Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Ethiopia Changed Our Lives!

Ethiopia trip #2 was heartwarming, heartbreaking and everything in between. We set off to do great things and I believe we did. Now that we are home, I've been trying to work through and process everything we saw, did, accomplished and wished we'd done while in Africa. This is my attempt to put into words what happened during our ten days in Ethiopia. Let's begin with day 1....

January 28 our first travel day, the South Dakota group (minus Amanda) made it to Denver no problem. Then weather related delays began causing each of our connections to be delayed and missed. STRESSFUL! We worked and worked to get on flights and were told it is not likely. Yet when that plane lifted off that runway, there we were sitting in a seat on our way to Addis! Lory had a way of working her magic and we all ended up arriving in Addis about 12 hours later than originally planned. From there, we hit the ground running. We breezed through customs, which was a blessing since we were very concerned about that part of our mission. Keep in mind there were close to 30 of us towing about 2000 pounds of donations plus our personal luggage totaling about 84 bags. And can you believe not a single bag was even scanned? Miracle for sure!
The guest house was wonderful and made us feel right at home. Then we visited Korah. You may remember some previous posts about Korah. Korah is a community that exists in the Addis landfill. If you haven't watched the video from August 9, 2010 on this blog, please go back and do that. Project 61 is awesome and we truly enjoyed our time visiting Korah, meeting the people, delivering food and praying with families and giving out Caramela (candy) and dresses to the children. We delivered about 200 dresses to the little girls in Korah. Amazing!Donation sorting, luggage shuffling, dinner at a lovely gallery and rest finished off Dec. 30.
"view from guest house"
Tomorrow half a day in Addis and our drive to Shanto...Stay tuned.

2 comments:

  1. Welcome Home! You were all in our thoughts and prayers daily! I have to say I think it's simply a miracle that no bags were scanned. So happy that all the donations made it! Thanks for all you did on the trip! Can't wait to read more.
    Kim P.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have been waiting for you to emerge! Can't wait to read the next installment!

    ReplyDelete