Oh man I've been here a month! Still amazing, still challenging (still wanting cheetos)...My days still consist of home visits, mostly to the families of the kids in the school but also with weavers. One family consists of dad, who is a guard at our guest house, mom, who is a weaver but used to carry fuel wood, plus three boys, one of which goes to the school. Super smart kid, great dancer too! Then the mom's sister is a cleaner at the guest house, and another sister in law is a single mom (the dad committed suicide a few years back) who has a kiddo at the school as well. The visits with the families of the kiddos is humbling enough, then hearing about the former fuel wood carriers, many of which started carrying these giant bundles of wood down from the mountain at like 8 years old, puts a lot in to perspective. We caught a couple taxis to get up Entoto mountain the other day, but did a good amount of walking up it as well. I'm telling you, I was out of breath just walking up a small section of it; I can't even imagine walking down that mountain with almost 100 pounds of wood on my back, walking back up it to get more, plus trying to go to school and provide for your family. This is women and young girls doing this. You don't see a lot of men doing a lot of heavy lifting around here. These women are strong.
I've got a bazillion pictures up on my google so if the few I post on facebook just aren't enough, there's like 200 more there. There's the fabulous people I'm here with, and the fabulous people I've met, plus scarves, food, goats, everything. Plus I've got a ton of pictures from the dermatologist and dentist visits. But I can tell you the results. Hygiene is poor. I mean like super bad. But what do you expect when mom has to walk a half mile to get water from a community container, or your bathroom is a hole in the ground covered with sticks? Of course these kids aren't brushing their teeth 3 times a day and have dandruff scabs and scabies. I've cried possibly twice since being here and once was the other day after the dentist visit. We took a selected 10 people, some kids some adults (parents and weavers) to see a group doing dental work and what they realized was all of the kids could have had basically every tooth pulled. Granted they are baby teeth and will fall out, but what will happen to the adult teeth if they keep up the same patterns they have now? It's easily to get frustrated and say, it's systemic, how can I help, what can be done about this? It can get huge and very overwhelming. It's sad just to hear how little these families make each month, or the lists of (usually preventable) diseases they have. And yes, I understand, these problems exist in America too, but truly, this is just on a whole different level. We saw a family where every member had hemorrhoids, which has like such a simple solution. Or a father who is depressed but there's not great systems in place to get the extremely poor basic mental health care. I could go on forever about everyone I've seen. They all have amazing stories. I'm just blessed to get to hear them.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
2 weeks in...
Oh man, it's been 2 weeks now! I've eaten more starch here than I have in my entire life! This girl is not a spicy food person and spicy food rules the land around here. Our cook even puts taco seasoning in our spaghetti sauce.... (We finally were able to communicate that it's too spicy!) But anyway......
It didn't take long for me to get used to the time change, although there were some early nights when I first got in. Heck there's still some early nights, but that's because the power goes out and we just get bored. I say we; it's me and Alicia, the house manager who is brave enough to stay here longer than a summer and is hoping to find work here. When I put pictures up you can see our many adventures with American food and fixing the internet. More interns will come soon and we won't be alone when people on the street say "hello, how are you, I am fine" to us. Or even "where are you going?" I've even been asked "how old are you" by some teenager on the street. I just ignore it all (or joke around with ones that are safe and just goofing off) but poor Samrawit, the social worker with Connected in Hope, feels terrible that they hackle and stare at us. It happens. Usually it just makes for funny stories.
Meanwhile, I LOVE this place. Ethiopia, Addis, the guest house, everything. The house we stay at has a gorgeous view of the mountains (we are kind of north of the main part of the city close to Entoto if you're looking at areas on a map), plus the house is like multiple levels so it's super different. The only downside is the slippery stairs. I've already fallen once and my poor butt is still in pain from the fall. The cooks and cleaner look at me crazy when I ice my butt...
The preschool is pretty awesome too. So each day I am driven from the guest house to the preschool which is basically our home base. Samrawit and I (and sometimes Alicia) go out to the homes of the kids at the school and talk with their family (usually mom) and learn what's going on with them, what their needs are, etc. The kiddos are adorable, plus I'm so lucky to get the background stories of their families. Most of the time they live in a one room house, with a living area separated from the bedroom/kitchen storage space with a curtain. Some houses are bigger than others (we sometimes can barely fit 3-4 of us in the living room comfortably) but none of them really "work" for a family. Most of the time the whole family sleeps in the bed, or on a mattress on the floor, there isn't a toilet or running water inside their home, and sometimes the closest water is a good walk from the home and is shared by several other families. Plus, this week we've had a good amount of rain, so the walks to get in to a complex have become muddy. I said that's the one thing I want to do for all these families is get someone to pave a nice straight path for them up to their door so that they aren't stepping on rocks and mud all the way home.
I gotta tell you, these women we talk to are strong, to say the least! We've heard many stories of abuse, spoke to parents who were blind and still trying to provide, plus women supporting not only their own immediate family but extended family members. Some of these moms are young and timid, some are really proud, but they are all awesome. Today we went to the home of a kid in the afterschool program who lives with grandma. And in the home was grandma, her husband, 3 grandkids and 3 sons. This place was not big either. Last Friday we went to an even smaller house with even more people packed in!
