dog love.

I LOVE this little dog!

Houses- all different kinds.

Below is the house that I stayed in while I was in Langano. I hesitate to show it because it makes it look much less rustic than it is. There was indoor plumbing, but no electricity except for 2 hours a night from a generator.


This is the Health Clinic at the Langano missionary station. I worked there several days of my trip delivering babies, performing surgery......WAIT that's a lie. Since I have no medical training I just weighed babies and handed out nutrition stuff.

This is a hospital in a nearby town. While we were there getting medicine this donkey drawn carriage pulled up with a group of wailing Ethiopians and a mother and son. The son had malaria and looked half dead, but later we passed them on the road and the son was sitting up and looked fine. Ethiopians can be a little dramatic with medical stuff.

This was maybe the worst experience of the trip for me (other than getting sick). This is a public bathroom.....a wooden shack with a tiny hole in the ground. A tiny hole that you have to hover over. It is one of those moments in life that it would really pay to be a man. I have smelled few things more foul than this.

In Ethiopia (in the bush) this would be considered a nice house. It actually looks like a house not a hut and it has a metal corrugated roof and windows.

This is the "Container Bridge." It is the point that separates the villages from the missionary compound. It is a shipping container they turned into a bridge.

This is the church on the missionary compound. It was definitely an interesting Sunday. A lady with a guitar and a guy singing worship in their language and a guest speaker who spoke vigorously for about an hour with a translator (not translated into English mind you). It was neat to see, but I am not sure how I would feel about doing church their every week.....you would literally have NO IDEA what was being sung or spoken.

This is the typical house in the bush...a hut. The outside is mud and sticks and the roof is made of sticks and straw. Crazy!!

Ethiopia is about 50% Christian and 50% Muslim. It is a very strategic country for the Muslim world and they are evangelizing like crazy. There are Muslim mosques everywhere. This mosque below is in the middle of the bush. It is the strangest thing to see a beautiful building like this in the middle of an area where people live in huts.

This is the school building out in Dawe. The kids sit on logs while they learn and yet they are more eager to learn than almost every American student I have ever met.

Strawberry stand where you can buy fresh strawberries on the side of the road.

This is a house up on stilts on the drive from the city to Langano. Pretty crazy.

Landscape

People-The Most Exciting Part.

This is Moses. The Smith's adopted him from Zambia when he was a baby. The adoption story is amazing and a miracle from God. His story can be found here. He is 5 now and living it up as a curious little boy in Africa.

This is Moses' oldest sister, Hannah. She is 12.

And this is their middle child, Mia. She is holding a bird with a hurt wing that she had great compassion on. She tried to save its life, but a day later she witnessed the cat eating it. It was very tragic for everyone, especially Mia.

This is Kara. She is my age and she has been in Ethiopia through SIM for 3 months. She just extended for another 2 months. She is a nurse and was such a blessing to be around. She is eating sugar cane like a champ.

The missionary compound has a ministry that takes in babies whose mother's have died in childbirth and they nurse them to health for 6 months until they can go back to their families. This is one of those babies. SO CUTE!

On a Saturday we decided to take a donkey cart ride to a nearby village and when I say donkey cart ride it means exactly what it says! Anytime foreigners (white people) go anywhere they attract a following. This is a picture of our donkey cart being followed by all types of natives.

The next 5 pictures are just random photos of people and kids that I saw on my trip. Nobody wears underwear in the bush and most kids don't wear pants so don't be to alarmed when you see a kid pantless...it is definitely part of the African experience.

This mother is carrying her child on her back, which is how all mothers transport their babies. It is fun to watch them get it all situated.

Below is a picture of the school I went to in a local village called Dawe. This would have been an amazing chance for pictures, but I hardly got any because me being white and being there was a huge distraction in itself to the learning process, so I had to be discreet with my camera.

To the right is the missionary who runs the Langano school, Ms. Joan. Beside her is a boy joing us on the way to the school in Dawe. Once a week she walks out to this school and teaches for them. It was about an hour walk.

This is a really nice guy we met in a souvenir shop. He laughed at our attempt to speak his language.

Few people ride horses in this area, but this woman did. She had ridden her horse to the clinic that day.

Addis Ababa- Pictures of the city.

I spent the first 3 days and the last day of my trip in the capital city, Addis Ababa. Of all the countries in Africa, Ethiopia is one of the most stable, however their government is still corrupt and their infrastructure is horrible. There is no middle class, most people are very poor and jobs are scarce. The most fascinating thing about the city to me was that at any time of day, all day long, people were out everywhere. It was as if someone was continuously kicking up a human ant hill. This first picture is a house (No Really!). These are all over the city. It is basically a raised metal coffin and someone calls it a home. This is actually a nice place to sleep compared to some places and ways I saw other people sleeping. The second picture is SIM (the missionary headquarters), where we stayed in city. One of the nights Phillip Yancey and his wife were there. I didn't meet him, but I did see his name on his room door.
We were at the market that is shown in one of these pictures and this car in the picture above pulled up and it was filled with lettuce...not lettuce in boxes or bags...just door-to-door, top to bottom filled with lettuce. It was priceless.
The picture of the building that looks like it was blown up by a bomb, is in fact a building under construction. There is scaffolding from top to bottom and it is just small tree branches tied together with rope....NOT SAFE!





















































The building above with the green and red lettering is a hospital across from where we stayed. The girl in the blue glasses is the girl who went with me from Houston. We didn't actually meet until customs in Ethiopia and through a long series of events she almost missed the flight from Germany to Addis and I wasn't even sure she was on the plane. The other girl is a missionary named Jenny. She picked us up from the airport and was such a huge blessing those first days because we were on our own. She made us breakfast and dinner and took us to church. Neither of us knew what we would have done without her. That is a picture of us drinking coffee in a souvenir shop. Poor Carrie doesn't like coffee but she was a trooper.