Ethiopia - The Clinic, The Team, The Prayer

(two posts today, so scroll down)

THE CLINIC

If you've forgotten by now, or are just tuning in, this was a Christian medical mission trip to a Jewish community in Ethiopia.  And I'm finally getting around to posting photos and information about the Clinic itself.

After setting up the clinic over the weekend, the team of 58 doctors, dentists, nurses, techs, pharmacists, prayer team and worship team members, and administrative personnel drove to the site on Monday morning.  They saw  masses of people already waiting in line for the clinic to open.

All week long thousands of people waited in line. 

The line stretched way down the street and around the corner to neighboring streets.

THE CLINIC SAW JUST SHY OF 10,000 PEOPLE IN FIVE DAYS!

9750 to be exact.

The need is so great.  The heartbreaking truth is that thousands waited and were not able to be seen by the end of the week. An absolutely gut wrenching and heartbreaking reality of human limits.   Thousands more came in need of care than the team was able to see.  I am amazed that they saw nearly 10,000 in just 5 days.  Astounding!

1731 people received eye glasses.  67 people received eye surgery.  And five babies were delivered at the clinic!

The Fisherman's position was in the prayer room.  There were 13 tables set up at which sat a JV team member and an Ethiopian Christian translator.  All day long these beaten down and broken people lined up to receive prayer.  The moment one left the table another one was approaching to sit down.  

I was curious about how it would be, sharing the Gospel of Jesus as Messiah to Jewish people. These people are so broken and weary, beaten down by their poverty and hardships.  They do not have the same kind of walls and defenses toward Jesus as one would expect a Jew to have.  Their need is so great, the Gospel truly is GOOD NEWS to them.  Their Messiah has already come and He offers them the FREE GIFT of new life and eternal life.  They do not have to earn it by keeping the vast and intricate Jewish LAW, the Old Testament Law.  Christ came to set us free from The Law.  He came to show that The Law (all the rules and regs) was only a means to show us our helplessness and great need for a Savior.  We can't earn heaven.  We can't earn reconciliation with God.  It is impossible.  And the consequences of not being reconciled to Him are great. That's why Christ came to die in our place. He paid the price.  We get the life.  He made the great exchange.  He took our sin and gave us His righteousness.  Those who believe, receive it and are reconciled with God for all eternity.  Many of clinic's patients welcomed this message, this good news, with open arms.

Of the 9750 people assisted, 918 received Yeshua (Jesus) as their Messiah. 

THE TEAM * THE PRAYER

Daily the team would gather to worship together, singing songs of worship and praise to our great God.  Getting their hearts and minds focused on Him and their purpose for being there, each morning anew they dedicated themselves to be used to meet the needs of these people so loved by Him.

The Fisherman brought his guitar with him.  He was unsure of how he would use it but knew it is always good to have.  It turned out that he was assigned to the prayer room while others participated on the worship team.  Though he wasn't on the worship team, his guitar was.  This is his guitar being played by one of the national Christians participating in the ministry week.

With the nationals and the Jewish Voice team, there was quite a crowd of loving people eagerly desiring to serve the thousands of people seeking medical and spiritual help.

They spent time every day in prayer.  Prayer for their work, yes.  But prayer for the people who needed not only them, but Jesus. 

The needs is so huge that emotions were often intense and overwhelming.

The Fisherman said he was (by far) not the only one who experienced waking up in the middle of the night, in tears over the vastness of need presented before him each day.  Individuals, sick and poor, bearing up under enormous burdens.  Individuals loved by and precious to God.  So in need of knowing Him and His love.

This team of ordinary people wanting to give what they can, prayed for the people they were meeting and treating. They took their needs and brokenness before God and with fervent and breaking hearts petitioned Him on behalf of the tens of thousands waiting at their doors.

Ethiopia - The Sleeping Where You Get Tired

I think the most unusual sight among The Fisherman's photos was the peculiar sight of people laying down sleeping anywhere and everywhere. 

I asked The Fisherman if these were drunk people and he said, "No. They're just people who laid down to sleep, right in the middle of wherever!" 

Are they homeless?  Are they foot travellers to the city?  Come in the hopes of finding work and ended up alone and with nowhere to stay?  What are their stories, I wonder. 

It appears they just lie down to sleep wherever they get tired.  Doesn't seem to matter where.

Or how public or bustling.

 

Right on the sidewalk...

or right on the street

or tucked securely under the tiniest overhang of a wall...

(with rocks securing your blanket and possessions)

...or right next to a door.

It doesn't seem to matter how many people pass by you, you're just so dog tired you've got to sleep.  Even on the rocks...

...even on a short wall...

...or on the sidewalk along the front of the wall...

...or at an angle to the wall...

...or even perpendicular to the wall.

People just leave you be, passing nonchalantly by like it's an everyday occurrence...which it must be.

How vulnerable! 

Especially with one arm slung out straight into the walkway...

Most of the sleepers seemed to sleep straight, but then there's this guy who curled up.   

"Hmmm, there's a guy sleeping on the sidewalk. I think I check my phone messages."

WOW.

We Interupt These Regularly Scheduled Ethiopia Posts to bring you...

....the results of my first day at a Beginning Quilting class...

We're making a small Log Cabin quilt.  It will be only about 3x4 feet.  Perfect for learning on.

Just let me say, I am in love with rotary cutters.

They are the coolest, easiest, most awesome invention for quilting.  I can't imagine cutting pieces the way they did in the "olden days".  (The olden days were probably only as far back as the 1970's but I'm not entirely sure.)

