texting

Me: Dude, there is a guy here at First Watch who looks just like Ben from LOST.

Mike: You should go ask him how he got off The Island.

five days back in the swing

A week ago I woke up to seventy degrees and ate breakfast outside, toast and marmalade and a couple macchiatos, with ten friends while listening to the chatter of others in Amharic.

Today I woke up to forty degrees and ate breakfast on the couch, cereal with milk and orange juice, with my cat watching intently—patiently waiting for me to finish so he could lick the bowl.

Kristen said it would feel like a dream, and she's right. Kristen is the only United Statesian on Zeway's Food for the Hungry staff. She is also a gracious and patient hostess, and a good friend. She is one of the many things I miss about Zeway (pronounced Zwai). You can find her in this photo, she's the only white girl. :)



Another thing I miss, being the grammarian that I am, is the absolute hilarity of the printed word in Ethiopia. They have two national languages, as I understand it, Oromo and Amharic. Amharic is spoken more widely in Zeway than Oromo, and it is a Semitic language, stemming from the language of ancient Cush, which was near Aramaic. So the letters? Not Latin characters. They are beautiful.



But I understand that there aren't vowels or the like in this particular language, so in translation spelling is just not something that is important. The translators simply spell things phonetically. Which, to me—one who loves words in general—is absolutely hilarious.

My favorite? This one:



I can't tell you how hard Jon and I laughed at this one. We have been back in the U.S. for five days now and we're still laughing. Full rousted cheeken. It's beautiful.

OK, so ... onto more relevant topics such as the reason we traveled to Ethiopia in the first place. We have a special friendship with Food for the Hungry there, and to visit these friends held such a feeling of being home, of being together not only in spirit but in person, hugging and laughing and praying and driving around talking about nothing in particular. It's not common to get the chance to be students of such wise people who are out in the world living the commands of Jesus; bringing the Kingdom of God into dark places; bringing hope to the hopeless; bringing release to captives. These folks at FH-Ethiopia work so hard day in/day out, putting us to shame in the ways that they trust God daily.



One of the many amazing things that the FH staff arranged for us to do while visiting was to each meet the child(ren) that we sponsor through the Child Development Program. I had the honor of meeting Nejmudin, handsome one that he is, first in his class of over two hundred kids, who likes to read fiction in what little free time he has. This is my sponsored young man and his brother ...



One thing that really hit me was how much I loved this boy the minute our eyes met. I'm not sure how, perhaps as a sister loves a little brother—protective and proud and well aware of how extraordinary this ordinary person is.

His house was not as nice as some; it was one room that doubled as a storefront—his brother runs a teahouse where he sells tea, coffee, and pastries for a living—and had no electricity. But it was also much nicer than some, with painted walls and a cement floor instead of grass walls and a dirt floor. Nejmudin and his brother have had hard lives, both parents dying from AIDS, and having to make it on their own without much direction. He spoke to me mostly through our translator, Aweke, but often he spoke soft and deliberate English, impressing me greatly with his hard work in the subject. I showed him pictures of my parents and my cat and autumn, and he laughed that I keep an animal inside my house and that the leaves on the trees turn bright orange in October.

But all these details of his life that I learned in our hour together didn't serve to make me love him any more or less, they simply served to deepen my understanding of who he is. My love for him was set in my heart already ... I realized I didn't love him because of his environment, or because of his accomplishments, but simply because of his existence. And his gifts or brokenness or our nervousness didn't keep me from embracing him—nothing in the world could have affected my delight in his existence, in the person of Nejmudin just being alive in this world.

And I realized that's exactly how God loves us. The dirt in our lives, the brokenness in our past, the uncertainty of our future, the importance of our accomplishments—none of that can or will or ever has affected his delight in our existence. He loves us unabashedly for who we are, for nothing other than our simply being alive in this world.

back on U.S. soil

So we're home from Africa. I must say that I miss it already. I miss our friends in Zeway, our kids in Zeway, the weather in Zeway, pretty much just miss Zeway altogether.

More will follow when I get some sleep. In the meantime, check out the first installment of photos on my Flickr. The digital ones are up, and the film pics will be up after they're processed.

Thank you all for your prayers and help in sending. It was downright beautiful.

having a hard time

Jordanne, eating M&Ms and dropping them, "Aw man! It just happened again. They keep falling out of my mouth and down my shirt."

marilynne

I'm getting things together for the trip to Ethiopia, and our friend Kristen asked for books (among chocolate and other things), so of course I am taking her a copy of Gilead. Because if I could put one thing in the hands of everyone on this entire earth, it'd be a copy of Gilead.

It started me thinking about the book again, about the sheer brilliance of it, and when I say brilliance I don't necessarily mean the intelligence of it as much as I mean the absolute lightness of it, the way it shines so brightly that darkness is a mere memory when you're settled into it.

One of the things I love about Marilynne Robinson in general is her incredible lack of pretense. She has this way about her—she seems to process the world with forgiveness. It's as if she puts grace before understanding. I want to be that way.

In Gilead, she writes as John Ames, the narrator, "Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing."

It's as if she's just taken by the idea of beauty; awestruck that God would put such a thing in our lives. And she's hellbent on not darkening it with despondency.

I am not sure whether my love for her is a shared aesthetics or a desire to view the world as she does. Maybe, hopefully, a little bit of both.

still not defrosting

17 degrees.
Snow on the ground and still falling.

And yet, it's March.
Daylight Savings Time begins tomorrow.

I'm just tired of winter already.

africa bound

Is it ignoble of me that when people ask what I'm most excited about when referring to our trip to Ethiopia next week, I reply, "eighty degrees"?

I'm sure that once we get there a million things will come out of the woodwork that I'll be more excited about: seeing Kristen again, meeting the boy I sponsor, praying with our team and the Zeway team, learning, writing, photographing ...

But, sitting here in layers with cold toes, I simply can't wait to walk around in a skirt and flip flops and get some sunburn.

well said

Julie, excited about the movie, trying to say she was on the edge of her seat,

"I was on the seat of my pants!"