Everyday I wake up around 6:30AM. I sleep on the bottom bunk in a room of five*, in a small brick house with 15 others living in it. We have no heating so multiple thick, wool blankets are necessary to sleep. We have a toilet and a cold shower, and no sink. There’s also no electricity which means we have strung up our headlamps over our, “living room,” which is actually a few empty beds, and we charge our devices at the house that we eat our meals at, where the rest of our 44 person squad lives. That house, called the Guest House, is about 100 yards from our own. Our house is in a small cluster of others just like it, on a compound with 29 orphans and a handful of widows living here with us. I get to see the sunrise everyday on my walk to breakfast, where I walk past the dirt field we play soccer on and the currently-under-construction building that will be used to teach people skills to hopefully have their own job or business. It’s certainly not always easy living here, but I love it regardless.
Oh, and did I mention it’s in Africa?
Sometimes that fact hits me and I’m shocked every time.
We live in a town called Harbu Chulule. It’s so small that people in the capital about 2 hours away have no idea what the place is. But we’ve learned to operate well here. Monday, Thursday, and Saturday’s are market days, so the town is a little more lively. A coffee shop here looks like a small shack with some bamboo and plastic tables and benches (but the coffee is delicious).
So what exactly do I do here? Well, in the mornings it looks like helping with different branches of HOPEthiopia’s ministry. That’s the NGO we are staying and working with. Some of my squad helps with reforestation, some of us help distribute water to villagers, and some of us have even been laying concrete. Our afternoons, however, do not have that much structure. We’re free to love the kids we live with however we want. For some of us that looks like playing soccer with them for hours. For others it might be coloring. And for others, it just looks like letting a child sit in their lap and talking. There’s some widows that live here that act as house mothers to the children and some of the squad has been spending a lot of time loving them as well as the kids.
And honestly, that’s about it. It sounds pretty simple, and thankfully it is. All we have to do is walk out our front door and ministry begins.
I’ve got exactly one month left to live here, as we’re gone at the end of February. I’ll keep the updates coming for this last month, and in the meantime know that I’m trying to make the most of the time left here. Okay I’m bad at ending these things so by until next time.
*since writing this, we have moved all of the team into one room. We have 3 triple bunks and it’s awesome.
Also, I’ve been writing all of my recent blogs on my phone so they’re probably a fair amount shorter than they used to be.
