We landed in Ethiopia on Friday night, got off the plane and the first thing we noticed was the cool air. It was dark so we were not sure what our surroundings were like until we awoke the next morning to a beautiful view of mountains in the distance.
We started our time in Ethiopia with a brief introduction to Ethiopian culture. An American living in the country shared with us how unique Ethiopia is regarding having their own alphabet, calendar, and way of telling time. For instance, to us, today is November 9, 2015 but to Ethiopians it is October 30, 2008. For the time, to us it is 12:30pm, but to Ethiopians it is 6:30 in the morning. 12 in the morning starts for them when the sun rises and then 12 at night is when the sun sets, so they are about 6 hours different from what we would expect. It’s been very fascinating learning about some of these cultural differences. It is definitely different here compared to Uganda and Rwanda which were quite similar to each other. Ethiopia is the only African country that was never colonized, so it has a lot more of a Middle Eastern influence.
Not long after we finished our training, we were greeted by our hosts, Masre, Tesfa, and Demerow. They loaded all of our bags on top of the roof of the car, attempted to strap them down (I say attempted because we had one tumble off after about 5 minutes of driving!) and then we were off. All we knew at this point was that our host contact was Masre and that we were living somewhere within Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.
During the drive, which turned out to be about an hour, we were able to learn more about our hosts and what we will be doing this month. Masre shared with us that we are his first World Race team and that they had discovered World Race online. Now this is very unique, typically ministries are discovered by Racers who are on the field, but in this case Masre and Demerow had been on the search for missionaries to host in their country and have partner with NGOs (Africa’s version of non-profits). They reached out to World Race themselves and began the process of becoming a host. They shared with us how perfect God’s timing was with it all. Not long after contacting World Race they found out that one of our staff members was coming to Ethiopia for business and was willing to visit and interview them in person regarding hosting. This was all in March and now here we are. It’s been really neat to hear about these men’s hearts for their country and why they wanted to host a group of missionaries. Their intent is simply to be able to provide more helping hands to the ministries that they care about in the city. So rather than us partnering with one ministry this month, the men have it organized so that we are with one ministry in the morning and another in the evening.
Ministry starts up tomorrow for us and all we know thus far is that we will be working with a ministry called Woman at Risk (WAR International), which involves helping women who have just gotten out of prostitution and another that involves tutoring kids. I’ll be able to share more about them next week after some time in the ministries!
Anyways, so we learned a lot in our hour long drive regarding our hosts and our ministries for the month, but we still were unsure which of the three we were living with or if we were on our own or really what our living conditions would even look like. We noticed towards the end of the drive that we were getting to more of a suburb of the city. The buildings were more spaced a part and taller, there also was a TON of buildings under construction. To us it looked like the richer part of town. We didn’t think we would be stopping here, but we were taken by surprise and after turning off on a side road, we came to a stop and we were told that we were home. The bigger man, Tesfa, began to use his loud booming voice to order everyone to help us get our bags inside and upstairs. He had us follow him up three stories of stairs, showed us to one room for two of us and then up another flight to the rooftop where another room was located for the rest of us.
It didn’t take us long to realize that we were once again being blessed with our living conditions. Our rooms are beautiful, we each have a small mattress pad on the ground AND we have three toilets and two running showers! When we didn’t think it could get any better, we found out that the kitchen has an oven and a refrigerator…what does this mean for us? It means that we will be able to cook a Thanksgiving dinner this month!
Our house host for the month is Tesfa and his wonderful wife Betty and their 3 year old daughter and 10 month year old son. It sounds like Tesfa has been a very successful business man, running his own construction company and car dealerships, and Betty is a manager at a bank downtown. They shared with us that God had begun to tell them several months ago that they needed to prepare to open their home to American missionaries. They were not sure what that meant until they met Masre at their church and learned that he was trying to find a place for his World Race team to live. It’s been really cool to hear how God has worked in the lives of all the people that will be caring for us this moth. It continues to amaze us how blessed everyone feels to receive us, because we feel like we are the ones being blessed.
The first day in a new country is always an adventure learning all about what we will be doing, where we will be living, and what type of food we will be fed. But after only two days and making our own four taxi ride adventure to the city, we feel settled in and ready to get started with ministry tomorrow with Masre and Demerow. It’s looking like it’s going to be another amazing month.
Exabier Yemeskin (“Praise God” in Amharic).
