I’m in Ethiopia! Hi everyone, it has been a minute since I’ve had an opportunity to post blogs and updates so let me give y’all a quick overview.
For our time in Ethiopia we are partnering with an organization called HOPEthiopia. We live on their base which is also the site of their Children’s Village, apple orchard, and women’s training center.
The Children’s Village is a cluster of houses that have been built to give homes to orphans. Each house has a House Mom who lives with and cares for the kids in their house. As you can imagine kids run around everywhere almost all day. The only time during the week that most of the kids are in one place and not running around and making enough noise to wake the surrounding village is Friday nights when they come to the Guest House (the building my team and I, and a few other teams, live in) for movie night.
The apple orchard is another project that HOPEthiopia is working on. Apples are very scarce, and therefore expensive, in Ethiopia. So the mission of HOPEthiopia with their orchard is to give grafts of their trees to local farmers to help them economically. My team, a few of the men on the squad, and I have taken up watering the orchard in the mornings. Each tree is supposed to be watered for at least 5min and there are about 52 trees in the orchard. Most of the trees are still shorter than me, but all of them are already producing fruit.
At the women’s training center a group of 9 women are being taught how to make clothes, backpacks, leather journals, cosmetic bags, and other things so that they can start a business and sell these products. Along with these skills they are also learning basic life skills such as cooking in a kitchen, first aid, and other skills to help them care for themselves and their families. With the goal being that these women be able to start a business they are being taught about economics and good business strategy, they are also learning to speak English as part of the skills they need to be successful global business women.
The base is right on the outskirts of a village called Harba Chelulee. Harba Chelulee is about a 2 hour bus ride south from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. The village has a bank, clinic (which I had to visit my first month here), a school, I think 3 churches, a mosque, coffee shops, small stores, and 3 days a week a large market. Everything is in walking distance from the base and most of the time you can make it back having spent barely over a dollar. For those who are curious the currency in Ethiopia is Birr, and it is about 30 Birr to 1 US dollar.
Ethiopia has been much different than Guatemala in many ways but it has been so incredible. This time has been very restful and has afforded me lots of opportunities to go deeper in my relationship with the Father and my relationships with my squadmates.
