It's Friday and we're flying to Cape Town via Johannesburg, passing back across the equator, over Uganda, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe. We just flew by Mount Kilimanjaro. Five more hours in the air followed by a 2-hour layover and a 2-hour flight.
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| Mt. Kilimanjaro, tallest peak in Africa, from plane window |
Yesterday we woke up to NO hot water, so we had really quick cold showers, and we still had no Internet access. Bob's phone SIM card was accepted this morning and the pin code worked, but there was no cell phone service available and the hotel's Wi-Fi password still didn't connect.
We met Joyce and Bob for breakfast at 8:30, then drove through Addis and the chaotic traffic for an hour northwest to Debre Zeyit (DEB-ra ZET), where we visited their home, their new chapel and met many of the members and missionaries they work with and have become so close to. Can you imagine a city of 9 million people with no traffic lanes and almost no (maybe 5 or 6) traffic lights? We had lunch at the beautiful Kuriftu Resort on one of the many lakes near Debre Zeyit.
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| Lunch at the Lake View Restaurant at the Kuriftu Resort outside Debre Zeyit |
It was really an amazing and memorable day to observe the Ethiopian people and culture firsthand. We can't even begin to describe all that we saw and experienced in one day! Here are 2 more photos...
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| At Lake Bishoftu, Pyramid Hotel |
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| Meetinghouse for Debre Zeyit Branch, built about a year and a half ago |
Luckily, a new expressway opened in September between Addis and Debra Zeyit, allowing us to leave behind the crowded, chaotic, slow and bumpy roads for a very modern, uncrowded freeway for the last half of the trip, at 120 km/hr (80 miles per hour), so we made the whole trip in about an hour, despite a bumper-to bumper start. What a remarkable difference between the old and new roads! The Chinese built the freeway with state-of-the art tools and technology and cheap African labor.
Today is the third day of the most sacred Ethiopian holiday, the 3-day Timkat celebration of the ark of the covenant. So the country was decked out in a very festive way with green, yellow and red flags and banners everywhere, especially around the Christian orthodox churches with their multiple onion-domes.
Every Christian Orthodox Church has a replica of the ark of the covenant in their "holy of holies" and they bring them out once a year at Timkat in January. Ethiopians claim possession of the original ark of the covenant from Solomon's temple.
Ethiopia is very much a Christian country with Jewish ties and traditions and claims to have had Christianity longer than anywhere else in Africa or outside the Middle East, dating back to before AD 400! Here you see Christian churches and Muslim mosques side by side.
Ethiopia is the only African country never colonized by Europeans. As a result, they have adapted more slowly to the conventions of the rest of the world, or have refused to adapt at all. For example, they have never adopted the modern calendar or clock, but have kept the same calendar and clock used for thousands of years.
The Ethiopian calendar has 12 months of exactly 30 days each, plus a 13th month with just 5 days (6 days every fourth year) and is almost eight years behind our calendar, so we're in May 2007 now. Christmas falls on our January 7th, and their new year starts on our September 24th.
The Ethiopian clock is six hours ahead of (or behind) us, as 12:00 am starts at dawn (6:00 am by our clocks) and 12:00 pm is at dusk (6:00 pm) and night goes from their 12:00 pm to 12:00 am or from 6pm to 6am on our clocks, which makes a lot of sense.
Bob's and Joyce's Ethiopian driver's licenses show their birth dates according to the Ethiopian calendar, and they announce and hold church meetings on Ethiopian time!
The dominant language of Ethiopia is Amharic, which has it's own very unique alphabet. So even in Africa, Ethiopia is unique. We were blown away by how much Amharic Bob & Joyce know and speak (and even read and write).
Ethiopia is in the dry season now, so it's not very green at all. In fact, the mountains and cities are quite brown and drab. Although we were at elevations of almost 8,000 feet high all day, temperatures were very warm, probably in the high 80's, but it was pleasantly cool in the evenings.
Bob's brother Rick is president of COEEF (Children of Ethiopa Education Foundation), a non-profit humanitarian NGO (non-government organization) committed to improving education of children in the country. He and his wife Carla are also in the country but were with a group down visiting the southern Kara and Hamar tribes in their remote villages on Wednesday. They left by 7 in the morning but didn't join us until almost 6:00 at night because they lost a few hours because their van had four flat tires and they only carried three spares (and no jack, so they had to use rocks)!
By 6:15 Rick, Joyce and Bob were together at our hotel, the Sidra Hotel, in Addis for the first reunion of the three surviving siblings of the J. Benson Egan family in 2 1/2 years! And who would have ever guessed back then that it would be in Ethiopia?!!
We went to dinner with Rick & Carla and a couple of their staff at a restaurant that combines traditional Ethiopian food (injera with wot) and traditional Ethiopian music, singing and dancing from all nine regions of the country, playing musical instruments that were unlike anything we had ever seen, and dancing very unique dances that stress shoulder and head movement. What an amazing cultural experience!!
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| The restaurant in Addis Ababa where we ate injera and wot and were entertained with Ethiopian musicians and dancers |
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