Sunday, May 3, 2009

Well, at 4:00 a.m. we were greeted with the sound of a priest singing prayers over a speaker system. There is a Egyptian Orthodox Church located at the top of the hill overlooking the campus. In fact, our bedroom window faces this church. I am assuming this only happens on Sunday mornings, but we’ll find out soon enough if that is not the case. I was able sleep until 6:00 a.m., but the rest were up for the day.

We headed off to church at around 9:30. There is an English language church that began meeting in Debre Zeit around 6 months ago. It includes people from the Netherlands, Canada, the US, and several African countries. They meet at a place called Genesis Farm, started by Dutch missionaries who are hoping to turn a vegetable farm business over to Ethiopians some day. Once we arrived we discovered that the meeting room was already being used by another group, so after some discussion we all headed back to the college chapel. We were told that this is just the way it is in Ethiopia. Plans are changed and you just go with it.

We took in the sites driving back and forth from the college to the city. There is a water shortage in the city, so we saw hundreds of people walking down the roads with bright yellow 10 gallon water containers, lined up at two different water delivery points. One is a Dutch mission that allows people to use their water, and other is a central point where the government delivers water. An interesting site was a large flatbed truck a few vehicles ahead of us holding a choir in gowns being cheered on by the neighbours. After we attended our English language service, I was kind of thinking I would have rather attended the service the choir we saw was singing at. Not that the service we attended was bad, but it certainly lacked the energy and enthusiasm we saw amongst the choir on the road.

After church a lunch was held in our honour. The power went out for most of the afternoon, but again, this is no big deal in Ethiopia. I had my first cup of Ethiopian coffee this afternoon, as did Karen. Now, for those of you who know me, I never drink coffee. In fact, I think I have consumed a total of one cup my entire life. This was fairly strong stuff according to those who are coffee drinkers, made by an Ethiopian woman who works for one of the families in the guest house, but with milk and sugar it was actually not bad. During the few hours we sat together we learned a lot about the college and life in Ethiopia.

Later in the afternoon we went for a hike up the hill overlooking the college on one side, with a great view of one of the area lakes on the other side. The highlight was discovering a hyena den complete with the skulls and bones a number of hyena dinners.

Tomorrow we will try to get some basic grocery shopping and banking done in the city.