Ron and Sally Jo Blog

Our tour spent several days in the capital, Addis Ababa.  We visited the former Good Shepherd School.  This had been the Mennonite school in Addis for missionary children for many years.  The daughters of the missionary couple with us on this tour had attended here.  They were excited to be able to visit the site 40 years later; though disappointed in the absence of manicured lawns and many flower beds that they had remembered from their time.  The school was taken over by the government and is now being used for military training.

We also visited the headquarters of the Meserete Kristos (Mennonite) Church located in the former Addis Mennonite Guest House.  The offices are in the midst of a big building project.  We climbed to the top where we could look out and see the first Mennonite church nearby, now part of a school.  It is interesting to be up close to a construction project and see methods used here.  We saw other building projects all over Addis.

We visited Sabahar Enterprise which is a silk weaving project.  Worms are imported from India; local farmers raise them and bring the cocoons to the project.  The silk is spun, dyed, and woven.

Lunch one day was at Selam Children’s Village, an orphanage which has grown quite large.  They have occupational training for the older students.  One aspect is learning to cook, wait tables, and run a restaurant.  Every noon they serve a 6-course meal which they have prepared with products from their own gardens.  The delicious meal consisted of

            Appetizer – chopped eggs on toast

            Soup – cream of chicken

            Salad – lettuce, etc

            Entre – cooked vegetables, rice, and meat stew

            Dessert – a cream pudding

            Coffee

Another excursion was up Entoto mountain which overlooks the city.  When the capital first moved to Addis in the 1880’s, Menelik II built his palace here.  We toured the remains of the palace and saw the outside of the church where he was crowned.  We were not allowed inside.  We did visit the inside of Raguel’s Orthodox Church nearby which has beautiful paintings.

We enjoyed an evening at a restaurant with a wide variety of Ethiopian foods and music and dance.  We spent a short time in the National Museum where we saw bone replicas of “Lucy” – 3.2 million years old fossil.  There were also displays of everyday items from Ethiopian culture.  On the lawn outside the museum were a number of sculptures, including ones of Haile Selassie and an Orthodox bishop killed by the Derg (communist government) but now considered a martyr. 

Early Sunday morning we attended part of a service at the large Medhane Alem Orthodox Church.  The service was, of course, all in Amharic but it was good to be there.  Men and women sit separately and nearly everyone wears a white shawl.  Women must cover their heads.  Later that morning we attended the large Mennonite Church in Addis.  We ended our tour with a light supper at the MCC house, hearing about their program in Ethiopia.  Sally Jo also celebrated her birthday with the group.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 25th, 2014 at 7:22 am 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.