Buckle down because I am about to give you the complete and total run down of life in Ethiopia with all the gory details. First and foremost, I am alive. we live on a compound in what everyone calls the guesthouse. Our house has a big living room with three couches and a dining room with enough tables and chairs for all of us. the coziest/homiest place we have lived so far. And we have a REAL kitchen with all the things- refrigerator, TWO sinks, an oven, a stove, even A MICROWAVE. And sometimes, when the Lord is loving us a little extra, we have HOT SHOWERS. And we even have a gym, which is actually just sticks with cement on the end under a metal roof, but you BET we use them every day/once a week.
Africa is beautiful. The weather is absolutely perfect. It’s kind of cold and windy, but the sun is super intense so it’s warm during the day and freezing cold at night so we bundle up in our sleeping bags that we finally get to break out after toting them around for the past 4 months. There are mountains and fields and goats and cows everywhere. (stars in Africa are truly INSANE, they feel so close you could touch them and they are so bright and I have never seen so many. I often take a blanket outside and just lay on the ground looking at them. it feels like a spiritual experience; it’s wild). We are literally in the middle of nowhere, that’s why we haven’t been able to communicate- no service + no wifi.
After being here a month, I’ve developed a pretty solid routine. I wake up at 6:30 every morning and spend time with Jesus until breakfast at 7:30. After breakfast, Madi and I do yoga on the front porch. Yes we have a front porch, and I think it’s my favorite place to exist here. Our morning ministry changes a lot here, partly because there are so many projects going on and partly because they don’t really know where to put us. For the first couple of weeks, my team did reforestation. WHICH WAS AWESOME. i loved it a lot. We had to hike to the reforestation site every morning, which was about a 40 minute walk. the first day, about half of my team and half of the boys team got to go on the most beautiful hike up this mountain while we waited on the rest of our teams to get there. I cannot put into words how beautiful it was. there are plants and trees that are shades of green that I have never even see before, some looked almost blue or silver. Truly spectacular. side note, I have recently come to the conclusion that green is God’s favorite color. He used it for SO MUCH of creation and made so many different shades and hues of ONE color. Im just sayin… Anyways, for reforestation, my team and our boys team sat around a huge pile of dirt and stuffed it into these plastic tube-like sack things, which they plant into the ground with a little seed and then it turns into a full-fledged forest. we would just sit on rocks in a circle and talk about everything from politics to spirituality to high school shenanigans. sometimes we would water the saplings, which entailed getting watering cans and walking to this stream that looks like its straight out of a movie, complete with rocks scattered about so you can hop across it. unreal beauty here. And for the past week or so, my team has been doing garden ministry, which made me very sad on the first day, because I thought a lot about my mom and the garden we had together at home. but I love it now. Happy to have little reminders of home. gardening for us entails watering and tilling the ground. And tilling the ground for us just means stabbing the dirt with shovels. so we are still doing that. afternoons are meant to be spent playing with the orphans that live on the compound, but they have started school. We aren’t allowed to leave the compound unless we have a local and a man with us, and there isn’t really anywhere to go anyways. so afternoons are really chill. I spend most of my time reading or spending time with Jesus, praying + reading the Bible. prayer has been kind of hard for me, since forever really. It just doesn’t really make sense to me, ya know. The lord knows my every thought and desire and what I want before I even ask for it. And He already has a predetermined plan for everyone and everything, so my prayers aren’t going to change His mind…so like why even pray?? But He has really been teaching me about the power of prayer and how it is more about relationship with Him than it is about asking and receiving.
I have been trying to create more than I consume, and I don’t really think of myself as a very creative or imaginative person. I’ve never been great at drawing or painting or any of that jazz, but the Lord is the Creator of all things and I am made in His image and He lives within me, so I must have some sort of creativity, right. So anyways, I was laying on the front porch in the afternoon the other day, and I just really wanted to physically CREATE something, so I asked the Lord to give me an idea, some sort of inspiration, and He told me I should make a prayer schedule!! so I did and I think it’s some of my best work, real cute.
Every Friday night, all the little orphan babies come over to our house and we watch a movie all together on the projector in our living room. On the weekends, since we cant really go anywhere, we watch a lot of movies and play outside a lot. We live a very simple life here. It’s very peaceful. The Lord has been teaching me a lot about the process of things. Like in every aspect of life I have been very goal-oriented. I focus more on arriving to the place I want to get to, than the steps of actually getting there. i have been doing it on the race too. I am in Africa for two more months, but im constantly thinking of PVT in March, and everything I’m going to do after that in Costa Rica, and then going home. And it’s like I have been wishing away my time here. Wishing away the process. And I have been really convicted about it. The Lord has given me two months to just get to know Him and get to spend time with Him. there will literally be no other time in my life where I will have time like this, with no distractions, no interruptions. And instead of taking advantage of it and trying to learn and grow and better myself, I’ve just been wishing it away, wanting to be somewhere else. But the Lord has been revealing to me that He is a God of the journey, not the destination. He just wants to go on the journey with us. The getting there is when He prepares us and turns us into who we need to be when we actually get to the destination. The journey is where we see Jesus the most. So he has really been challenging me to be present and focused on Him and what He wants me to do and what He wants me to be. I have been asking Him, basically since coming on the race, and maybe even before that, to reveal to me what my passions are, because I know He knows me better than I know myself. I basically just want Him to tell me what I should do with my life, in terms of career and college. I want to know the plan so that I can start working toward the end goal. But he hasn’t given me much. And I am realizing that He isn’t just going to tell me, “jaci, I want you to be/do ___”. Because He is a God of the journey. He wants me to chase after Him, and on the way, I will find myself, I will grow, and suddenly I will have become the very thing I was asking Him to tell me I am. so yeah Jesus is a pretty cool guy.
in the spirit of disclosure, I will tell you that i went through a minor period of depression right after Christmas. I was just feeling really homesick and lonely and all the things you would expect to feel when you’re a world away on Christmas. So I spent about three days straight with my headphones in, avoiding any and all social activities, watching a lot of movies and crying a lot, so much so that I actually made myself ill with a headache from all the weeping. lol past me is ridiculous. But God brought me out of that completely and reminded me that He is my ‘capital h’ Home. I am never actually alone and I can always find my comfort and my safe place with Him. So again, really awesome dude that Jesus.
Now I will share some miscellaneous facts and short stories for your own reading pleasure:
My team and I, in order to both serve the other teams on the squad and distract ourselves from the fact we wouldn’t be home for Christmas, we gave ourselves the task of being the Christmas Commitee. We had an activity every day for the twelve days leading up to Christmas. also we collected a sock from everyone and hung them as stockings and wrote notes to put into the stockings and told everyone else to do the same, so that everyone would have some sweet somethings to open up on Christmas.
My team also did secret Santa, because we are the most extra people on the planet. Caroline got me, she gave me some sweet little notes and soda and a cute basket, and because she knows I love her more than myself, earrings with her initials on them. I got Cindy as mine, and I knew that she is a deep and sentimental person, so I drew her some pictures to the best of my ability with some words of affirmation and I wrote her a poem, because I am the extra-est of the extra. not to toot my own horn or anything, but it made her cry.
Funny thing about those earrings Caroline gave me, I don’t know if im allergic to the material or if they are just real trash, but I wore them for a few days and my earlobes swelled up and bled. They were red and swollen for days. I still wore them though because i’m a true friend.
sorry for the length of this blog. apparently, a lot happens in a month and a half. thanks for making it to the end. I love and appreciate you all for following along in my journey and supporting me in more ways than I could’ve ever hoped for. more updates to come in approximately 2 months.
all my love, Jaci
