Update Two

Well, time is just flying by here in Mekelle. I swear a day has just started and suddenly we have done about 8 thousand different things and then its time for bed at 9 o’clock (or as we like to call it, ‘missionary midnight’). We are constantly running around this town, with occasional breaks for some amazing Ethiopian coffee (really, you have not experienced coffee until you have been through an Ethiopian coffee ceremony…I think I am ruined for the ordinary now just based on how good the coffee is, sometimes Mindy and I lay in bed at night and just talk about how excited we are for our coffee the next morning).
The other intern here, Joel, just left this past weekend after he spent 6 months here, so we have a few weeks of quiet before a couple of guys from Ireland join us, then the other UPC team comes a couple weeks later. So, since we have no man to protect us from the dangers of Ethiopia at night, we are pretty much confined to our compound at night, but its led to ridiculous amounts of reading (I’ll come back much more intellectual if anyone desires some grown-up conversation). Before Joel left, the three of us and Philemon (an Ethiopian friend) went on a hike to a waterfall and had one of the most ridiculous trip there…it will probably earn its own blog entry.
Don’t worry, we do more than drink coffee all day. We’ve been spending our mornings mostly at a couple different orphanages. The one I get most excited about is the girls Orthodox orphanage. We walk in there twice a week and are just bombarded with hugs and handshakes and invitations to do all sorts of activities. They have one caregiver taking care of all of them; the caregiver truly does have a good heart, but is disabled and just too old, so these girls really have no one caring for them. They appreciate everything we do with them or bring to them. You have never seen anyone as thankful as these girls are when they understand that we are there just to spend time with them. We do crafts, and play really fun games that they have created. My favorite is called “volleyball”. Now, get rid of any preconceptions of volleyball and imagine a game where one person is in the middle and two others on either side of the compound. The person in the middle attempts to stack about 20 bottle caps on top of each other while the two girls on the outside throw a pair of rolled up socks at the one in the middle. If you get hit while stacking you are out and someone else tries…I could literally play that game all day (who wants to start a summer league?). These girls make me appreciate so much of what I have, but more than that, they have really shown me how much of an impact you can have just by showing Love. Every time we step into the compound my heart just breaks for these girls. There are 62 girls living at this orphanage that shares property with one of the Ethiopian Orthodox churches in Mekelle. Around five of these girls are HIV-positive, and that has been the one thing here that really blows my mind. You really would never know who was HIV-positive unless someone else told you, and it really gets us questioning how many kids we know who are HIV-positive, and we will never have a clue. It’s just tough knowing that some of these kids may not get the medicine they need, or that they have been taken to an orphanage and are unwanted because of their status.
So, when I am not making bracelets or dodging rolled up socks in the mornings, you can usually find us ferengis either at a blind school, or blind orphanage. The language barrier gets a little tougher here, just because you can’t do ridiculous charades in order to describe anything to them. When we visit the blind boarding school, we bring a couple of the older girls from the Youth Center with us, its neat to have these girls doing something selfless and just to watch them have fun and get in there with people less fortunate than them (and its pretty hard to be less fortunate than some of them). We join in some pretty fun games like “Mongo Mongo” and “Arungueda” and what we like to call “basket”. Some of these older girls who join us have already had so much more influence on me than they will ever know. They are the core group of girls who were our “target” group going in, and we focus a lot on them. We had them over for a movie night over the weekend, it was insane. They are really all great kids with hard stories. A couple grew up in orphanages, a couple are basically running household, and it was fun just to have them over to be regular teenage girls. It was a little painful sitting through High School Musical 1 AND 2 consecutively, but it was good to have them over and just to hang out. I really like these girls and I think they are pretty entertained by how weird we are and they enjoy mocking our poor Tigrinya and Amharic, it’s humbling that they know three languages and I know one.
So, we hang out at orphanages, hang out with the older girls, and drink coffee. We work a little bit too. We are teaching English four days a week, and its actually challenging. Just because I can speak English well definitely does not mean I am qualified to teach it. I have a new respect for teachers with all their organization and lesson planning. When I decide what’s going to happen and what we are learning, it usually turns into a big game of silent ball. You ask a question in English, throw it to a kid, and he or she answers you in English. It gets more challenging on the days when there is no power and you play silent ball in the dark classroom. We run other programs, too. Table tennis and bingo tournaments are big, we do Anti-AIDS classes and peer education too.
Not all of life here is totally enjoyable, though. We have some serious issues with Ethiopian men, especially when it is only Mindy and I walking around by ourselves. We have to be careful about any eye contact with men. If you make eye contact with them, you have literally just told them “yes, I would like to have sex with you”. Walking somewhere is literally the most frustrating part of any day, you have no idea how many times I have accidentally made eye contact with an Ethiopian man. No worries, we have a fun game we play now: we look down and try to find bottle caps. We have a really big collection. Ok, so the men thing really is the biggest issue. We are constantly yelled at, stared at, approached, and followed. Ethiopian men are accustomed to getting what they want, and when you ignore them or tell them to go away they are not happy. The other day we were shopping at a local fruit and vegetable market and when we ignored a group of guys, they literally threw a stick at me. Yes, I got hit with a stick in the middle of an Ethiopian fruit market, it was a little irritating, but now I guess I have my token “I got a stick thrown at me in Ethiopia” story.
We are still in fairly good health (I know, knock on wood again), but I am just waiting for the moment something weird sneaks into some of the food we eat. I subsist mostly on nutella (yeah, I’m becoming one of those people who goes abroad and comes back addicted to nutella) and also on an Ethiopian snack called “Kolo”. Kolo is basically roasted barely and a few peanuts thrown in, most Ethiopians eat it at coffee ceremonies, but it is really turning into my favorite food…don’t worry I’m bringing some home with me, I’d love to share some with you. We’ve had some weird animal encounters, most notably Bueller the gecko, and more recently a scorpion…we can’t find the scorpion (the night we found in on the ceiling in the bedroom, we moved our beds to the kitchen and slept there) so we now sleep under nets and pray that our friend will not return.
There are ridiculous amounts of other stories to tell, but I’ll spare you, you are a champ if you have lasted this long. Pray for good health, no more scorpions, and no more getting sticks thrown at us.
Here’s a fun Ethiopian fact to leave you with:
There are literally no trash cans on the streets of Mekelle. (Talk about a dilemma when we want to spit our gum out but have too much of a conscience to throw it on the street.)