May 20, 2009 -- posted by Karen

We (Karen and the boys) spent the afternoon volunteering at the Ethiopian school. One of the teachers was not able to come to school because she was ill, so the principal asked if we would be willing to teach her class. If it had been an English class, that would have been easy but this was a Bible class which is typically taught in Amharic because these are students whose English is very, very minimal. As Sol, Abram and I were led toward the class we tried to come up with a plan. In the end, we simply ended up acting out Bible stories with very simple dialogue ourselves and then had volunteers from the class come forward to do the same thing. I don’t think they had ever had a Bible class that was quite this interactive since I’ve observed that most of their learning is very teacher-oriented. However, judging by the laughter and smiles, they enjoyed themselves. Hopefully they learned a little bit too!

I expect the next few days to be pretty routine. We don’t have any major day trips or expeditions planned. But we are putting together all the details for our major trip to Northern Ethiopia next week. The flights are already booked and we spent yesterday evening consulting Trip Adviser before making final reservations for our accommodation. We will be flying to Lalibela and then to Gondor.

The weather here seems to be continuously ideal. About 80 degrees every day. Sometimes there is a dramatic rain storm that lasts an hour and then it clears up again and the sun comes out. It’s really quite beautiful.