Hello everyone!
I’ve been living in the great country of Ethiopia for a month now, heading into month five of this adventure. There’s been a lot that’s happened since landing here and being three hours down the road from WIFI. Some of what I’ll be mentioning in here is on my YouTube channel, so check that out after you’ve read, subscribed and commented to my blog (haha totally kidding…).
First, the plane ride here was interesting and quite amusing for me. Being from Australia, I’ve taken a large number of international flights. Some of my squad mates on the other hand have not. A seventeen hour plane journey across an ocean is something a number of them haven’t experienced before. So the gasps of excitement about getting blankets, pillows, meals, and free movies cracked me up and earned a text to my parents. The flight went very smoothly, there were great movie selections and the meals consisted of chicken or fish….but no chicken. That was the only part of the flight that was a little rough.
We arrived to our hotel close to midnight, unable to sleep much because Guatemalan time was around 3PM. Maddie Bailey and I shared a hotel room and we were flipping through channels on the TV. When suddenly we couldn’t anymore because either the TV broke or the remote died because we were stuck watching Amharic “Kung Fu Panda”. Our next move was to unplug the TV, order some lentil soup, shower, then hit the hay. The designer for the shower at the hotel should probably revisit the drawing board though. Half a pane of glass covering it was not a smart move considering everyone on our squad that showered said their bathroom flooded from this. It was not user error, if I had a picture of the shower I’d prove that it was a design flaw.
The next morning, after a three hour journey looking out at what Ethiopia had to offer, we arrived to the Hopethiopia base, our home for the next three months. After loosely setting up camp in a room with us (team Esther), 3.2 and Ekklesia, we were met by the 11n11 W squad for an awakening! Awakenings are rare to the World Race, but it’s when two World Race squads are in the same country and meet up. Gap W happened to be in Ethiopia at the same time as 11n11 W squad. I got to be a worship coordinator for the awakening and “W” truly stands for worship for both these squads. Shoutout to my friends on 11n11, Shannon and Lubbock! It was such a blast meeting those girls and learning so much from them. Please be praying for their long journey around the world!
After the few days of the awakening, the other W squad had left and we had orientation. Our team also moved rooms now that there was a free one for us. Now that we had a more private space for our team we were able to process some things. The first being the absence of our teammate Makayla. Makayla, or as I call her Mak, was sick a lot in Guatemala and didn’t get cleared to come to Africa from a doctor in the states during our 22 hour layover in Newark, NJ. If you’d like to find out more about that, please go check out her blog post. I, honestly, had to process her absence a lot here. For whatever reason, Mak not being here hit me really hard and I cried thinking about it for about a week and a half. Thankfully I was able to process it with my team and squad leader, Connor, and it made me feel a bit better.
The rest of our time so far has been getting used to the flexibility of our life here. Getting sorted into ministry tracks and figuring out what our morning ministry would look like. In team Esther’s case, mornings are filled with gardening. We’ve cut grass, broken up soil and gotten it ready for seeds, and we’ve even planted three rows of seed already.
My afternoon ministry is the kids. We live on an orphanage and 50% of everyone’s ministry is advised to be with the kids here. However, we got put into three different tracks so we can get a lot done during our time here. We have the women’s track (teaching training center women life skills and English and also hanging out with the house mums), the reforestation track (grass cutting, tending gardens and planting) and the kid committee (hanging out with the kids and having different classes for them). My whole team, except for HPK, is on the kids committee. I get the pleasure of heading the music and drama classes for our track. The kids here are so sweet and love us so well.
Our day-to-day consists of: breakfast (a rotation of different meals all including bread), morning ministry (in team Esther’s case gardening), lunch (a rotation of meals surprisingly without bread), afternoon ministry (kids committee!!!!), and dinner (a rotation of meals with bread. On special occasions, aka this has happened twice, we get garlic bread ooo ahhh. Sometimes we also get desert which is always fun for us). On Friday’s we also have movie night with the kids.
We occasionally go into the village for snacks, soft drinking or just to see the crazy amount of donkey, goat and horse traffic. At night, the stars are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen them. You can see every star in the galaxy, I swear. It’s the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen, I only wish I could capture its beauty.
Life here is so simple. My days are filled with kids laughter, the cutest smiles, kiddie pool laundry, so much popcorn, and so much time to chat with the Lord. When in my life will I ever get to be so disconnected and live so simply? I’m really just enjoying it while I can.
That’s all for now!
See you soon!
-Chelsea