I could honestly go on and on about just the past 2 weeks. Giant donuts and multiple cups of coffee (buna) a day, a bird that bangs on our window, the bagillions of scarves that I want to (and will) buy....There's just so much I love about being here already. But there's something very different about this trip verses my trip to Ghana back in 2011. I have a sweet sweet guy waiting on me at home. I'm lucky because we Skype pretty regularly but I still miss him like crazy. Trips like this have always felt like a calling to me; I always wanted to go to Africa and still hope that there's work for me here to do. But it's harder to be away when there's someone waiting on you at home. When I went to Ghana I basically had nothing back home, I was starting my life over after that trip (and I truly did!). Now, it's almost like this is my last big thing before life together happens. And yeah we've been together for over 2 years and we even made a big life change together. But after this, it will be different. We've talked about getting engaged, and the move back to St. Louis is a go at the end of the year. I know I feel called in a different way (toward marriage and family life instead of being single and being the constant "helper"). I'm just blessed to have gotten to go down so many different paths so far!
So hopefully, I'll get to blog more, although my computer is possibly caput (I'm using Samrawit's, mostly to catch up on home visit notes since tomorrow is a holiday and there is no school). And I'll try to get any pictures I take up on Google so it's somewhat centralized and share-able. Meanwhile I'm Skype-able and also have Viber so texting and talking go through that.
Ciao!
It didn't take long for me to get used to the time change, although there were some early nights when I first got in. Heck there's still some early nights, but that's because the power goes out and we just get bored. I say we; it's me and Alicia, the house manager who is brave enough to stay here longer than a summer and is hoping to find work here. When I put pictures up you can see our many adventures with American food and fixing the internet. More interns will come soon and we won't be alone when people on the street say "hello, how are you, I am fine" to us. Or even "where are you going?" I've even been asked "how old are you" by some teenager on the street. I just ignore it all (or joke around with ones that are safe and just goofing off) but poor Samrawit, the social worker with Connected in Hope, feels terrible that they hackle and stare at us. It happens. Usually it just makes for funny stories.
Meanwhile, I LOVE this place. Ethiopia, Addis, the guest house, everything. The house we stay at has a gorgeous view of the mountains (we are kind of north of the main part of the city close to Entoto if you're looking at areas on a map), plus the house is like multiple levels so it's super different. The only downside is the slippery stairs. I've already fallen once and my poor butt is still in pain from the fall. The cooks and cleaner look at me crazy when I ice my butt...
The preschool is pretty awesome too. So each day I am driven from the guest house to the preschool which is basically our home base. Samrawit and I (and sometimes Alicia) go out to the homes of the kids at the school and talk with their family (usually mom) and learn what's going on with them, what their needs are, etc. The kiddos are adorable, plus I'm so lucky to get the background stories of their families. Most of the time they live in a one room house, with a living area separated from the bedroom/kitchen storage space with a curtain. Some houses are bigger than others (we sometimes can barely fit 3-4 of us in the living room comfortably) but none of them really "work" for a family. Most of the time the whole family sleeps in the bed, or on a mattress on the floor, there isn't a toilet or running water inside their home, and sometimes the closest water is a good walk from the home and is shared by several other families. Plus, this week we've had a good amount of rain, so the walks to get in to a complex have become muddy. I said that's the one thing I want to do for all these families is get someone to pave a nice straight path for them up to their door so that they aren't stepping on rocks and mud all the way home.
I gotta tell you, these women we talk to are strong, to say the least! We've heard many stories of abuse, spoke to parents who were blind and still trying to provide, plus women supporting not only their own immediate family but extended family members. Some of these moms are young and timid, some are really proud, but they are all awesome. Today we went to the home of a kid in the afterschool program who lives with grandma. And in the home was grandma, her husband, 3 grandkids and 3 sons. This place was not big either. Last Friday we went to an even smaller house with even more people packed in!
I could honestly go on and on about just the past 2 weeks. Giant donuts and multiple cups of coffee (buna) a day, a bird that bangs on our window, the bagillions of scarves that I want to (and will) buy....There's just so much I love about being here already. But there's something very different about this trip verses my trip to Ghana back in 2011. I have a sweet sweet guy waiting on me at home. I'm lucky because we Skype pretty regularly but I still miss him like crazy. Trips like this have always felt like a calling to me; I always wanted to go to Africa and still hope that there's work for me here to do. But it's harder to be away when there's someone waiting on you at home. When I went to Ghana I basically had nothing back home, I was starting my life over after that trip (and I truly did!). Now, it's almost like this is my last big thing before life together happens. And yeah we've been together for over 2 years and we even made a big life change together. But after this, it will be different. We've talked about getting engaged, and the move back to St. Louis is a go at the end of the year. I know I feel called in a different way (toward marriage and family life instead of being single and being the constant "helper"). I'm just blessed to have gotten to go down so many different paths so far!
So hopefully, I'll get to blog more, although my computer is possibly caput (I'm using Samrawit's, mostly to catch up on home visit notes since tomorrow is a holiday and there is no school). And I'll try to get any pictures I take up on Google so it's somewhat centralized and share-able. Meanwhile I'm Skype-able and also have Viber so texting and talking go through that.
Ciao!
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