Sara, as I mentioned earlier, is the sister of Misrak, our church secretary and her mother also attends our church at home. Sara spent seven years in the US and when her visa ran out she was forcibly repatriated to Kenya. Sara and Mickey, her 28-year old nephew, who is a pastor, picked us up from the hotel in his car about 11:00 and they took us to the Rodeo restaurant for a nice lunch (no injera). By about noon, Michael left to pick up his 3 ½ year old daughter, Caris (which means, “grace” in Greek} from her pre-school nearby [View Full Entry]

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Since 2001 we (mostly Cheryl) have sponsored Emebet Tsegaye a young girl in Ethiopia through Compassion International, a Christian organization headquartered in Colorado Springs, CO, USA. They have corresponded every two to four months with the letters translated and forwarded each way by the Compassion staff. When we first started getting serious about this trip, part of the timing was nudged by the fact that Compassion is holding a 10-day Ethiopia tour that actually started today. That coupled with our summer church’s tour of the Holy Land starting in late Feb (more on that later wh [View Full Entry]

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Since we were unable to spend the day with our friend, Sara, we booked an all day tour to the capital city with the tour people who picked us up from the airport. Our tour guides were Fish and Daniel of Tom Tom Tours. Fish is actually a nickname (no kidding?) for Fiseha which is a Ge’ez name which means fun. Ge’ez is an ancient language that centuries ago was replaced by Amharic, the current national language. Ethiopia is inhabited by 83 tribes and including the minor ones, over 200 separate dialects are spoken. Amharic was established as the national language [View Full Entry]

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We left home on Friday 6 Feb, complete with our luggage for our two and a half month trip to thirteen countries. After one plane change and another intermediate stop for an hour and a half in Khartoum, where we couldn’t get off the plane, we finally made it to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. During our four-hour layover in Amsterdam we called our friend, Sara, in Addis. We tried to use our new Skype capabilities to call her cell phone and got completely gerschplatzled (don’t you just love it when I talk technical?) so we had to resort to our AT&T cell [View Full Entry]

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