A slow one

Today and tomorrow will be very slow and relaxing. Today I am going to one of my Ethiopian friend's college graduation. His name is Eshete and he is part of my church's staff over here. Afterwards we will be going to his home for a meal and fellowship. It should be very nice.

Tomorrow we will be going to church. I visited this church when I was here in January and it is simply wonderful. I will most likely not understand more than a few words that they are saying, as was the case last time, but I think that it will still touch me. The people here are very enthuasiastic about their religions and it is quite refreshing to see this.

Yesterday was a very busy day. We left about 8:30 in the morning to visit all kinds of different officials. We had to hand in the year end reports for the projects that we are doing. These reports include how much money was spent, how much is left, what was accomplished, etc. They are very big reports, probably at least 100 pages. After we finished with that we had to go and pay the monthly income taxes (they pay these at the end of every month, so 12 times a year). At most of these stops I had to wait in the car because I was American. Some of these visits would take a very long time, as much as 1 hour to do a very simple job.

We also made time to stop for coffee (Ethiopian coffee is so good). We bought some donuts for tea time in the afternoon, stopped at a local library, picked up a lot of medications for the medical clinic in a week. I'm sure that there are things that I am forgetting to say. But, we stopped at home for lunch, other than that we were out all day until about 4 or 5 pm.

I went on a walk last night with Frew and his wife, Frehiwot. We visited there church, they are currently doing construction there to make the auditorium bigger. It looks very nice, they just poured the concrete for the stage.

I have been enjoying myself very much, it has been so wonderful to spend most of my time here so far with the family I am staying with. We eat meals together, watch TV, play uno, do puzzles, talk, take walks, etc. They have really made me feel like I am part of their family, It has been wonderful.

The food has been fantastic so far. We eat injera for every meal (this morning we had scrambled eggs which we ate with injera, no forks). I think that it will take me a long time to get sick of this food, I like it very much. It is interesting that in America we eat so many different kinds of foods, so it takes a while to get used to eating the same basic thing every meal, every day.

Still working on the pictures, maybe tomorrow I will be able to post some.

Hope you are all well.