Serving Others

Well, we made it, and I finally found a computer so that I can send you a more extended update!  The trip over was smooth.  So smooth, in fact, that we leaders were sort of pinching ourselves the entire time.  We just kept saying, “Can you believe how well this is going?”  We really couldn’t, and were all extremely thankful.
As many of you know, when you travel, especially with 20 people (15 of whom are students), you prepare for things to not always go perfectly. You have backup plans.  So far we haven’t needed to work out of that part of our brain.

Then we arrived in Addis, 7:45 or so Thursday morning.  Most of the students had not slept or slept very little before we departed Charlotte at 7:30 on Wednesday morning.  They were tired.  So what did we do?  Eat.  That’s right.  We had just had breakfast on the plane, but were greeted by our friends here and then taken to breakfast.  And then we went to the SIM guesthouse and had lunch about 2 hours later! We got settled and learned about some of the incredible things that God is doing in Ethiopia among Muslims and those affected by HIV/AIDS, and then we headed down to the Deborah house, a ministry that brings girls off the street, and had coffee and worshipped with them in the house (and maybe ate some more food as well).  It was an incredible first day, and the kids all survived.  We ended the day, appropriately enough, with another meal.

The next day we loaded up the vans in the morning and headed to a village outside of Awassa.  We spent two nights there at a facility that is utilized by numerous ministries.  It was a great experience.
On Saturday we split into two teams, each joined by some of the youth workers and students from a church in Awassa, and walked a few miles into the villages.  We were graciously hosted by some local believers who shared their homes, their food, and their lives with us.  We were immersed in the culture!  I can’t wait for our students to tell you more about this day.  The homes we were in were either traditional huts, where the family lived on one side and the cows the other, or modest homes that were about two rooms.  It was incredible.

The day was capped off by a great time with the youth from Awassa.  Our students talked and played with them and other children from the area. It was a great experience.

On Sunday we went to church in Awassa, had lunch, and then headed to Camp Langano.  We were finally here!  We unloaded and spent the night getting to know the leaders of camp.  Today it all began!  The campers loaded off the bus at about two thirty, and broke into their teams for soccer camp.  While we thought that since this week is an all girls camp the guys on our team would be doing construction, they actually will be team leaders as well.  They all were extremely adaptable, and as we played with the kids today and did sundry team-building exercises, I can’t really explain in words what a great job that all of your kids and all of our students from Church at Charlotte did.  They make all of the leaders proud.  They dive right in, have rarely complained about a thing, and are working well together.

One short story, and then I’ll be done.

As many of you know, since Ethiopia is a communal culture, they all take turns feeding one another at meals.  The kids are broken up into
8 teams, each team having at least two from our group as leaders.
Today when the kids got here, many of them were faced with the unfamiliar situation of someone else feeding them, multiple times, at a meal.  So today at both lunch and dinner, I watched as some of our kids took mouthful after mouthful from excited Ethiopian girls!  They didn’t complain.  They didn’t care one bit.  They dove in, which is pretty much their approach to everything thus far.

Pray for our week.  Pray that God would work in our students, and especially through them.  Many of the girls at camp this week probably don’t know Jesus.  This is our prayer for them.  Thanks for praying.

I’ll try to send another extended update in a few days.  Sorry this is long, but I wanted to catch you up on our week thus far.

Ryan