We arrived at our second compound of the month in Hawassa, Ethiopia. Our leader, Jack, made a contact with a pastor in town, and after much prayer this seemed like the right place for us to be. We are staying in an abandoned bible college. It’s actually a really beautiful property accompanied by a school for 600 local kids. We have bedrooms, a kitchen, and bathrooms. What we don’t have is running water and electricity, but we are getting the hang of how to do things pumping well water and my teammates have plenty of solar lanterns. At night it’s the most beautiful, the brightest amount of stars I’ve ever seen right over our compound.
We’ve had a few projects since we have been here, but are hoping for more. We aren’t allowed to leave the compound for safety purposes. A lot of local children will usually just bombard us by asking us for everything from the watches on our wrists to the water in our bottles. Anything we’ve got, they want.
Life in the compound is interesting, especially since we can’t leave. It kind of feels like we are zoo animals. Everyone in the school likes to peak in our yard or get as close as they can to see what the “white people” are doing. Everything we do is on display. When we walk around the property, people just stare at us- brushing our teeth, sweeping, eating lunch, reading. All of it they find so interesting. However if we come too close, they will scatter and run off like we are dangerous.
On our first day we went hiking up a mountain nearby. This was before we were told not to leave. As we walked, we picked up more and more children. They just kept following us. I think we must have had anywhere for 40 to 50 kids just following us wherever we went. They wanted to hold our hands. They wanted us to give them whatever we had. They wanted to just touch our skin. They were so intrusive to have any of our things that we can no longer go outside the compound.
Yesterday we painted part of the school building. Just Gabbie and I started and we needed a guard to look after us so that the kids wouldn’t get too rambunctious over having Americans working on their school building. The guard was a nice old local man, but Jack sat under a tree nearby maybe to just keep an extra eye on us. I started to sweep so we weren’t painting over dirt. One of the professors stopped me and pulled a girl from class to have her sweep. I told him no that we were here to serve and continued to sweep. Gabbie and I had to just paint the bottom of the building. All the kids are staring and we are on our hands and knees in old flannels painting their school building. Every time I got to a door frame to see the students staring at us I couldn’t help but think, “what are they thinking?” They are scared of us, but we are serving them. We are from a privileged country, but we are looking homeless and painting the bottom of an old concrete school in the rural land of Africa. Do they think we are crazy? I bet they wonder what kind of person leaves such a nice country to paint an old school where the kids can’t even afford shoes.
For me and my team- what kind of person wouldn’t? We feel honored to serve these kids and hunger for more work. We are the ones who are being blessed by doing the work of Jesus around the globe.
Today we were able to bless this ministry with a newly painted fence- mint green (my favorite color). I put on my same crappy flannel I got for $2 in Vietnam, and we had a huge audience just watching the paint dry.
