Day Three Thursday -6.23.11

Christy and I woke up a bit annoyed at some of our teammates. Two of our teammates came into our room "quietly" leaving the door wide open to the bright lights of the hallway at 4am. They decided that instead of using the shower right by their room, (which worked probably better than the one in our room) that they would use our shower because it looked nicer. Looks can be deceiving. SERIOUSLY?! I AM TIRED! DON'T WAKE US UP FOR STUPID REASONS! I didn't think we were going to be able to fall asleep again but we somehow managed.

After waking up for the day, we all had french toast with nutella, honey, or peanut butter for breakfast. We had our morning devotion together and are going through the book of Mark. Then we all got on the bus and headed to Big AHOPE which are the children with HIV/AIDS 8 years and older. We started with a craft of making pictures out of torn up construction paper. A lot of the children knew a bit of english but you couldn't really tell sometimes because I sensed they didn't enjoy speaking it or like leaning it. Hmmmm..... I don't really know what to do for them with that area of things. I feel as though we are just another group to come in and pass by in a few days, unable to establish solid relationships. Isn't that how Christ is really shared? Relationships? But then again, the woman on the plane. I will always remember that and how God spoke through her to me. I'm afraid of the jadedness of theses children with groups like ours coming in that we will not be much purpose or shine bright for His glory. I think if I had to do this all over again I would just go with one or two other people and focus on one ministry and build relationships with the people. Probably staying longer than a month.

After Big AHOPE we had lunch at a place called Island Breeze. I was debating on what to get and eventually settled on pizza. Danielle who had come to Ethiopia before said that they had really good pizza there. Apparently Ethiopians really like Italians and Italian food. At the restaurant I sat next to Surafel (we call him Su for short). He is one of our translators. This was the first time I really got a chance to talk to him and thoroughly enjoyed it. Su works for TOMS shoes here and manages? the production site here in Ethiopia. It's where they make the shoes that are donated. He has a dry sense of humor and is very sarcastic. He was a lot of fun to talk to, and his favorite T.V. show is 30 Rock. That automatically puts him in my friend box. He also has a beautiful story. Su is 27 and has an adopted daughter who was a product of a rape. His maid was the one who was raped and she didn't want the child so he took her in. What is so beautiful about it is that Su was also a product of a rape. His mother was a maid in his father's house and he raped her. His grandmother (on his dad's side) secretly took her in and took care of them. His mom left and left him with his grandmother and father. He has never met his mother and doesn't even know if she is still alive.

When Su grew older he volunteered with Mother Theresa's hospital and worked with the women that had breast troubles and needed to breast feed their babies. They had trouble breast feeding because of mild build-up making milk clots (i think). Regular breast pumps wouldn't work so Su was the one who had to hand milk these women. He said it was the best job ever! with a mischevious smile on his face. HAHA!! Su has a girl friend from New York. "she's white." Su said. He is definitely a funny character to be around. One of my favorite people.

After lunch we headed to a coffee shop for some awesome Ethiopian coffee. It was like an Ethiopian version of Starbucks, but way better! I got a Machiato.... Delicious! Ethiopia is the birth place of coffee so you know it's good....

Grabbing coffee and getting a little rejuvenated we headed to the next orphanage under the same organization (AHOPE). It was Little AHOPE. These children are all under the age of 8. Many toddlers in the baby room.

Again, all these children are infected with HIV/AIDS. It is very sad when realizing the hard life they have to face, yet as young as they are they don't understand what they have and why... or why they have to live life the way they do. These kids at this particular orphanage lifted my spirits a bit because of their excitement to see us and learn.

We did and English lesson with the kids teaching them the words sit, stand, and jump, getting them to act them out and spell them. It was so fun and refreshing to see their enthusiasm after having to experience almost the complete opposite from the older children at Big AHOPE. As a group they learned these words and then each of us took three children and spent some time with each child individually (sort of) to see and help them with what they just learned.

While I was working with the three kids I grabbed, (or more like they swarmed up to me and grabbed me) there was a kid that came up to me wanting to show me the paper plane he was making. That gave me the idea to make him one of those Chinese origami boxes that are flat and then turn into a box when you blow air into them. He LOVED IT! It was definitely a hit and so much a hit that a swarm of kids came up to me waving paper in my face to make them one too. It became a rally of children around me starving to be the next one to get an origami box. Then it became a violent rally of children... haha... some of the kids were so angry if they weren't next that they would throw their piece of paper down and stomp away yelling.... coming back later to try to be next again. Not much patience in these kids. It was so stressful because of the amount of children fulling and tugging on me, and the fact that I was the only one in our group that knew how to do it.

The rest of the group had to pull me away from these kids to get me back on our bus to go back kto the guest house. We had a little bit of down time when we returned to our resting quarters, which was nice because it was the most down time we had during our whole trip so far. We had some exciting dinner plans to come after we rested up a bit.

For dinner we went to a traditional Ethiopian restaurant. The food was absolutely amazing and we got to watch traditional Ethiopian music and dancing as we ate. SO FUN! We were front and center with the stage they had, and men with instruments I'd never sen before were just jamming away chilling out. Then after awhile a group of men and women came out onto the stage dancing and beating on drums. The dancing was unbelievable! They did the shoulder popping thing that was unreal and could put "so you think you can dance" to shame. They did something with their necks and heads that looked ridiculously hard. The whole Ethiopian dinner experience was just amazing and left me craving more for culture. You're probably thinking it was one of those touristy restaurants..... probably. but it was still cool. Everyone in there seemed to be Ethiopian besides a few and us. There are a lot of Asian people here too.... which I thought was kinda weird... but I found out apparently the Chinese send their prisoners here and put them to work... huh... I thought that, that was interesting.