Ron and Sally Jo Blog

We took time out from our work with MCC to join the “Experience Ethiopia Tour.”  There are 12 participants plus 2 couples jointly leading it.  The group is varied.  One couple and two of their adult daughters are with them.  They worked in Ethiopia in the early 1970s and the daughters attended school here during that time.  We have been able to visit the hospital where they worked and the school they attended.  There is a young pastor and his wife from western Canada who have never been to Africa.  There is another woman our age who has worked with MCC in various parts of Africa but had not been to Ethiopia.  And then there is the couple close to our age who were very good friends with Ron’s parents; it has been fun to learn to know them.  

The first half of the tour was a bus trip to areas south of Addis Ababa emphasizing the work of the Meserete Kristos (Mennonite) Church and the history of the Mennonite missionaries in the area. 

We first went to the Bible College about 1 ½ hours south of Addis and stayed two nights.  The college moved to this spot from Addis in 2006.  We met professors and had lunch with students.  We climbed a hill behind the college and took a short walk to a nearby lake where there were hundreds of marabou storks and flamingos.  We had supper in one of the homes of the staff.

We continued traveling south to Awasa in the great Rift Valley and visited several more MK churches, heard about their work, and saw their building projects.  We stopped to see birds at a lake.  We visited an MCC-partnered project in reforestation.  We ate lunch in a small Ethiopian restaurant in a rural village. 

In contrast we stayed in a very nice hotel by Lake Awasa.  When we arrived at the hotel we realized that an interfaith conference was being held that included Orthodox, Muslims, and Evangelicals.  During the bus trip we were able to see life in the countryside.  We saw many “hay stacks” of the teff grain, a staple ingredient in enjira, the sourdough crepe-like bread served with most Ethiopian meals. We saw many of the three-wheeled blue and white “taxis.”

Our last day in this southern part of the tour was spent in Nazaret where Mennonite missionaries first began working in Ethiopia in 1945.  We visited the former Mennonite hospital and the former Bible Academy—both of which were taken over by the government during the DERG (communist government, 1974 – 1991) and have not been returned.  We attended church in the first MK church which has greatly expanded since the early days. 

We visited an orphanage run by members of the church where we saw them making ingera over a wood fire and were served coffee in the traditional manner.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 12th, 2014 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Ethiopia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.