We headed to the Entoto project compound after our morning meeting.  The team worked on sorting clothes, cleaning up, landscaping, etc.  I went shopping.  We wanted to do some landscaping, flower planting, painting, shelf and closet construction, etc.  These things are very hard to do without supplies, so Esias, Tamara, Anna, and myself all went out to get them.  There’s one catch: there’s no Home Depot in Addis Ababa.  So where do you shop for supplies?  Well, Lowe’s of course!

Just kidding.  There’s no Lowe’s either.  No, you go to Mercado, purportedly the largest open-air market in Africa.  If you’ve ever been to a market in a third world country, you can picture it.  Shopping at Mercado isn’t like going to the store.  You go from shop to shop hoping that someone has what you need.  Our trip to Mercado and a couple of shops outside of Mercado took basically the first half of the day.

After lunch we went back to the compound to drop Tamara and Anna off.  Their part (paint selection) was done.  Esias, Jovani, and I then went out to a wood shop to get the wood we had purchased cut.  What an experience.  We drove down this stone paved street into a small neighborhood and then down a hill.  We unstrapped the 4′x8′ wood sheets from the top of the van and down the rest of the hill, over a ditch, and into the shop.  I marked the boards, and the workers cut them for us.  We also needed some 3 cm x 3 cm boards, so they cut down some branches for us.  Yes, the wood didn’t come pre cut.  They had branches that had been quartered length-wise that they then cut to the size we needed.

We then went to the paint factory to pick up the rest of the paint that we needed.  After that we stopped at a couple of shops to buy large bags so that we could transport gravel, which we purchased at another shop.  It had taken nearly the entire work day to buy paint, paint supplies, wood, shovels, screws, and gravel.

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Pastor Sale spoke on “Go.”  It was a great message about how we need to just go, to go do what God is telling us to do or to take a step forward in faith, trusting God to meet us on the way.

After service we went to lunch.  On the way there a guy came up to the van and wanted me to buy a pair of sunglasses.  This type of street vending is very common in Addis Ababa.  Usually people aren’t selling something I want, but I knew I’d appreciate having sungalsses while in Addis.  The guy asked 75 birr.  (A bit more than $7, the exchange rate is around 11 to 1).  We haggled over the price and settled on 40 or 50 birr, at which point I realized that I only had 29 birr on me.  I figured I was out of luck, but he was happy to sell them to me for 29.  I think this made me the first person to haggle for something on the trip.  (Well, not including John who had already been here for over two weeks.)

At lunch Rachel and I sat with Melissa and Anna, the Beza staffer who coordinated and led our trip.  Afterwards half of the team went to the pool and the other half went to the Ethnological Museum.  I headed to the museum which was located in the former palace of former king Haile Selassie.  It was a good opportunity to learn a bit more about the history and culture of Ethiopia.

After that we went to the Shiro Meda market, which we we had driven through the day before.  It’s an interesting place.  Tamara, one of the Entoto Project staffers, was with us and helped us bargain for better prices, but the best find of the day was the Ethiopian coffee pots.  I don’t think we even had to haggle over the price.  They offered them to us for 10 birr (less than a dollar).  Coffee is a staple of Ethiopia, and even those who are very poor have a coffee pot and small stove to prepare coffee, so a pot makes for an authentic souvenir.

The group split up a bit going through the market, leaving me on my own, which is pretty much how I like it in situations like that.  I walked down a few shops and saw a belt that I was interested in.  Once again, the guy started the price at 75 birr.  I said 25.  I don’t remember what his “final” price was, but I walked away from it.  He called me back and agreed to give me the belt for 40, but when I gave him a 50, he gave me back five ones.  I had walked away again by the time I realized it, so I went back to the shop to get five more.  He was reluctant, but after some arguing I got my five birr.  As I walked away, one of the guys standing around said “Good” to me.  I was pretty pround of myself.  My second day in Ethiopia on my first trip out of the U.S., and I was already haggling like a pro!

After shopping was dinner at Yod Abyssinia.  Yod serves traditional Ethiopian food and has live music and dancing in the traditional Ethiopian style to entertain you while you eat.  There’s a good story here, but it’s better accompanied by video, so I’ll leave that for another time…

I know what you’re thinking.  This doesn’t sound like much of a mission trip, but let me assure you, the real work began on Monday morning, although for me that meant more shopping.  (More on that in my next post.)

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To get to and from the mountain, you drive through a market area. I’m not exactly sure how to describe the chaos there. Pedestrians, cars, buses, and the occasional donkey share the street. When we made our first short van trip from the airport to our hotel, the Addis Guest House, I thought that Ethiopian driving was right up my alley, aggressive. By the end of the day I was proven wrong. Driving here is crazy. Most of the streets have no speed limits. Of course, it doesn’t matter because you can’t usually go that fast anyway. There are too many cars, people, et cetera in the streets. I’ll try to post some pictures at some point, but nothing I’ve shot does it justice.

