Monday morning

Day 3 - Morning

Sunday we drove 8 hours south of Addis Ababa to Jima, a middle size city with a university. It

hardly seems real that we’re here. Almost like a dream. Driving through the countryside, we saw

many round straw and mud huts. When we crossed several muddy rivers, I saw women

washing clothes and laundry draped over the foliage surrounding a stream, drying in the sun. In

the low farm land, there were herds of cows and goats walking along the roads: some with

attending boy with sticks, some unattended and wearily close to our fast moving van! As we

were ascending into the hills, we encountered a family of baboons encamped on the road side

scrounging for food scraps. Since the journey was hot and long and the roads windy, I was

grateful for our pit stops, once for breakfast at a hotel’s beautiful courtyard cafe and once for

Cokes and coffee at a small village shop. Praise the Lord we arrived in Jima with no accidents.

Once while driving through a small village, the driver slammed the breaks, throwing all of us into

each other (no seat belts here) narrowly avoiding a collision with a donkey cart!

Please pray for us as we meet the evangelists today. We are excited to see what God has

planned for us here. Surely it will be unexpected and good since the Lord is full of surprises and

good gifts! This morning we prayed to Jesus while listening to the 5 am Muslim call to prayer. I

think I will feel less like I’m moving through a dream once we begin interacting with the

evangelists we've come all this way to meet!

From Daniel:

This trip has been a funny mix of nostalgia and new experiences.

It feels similar to the short-term trips I took to Reynosa, Mexico 2002-2008. Lots of people living

day to day with the clothes on their backs. Lots of children, teens, and young people. Makeshift

soccer fields in parking lots and fields. Fruit sold by the basket, small huts with corrugated roofs.

Drinking water in bottles, glass bottle cokes and small shops and restaurants in the front room of

family homes.

It feels different because I know no Amharic. I am not here to play soccer and connect through

sports. I’m going to be leading a conference of grown men and women who are already

sacrificing much for the sake of the gospel. I wake in the predawn hours to Muslim prayer calls

instead of the gentle encouragement of friends to get up and pray before dawn at La Alianza

church with other believers.

I have also never seen large stretches of rural subsistence farms with adobe and stick houses.

There are probably similar areas in Mexico, but we never drove through them.