Ethiopia Trip Journal Entry #3

7-4-2009

Dear Diary,
I know it's been a while, so I've now decided to force myself to journal today. This week has been long, rainy, and exhausting, but it has also been truly amazing.

Monday was just a prep-day for the week, so not too much went down then. If my memory serves me right, we may have run through the "Everything" skit a couple of times, but not too many times cause the laptop ran out of power (we have the song on the laptop, so the laptop is pretty important).

Tuesday, my group went to Little AHOPE (where the smaller HIV positive children are. I'm not sure if I mentioned it before or not, but all of the children at any of the AHOPE facilities are HIV positive). It was a ton of fun. We started by putting on a show with finger puppets about Noah's Ark and the kids loved it (although, they probably loved the finger puppets themselves more than the actual production we put on with the puppets). Next, we played with them and gave them bubbles, then it was time for us to leave until the later session. We walked back to "Lil' A," as I like to call it, for the afternoon session. While there we played with them one more again (ebonics) and this time with Play-Doh, but the real story began on the walk back to our guesthouse. We walked in a down-pour, like seriously you have no idea (I saw cats and dogs falling from the heavens), we walked approximately 2 miles in the pouring rain... fun times, fun times.

Wednesday we were able to visit a couple of AHOPE run feeding centers (day-cares, really). Unfortunately, we were only able to visit with the kids for an hour each time, but they were definitely fun-packed hours. At the first feeding center, the children just swarmed us as soon as they saw us; they started grabbing our arms and putting them around them. The group of boys that claimed me played "Spider-Man" with me (we just made our hands like we were shooting webs at each other and made like a hissing noise for when the web left our hands) and luckily I caught on quickly. During the skits and stories we did for them, a couple of the boys just sat next to me the entire time holding my hands and putting my arms around their shoulders. When we left I received more hugs and kisses from the kids than I could count. It was just an amazing time from start to finish. The second place started slower, but ended the same way. Although, it was a little heart-breaking when the kids would ask us when we would be back, because we had no idea. Those kids don't really have much that they can depend on besides the feeding centers, so not being able to really answer their question was hard for me.

Thursday my group went to Big AHOPE (or "Big A")for a VBS type of day. The first class went great, we told them the Noh's Ark story and it went great (just as I said earlier in the sentence). However, all that changed with the second class; that is when we discovered that the kids in the second class were really supposed to be in the first class and all of the kids in the first class were supposed to be in either the second or third classes (the kids just sat in the room waiting for us, so we just assumed that they were in the class... but they weren't). The rest of the classes were just so-so, but playing with the kids was awesomely fun (like always). The kids also took pictures with my camera, so that was nice because I'm definitely not the best photographer in the world. The kids probablt doubled the amount of pictures on my camera's memory card, so that was a blessing (they're good photographers too).

Friday we left for a resort 3 hours away. It wasn't anything like an American resort, but it still had a certain likability about it. The water was all from a local underground hot-spring (would have been awesome if it hadn't been hot there too). It was a nice drive, in that we were able to see a different Africa than what we see everyday in Addis Ababa (meaning "New Flower" in Amharic). Zach and I also visited where the hot-spring directly comes from (many a bathing Ethiopian men were present) and it was ridiculously hot... our feet were red from the water for 20'ish minutes after we left. The one down-side of getting all the water from a hot-spring is that all of the water is hot (and I do mean all of the water is hot... the toilet water even). All-in-all, it was a decent time.

Saturday, we just got back from the resort and we are all pretty tired. Not much going on for our 4th of July except relaxing and hanging-out. I did however forget to mention that I was attacked by a cow on Friday. We stopped at a farm on the way to the resort and evidently a cow took a real shining to me. At first it came up to me so I petted it out of politeness, but then it went ninja-status on me and snuck-up on me from behind and licked my back (big wet-spot on the back of my shirt for a while). I guess there is just a raw-animal-magnetism about me.