Beautiful day here in Addis, about 75°-80°F with a nice breeze blowing through. I’m sitting in the Samaritan’s Purse HQ where they have a fast(er) internet and a great office space.
Today, Aaron and I visited the Women at Risk compound. Women at Risk is an organization that has been here in Addis for about 14 years and works with women in prostitution very closely. At any given time they have roughly 20 women that are in their program.
Their mission statement is as follows: To love, accept and reach out to urban commercial sex workers with a view to building community through relationships and improving their quality of life. To challenge civil society about the issues they face through effective advocacy and education programs.
It’s really neat to see how the well-trained staff interacts with the women and shows them Christ’s love. One of their directors mentioned that 87% of the women that join the program come out successful, working healthy jobs to support themselves.
I spent a couple hours with some of the young women and got to spend some time making portraits. Many of them have come to know Christ through the program and it was really amazing the joy they had, it was so contagious! I wish I had more time to upload images but for now I’ll give you share this one. I’l upload a more in-depth post later.
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Well.. sorry its been so long since a serious update… Ethiopia was tough because the internet access there was slim to none. Then we came to Tanzania and we were constantly busy. Right now I am sitting in the transit lounge in the Nairobi Airport and have been sitting here just about 10 hours.
This morning we unfortunately missed our flight out of Kilimanjaro airport and thus missed our connection flight to Zambia. We were supposed to be in Lusaka, Zambia at 10AM and now we will get there at 11PM. It will be a miracle if we still have time to get to Victoria Falls tomorrow — but we will have to wait and see.
Ethiopia was an amazing and unique place. We spent our first few days in Addis Ababa with a friend, Aaaron, who works as a regional director for Samartin’s Purse. He’s living with a couple of guys that work at a private Christian school that is attended primarily by missionaries kids and kids from well-off Ethiopian families.
Injera, the staple Ethiopian food, is amazing. It’s made from teff, a grain that we won’t see in the States and its like a spongy ciapatti kind of. Very hard to explain. Anyway — you take this spongy ciapatti thing and dip it into one of like thirty different sauces. Some of the sauces have meat, others don’t. Most have a bit of spicy kick to them as well.
Here’s a shot of a typical injera dish. Our guide was kind of enough to take us into his home and his mother gave us a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony which is given to guests on rare occasions. She also made us injera and we got to sit in the home with their family and spend time with them. It was pretty cool.
Lalibela is the home of the buried churches where King Lalibela literally carved 11 churches out of rock. Story goes that he was told by God to build these churches and that he would do tons of work on them during the day but then at night angels would do twice as much work. A bit far-stretched, yes, but they are quite extraordinary.
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