In the 10 days since I returned from Ethiopia, I’ve been reflecting on some of the contrasts. The obvious wealth differences don’t move me as much as these do:

Morning in Ethiopia: If it is my turn, I get up early and cook breakfast with another person as a team. All 11 of us in the guest house eat together. As we finish eating we are joined by five social workers, two housekeepers who are like family, and a few other staff members for morning devotions.

Morning in America: I get up at the last possible minute and hurry out the door to work without eating breakfast. I have little if any interaction with anyone before work.

Commuting in Ethiopia: We team up with 3 or 4 other people and talk for 30 minutes while we wait for transportation or coordination. We cram into a small Bajaj or a chock-full taxi van in physical contact with multiple people and jostle and joke and talk along the way to our destination.

Commuting in America: I get in my individual personal car and drive alone in silence, planning my day’s work in my head. I don’t even make eye contact with people in the other individual cars.

Workday in Ethiopia: We crowd into a 8×8 foot house with 4 other adults and a few kids. We sit on a few borrowed chairs and a child sits on my lap. Flies, fleas, and people are all touching me due to the size and condition of the house. We converse and play games for over an hour while the children’s mother hospitably prepares coffee for us from raw coffee beans over a charcoal fire in the center of the floor.

Workday in America: I sit alone in my office typing on my laptop, analyzing business performance numbers and text messaging employees in silence.

Evening in Ethiopia: We sit on the guesthouse couches and talk about the experiences of the day while we wait for the team cooking dinner. We eat together, and another team washes the dishes together by hand. We play card games together late into the night. We go to bed in a room full of bunk beds and other people.

Evening in America: I get home after dinner time, having finished dropping off and picking up my kids from extracurriculars. I eat drive through food by myself between one of those stops.

I have a great life in America, and it doesn’t come close to the community and togetherness that fills the lives of my new Ethiopian friends. We can afford to be isolated from each other here, and it’s not good for us. I want to amp up the togetherness in my life.

Today our mission team ran activity day, a regular VBS-style day for the sponsored children in the BCI program. To my relief it went off quite smoothly.

Missionaries, program kids, and locals playing volleyball.

Feeding program underway.

Sixteen people in one minivan taxi on the way back from activity day.

Friday in Ethiopia I had great fun co-teaching a training on planning. The teaching staff of the BCI Academy school participated.

After an introduction I led with the big why question. You just can’t plan if you don’t know the why.

“Why does BCI Academy exist?”

First nobody wanted to raise their hand. Then a teacher said “To teach students.”

I said “Good answer, that’s the basic truth. Why do you want to teach students?”

“To enable them to do well academically.”

I asked “If the students do well academically, then what?”

After a silence the principle raised his hand. “If the students do well academically they will be productive and successful members of society, and we will make a better Ethiopia.”

I got chills when he said that. What a big why and a great motivation to the teachers. With that inspiring vision in mind, we were ready to talk about how deliberate planning gets us from here to there.

It took four days to get a mobile Internet access card setup and working here. AT&T doesn’t get along with Ethiopia so I had to go local. I’m finally back online. Nothing happens quickly in developing countries. I’ve never been so grateful for dialup-speed Internet before.

I’ve had too many varied experiences to summarize in any way that does justice. Here are a few snippets.

I taught English to Grade 2, Grade 5, and Grade 7 at BCI Academy on Monday. I’ve never taught a class before. The usual teachers did crowd control for me which was essential. It felt good to be willing to give something new and potentially chaotic a shot. I think the kids learned something. They don’t get to hear native English speakers often.

Here’s a sponsored child writing a letter to his sponsors in Canada. He took it so seriously, and resisted the urge to play with the toys we brought until he had finished it. Assisting him is Tigist, his social worker and a wonderful, hard-working, servant-hearted young woman.

Here’s a view from the top of a nearby mountain, and one from outside another sponsored child’s house we visited. These look like I expect Africa to look.

This woman is blind. Her two elementary school age children cook and shop for her. We visited her home today. We brought a pair of used tennis shoes for the boy, a great luxury in this place.

I came to understand today that truly helping people in poverty requires changing the choices they make. For example, the simple choice of using clean water instead of contaminated water seems obvious and easy, yet many people here don’t take advantage of free and easy options for sanitizing their drinking water. Perhaps once they got sick while trying clean water for a week, and concluded it doesn’t make any difference. Perhaps they figure lake water has always been good enough. Habits, traditions, and mindsets get in the way of even basic poverty alleviation efforts.

Another example, many young children die of diarrhea here. Three out of five children die before age 5, of that and other highly preventable causes. Simple oral rehydration therapy (a water / salt / sugar mix like diluted gatorade) is all that’s needed to prevent most of the deaths. Mixes are available for sale in the city, but still the children die because the parents don’t know about it, don’t think it will work, or who knows.

When you live in poverty, you don’t have margin for error. The safest choice appears to be to do things the way they were always done, and the way everyone else is doing. It’s hard, and I think understandably so, to convince someone in that mindset to try something new.

Changing supply availability is not the toughest part of this kind of work, changing minds is. I think that’s true of all kinds of work in all kinds of places.