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.
It’s 4:30am here in the Lemlem neighborhood of Debre Zeyit, Ethiopia. Most of the dogs stopped barking sometime after 3, and the predawn quiet has settled in. I think the whole world takes this silent pause before dawn. Just another thing we all have in common.
We have a full day planned and I’ll be tired later if I don’t go back to sleep. My mind is busy trying to wrap itself around all the newness of gifts like these…
Tekele gave me warmth. He presses his face and neck beside mine and holds me tightly in an uninhibited embrace mere seconds after meeting me. He doesn’t know me, he wasn’t expecting me. There’s no particular reason he should care about me, but he does. He reaches out to me with a fearlessness i want for myself. Tekele is an Ethiopian man with short gray hair and a healthier figure than most people here. I imagine he eats better than most because he has a good job as a teacher of leadership, research methodology, and English. As I sit through, and he eagerly drinks in, a lengthy church service in Amharic, a language I know literally three words of, he mercifully passes me notes with English headlines from the lyrics and sermon content. My favorite says “This is no time for sleeping or passing the time in idleness. Bear fruits!”. With great energy and generous sprinkling of echoed Amens, the Ethiopian preacher thousands of miles from my home and completely outside my culture was articulating a concept that touches deep convictions in me.
Ebenezer gave me inspiration. He sits next to me on a couch in the children’s home where he lives with nine other children and two foster moms. He’s 15 years old with a face that speaks of total sincerity. Like many here he is very thin and looks young for his age. He’s energetically eager and obviously smart. While we talk I’m eating popcorn one of his foster moms has popped for us on a small charcoal fire in a pot nearby. Now she’s roasting coffee beans in a small pan over the same coals. We’re here for this coffee ceremony which I gather is a way of formally welcoming us to town
Ebenezer
He tells me about civics class and describes in detail the legalities of how Ethiopian citizenship is obtained by birthplace, blood relationship, or naturalization. He also comments on the legalities of American citizenship. Then using considerable time and energy he asks me a question he has been unable to find an answer to. If an Ethiopian woman marries and American man in Ethiopia, and gets pregnant with his child who is born over Germany while on an airplane flight from Ethiopia to the US, what citizenship(s) will the child have? This is not a game of stump the teacher, he is intensely curious and he really wants to know. He is earnestly hoping someone in our group of Americans will know the answer and he is disappointed that we don’t. He said it is not addressed in the Ethiopian constitution and he doesn’t have access to the German and American constitutions to see what they say. Ebenezer wants to be a doctor, but his first love is soccer. He says when he watches soccer it gives him such joy that he wants to play like that someday. He says he will leave it up to God which career he follows. I promised him I’d try to find an answer to his citizenship question.
The sun will be up soon and I never did go back to sleep. I’ll post this the next time I have Internet access. Today we plan to participate in art and sports classes at BCI Academy, the private school part of Blessing the Children International. Word is we might play a game of soccer against the students. My money is on the kids in that game.
