to make sure it was ok. We love Yeshuas.

That’s all for now friends…I’ll write again soon!

Blessings,

E