For dinner half the team went to the Bier Garden (for food, not beer). My half went to Kaldi’s, a Starbucks rip-off, and a good one at that.¹. They use a very similar green and white logo, and the inside could be straight out of a Starbucks. Of course, Kaldi’s serves food as well. Here I got my first taste of a hamburger in Ethiopia. I found out later that they put Ethiopian spices in the meat, giving it a distinctly un-American hamburger flavor.

And that was pretty much our first day.

¹A side note, Kaldi’s beat Starbucks in a trademark infringement lawsuit because Kaldi’s beat Starbucks into Ethiopia.

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We walked through a grassy field and by a shanty shop down a path of loose stones the size of bricks.  Making a left and passing through a gate we entered Sara’s neighborhood.  To the right stood her home.  As we entered a baby was crying.  His wails filled the seven by eight foot room.  Sara tried but failed to quiet her son.  It was not until she took him out into the afternoon sun that his tears ceased.

Sara returned and as we talked, Jonam, her son, played with his noisemaker, two small ceramic cups that he bangs together.  We learned many things about Sara’s life, but these short bursts of conversation are punctuated by long periods of silence.  It was difficult to ask Sara questions.  It was not for lack of interest on our part nor an unwillingness to respond on her part, but prying into her obviously difficult life seemed inappropriate.  Questions such as “How did you contract HIV/AIDS?” were ones that riddled my brain, but I could not muster courage to ask them.

While I cannot share many of the Sara works with the Entoto Project’s job creation program where she makes jewelry from coffee beans, one of Ethiopia’s staples and an integral part of Ethiopian culture.  She told us that she would like to move down off the mountain but that she cannot.  Her rent would triple from approximately six dollars per month to nearly twenty.  While the Entoto Project pays Sara very well on an hourly basis, the number of hours that they can provide are limited.

Eventually Sara stepped outside and passed her son, her greatest joy, to a neighbor.  She began to prepare tea for us, a surprise in a culture that nearly always serves coffee to guests.  She would step outside and come back with something needed, cups, water to wash dishes, and so on, each thing borrowed from a neighbor.  One time she came back with a loaf of bread which she served us along with the tea.  The hospitality shown in the face of such dire circumstances and the willingness of neighbors to share with one another when each has so little of his own is amazing.

I still haven’t processed this experience, what it was like to sit and talk with a woman who owns so few worldly goods that I could have bought them all with the cash in my pocket.  I don’t really understand this yet.  Before we left we prayed for Sara and Jonam.  We prayed for healing for her, for protection for Jonam, and that he would become a strong man of God.

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After some time to talk, lunch, and some more briefing we headed up the mountain.  We split into two teams, one to play soccer with the kids and another to visit the homes of several residents who participate in the Entoto Project.  The second team further divided into groups of three or four (including a translator).  Jessie Webb, Rachel, and myself, along with Eden (pronounced Aiden), an Entoto Project staff member and our translator, visited with a woman named Sara (name changed for privacy reasons).  It was an amazing experience, but that is a story for another post.

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Funny story: Ethiopia doesn’t have daylight savings time.  “Why does this matter?” you ask.  Well for some reason even though Ethiopian Airlines has operated in the U.S. for quite some time, they still haven’t figured out how to account for DST when tickets are purchased before a time change for a flight occuring after a time change.  In other words our itinerary said that our flight was scheduled to leave at 9:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time, but the flight was actually leaving at 10:30 EDT (which would be 9:30 Eastern Standard Time, should the time change have not occurred.

Anyway, that was more of an aside.  The flight itself was actually easier than some domestic flights that I’ve had which involve a plane change.  We got on, flew about 9 hours, landed in Rome for an hour, and flew another 5 or 6 hours to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  We got our luggage (”aided” by people “helping” to try to coerce a tip), and the only thing we had to declare at customs was our cash.  All in all, not a bad trip.

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I don’t yet have a final list of the folks who have donated, but I want to recognize all of them by name when I get it. I’ll just be posting the names, not the amounts, but if you’ve given something and you don’t want that fact to be made public, please let me know. However, I really would like to honor you in this way. You’ve been a huge blessing to us, and we are very grateful.

Please feel free to celebrate with us in the comments!

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I’ll be honest, I had been worried that we were going to write a large check to get there.  Thanks to all of you who gave for your generosity.  We’re excited to go and to share with all of you what God does while we are there.  Only 16 more days!

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A huge thanks to Min Kim and Mary Evans for doing most of the prep work for the event and of course thanks are owed to John Hasler, our fearless leader.

The first team leaves on Friday, and our team leaves in two weeks.  I’m starting to get excited!  Please be in prayer for all of us, especially for the team leaving this week.  I’ll be posting some more specific prayer requests later.

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