What got me off my duff after, oh, decades of saying "I'm going to make a quilt someday" was seeing a certain quilt in the shop last week.  It's called a Bullseye pattern.  I have a picture of it on my phone but have no idea how to get it out of my phone and into my computer.  It uses three concentric (love that word, concentric) circles that are top stitched together.  Then they're cut in quarters, the quarters are mixed up and sewn together on on top of a square of four quarters.  I loved it.  So now I'm taking a beginners class for $5 a session. 

Today is "someday"!

Ethiopia - The Hair

One of the things I enjoyed noticing in The Fisherman's pictures was the cool ways the children wore their hair.

I think this little boy wins the Best Of Kids prize.

But the Best of Adults prize, hands down, goes to one of the wedding guests from The Fisherman's first hours in Ethiopia. 

This is amazing, isn't it?!

Lunch In A Very Small Town

(There's more Ethiopia photos coming but I felt the need to post today's very small town experience.)

I accompanied a friend to court today.  She was called to testify at a custody hearing and the courthouse is 50 miles away.  I went to keep her company and give her support in this unpleasant task that was forced upon her.

When it was over and we were on our way out of the small town that is our county seat, we saw a sign that said "24 Flavors of Soft Serve."  Wow!  24 different flavors of soft serve ice cream?  That's worth a stop.  We've never seen such a vast soft serve menu before.  We said, "This must be the Baskin Robbins of soft serve!" (BR is aka "31 Flavors".) We had to check it out. 

We turned around, pulled in and parked.  Immediately upon getting out of the car we both saw and smelled the bar-be-que cooking in a big outdoor smoker on one side of the building.  It smelled great!  I guess this little ice cream joint serves BBQ, too, I thought.

First order of business was a restroom stop.  Women's door said: "Out of Order."  No problem, we used the Men's.

Next, let's check out this soft serve and maybe think about having a BBQ lunch, as well.  24 flavors of soft serve...hmmmmm.  Wait, how come there's only one machine?  Turns out their big sign out front boasting 24 flavors actually meant, well, ONE flavor, but with the option of 23 "mix-ins".  Mixed in and churned around in their milk shake style mixer what they essentially had was 24 Blizzards like at Dairy Queen.  We decided we needed some lunch first and proceeded to become TOTALLY CONFUSED by the menu boards posted above our heads. 

One side of the menu said: 

BBQ

Tuesday and Friday Only

and listed all the BBQ options. 

The other side of the menu said:

Not Served >> Mexican Food<< After 8:00 PM

Monday                      Thursday    Saturday

Wait.  Does that mean Mexican food is not served on Monday, Thursday and Saturday? Does that mean Mexican food is not served after 8:00pm on Monday, Thursday and Saturday?

Today's Wednesday.  We should be able to get Mexican food, right? And, it's before 8:00 PM. anyway.

And we smelled that awesome BBQ outside.  What's up with that?  That's what we really wanted but it wasn't a Tuesday or Friday.  But hmmmm, they've got it outside....  We went ahead and asked.   "So...we CAN'T get BBQ today?"

"Oh, yeh.  You can get BBQ today.    Except you can't.    Because it's not ready."

It was 11:30 a.m.   Standard lunch realm if I'm not mistaken.

Ahhhh......small towns!

"OK, what about Mexican food? Can we get Mexican food?"

"No. No Mexican food today."  But it's not after 8:00 PM!  And Wednesday is not listed among the Not Served days. (Maybe "Wednesday" fell off from the gap between Monday and Thursday?)

So here we are on a Wednesday, trying to figure out what in the heck this restaurant serves and when.

What about Wednesday at this BBQ/Mexican Food/Ice Cream joint? 

Wednesday is simply not mentioned.  Tuesday, Friday (BBQ Only days, remember), Monday, Thursday and Saturday....  Huh?  What about Wednesday?  Today is WEDNESDAY people!  (And who KNOWS about Sunday?!  Maybe they're closed Sundays.) 

And yet, on this Wednesday that is not a Tuesday or Friday, we COULD get BBQ.   (Wait...I'm REALLY confused now.)

IF it was ready.  Which it wasn't. 

So, though we COULD have had BBQ on this nowhere mentioned Wednesday, we actually could NOT because, well, it wasn't ready yet, even though it was lunch time.  And we could NOT get Mexican food even though it was before 8:00 pm and the sign seemed to indicate Wednesday was a Mexican food day. 

These two options pretty much summed up the menu we were looking at.  Huh?  But it's Wednesday!  What about Wednesday?  At this point I began to wonder if Wednesday might be an ice cream only day.

Both of us totally confused and frustrated, I finally, with a surprising degree of presence of mind given our situation, asked, "If we wanted to eat lunch here today, WHAT COULD WE HAVE?

The girl behind the counter pointed to a menu behind her listing basic burgers and fried foods - a menu that we had no chance of even noticing before because,
1. it was below eye level,
2. she was pretty much standing in front of it, and
3. every inch of the walls seemed to be plastered with hand written signs, posters, and lists to such a point that you pretty much wrote off the whole behind-the-counter area as way too complicated for your brain to even gather any information from.

Brains fried, we decided to go somewhere else for lunch and then come back for ice cream. It was such a rapid-fire confusion that only in the typing of this have I figured out the Mexican food side of the menu SHOULD have read:

Mexican Food - Monday, Thursday, Saturday

Not served after 8:00 PM

Next we went to the other end of town (a whole 2 minutes away) and found a Mexican restaurant my friend had been to once before.  Laughing and talking about our previous fiasco we looked at the menu and made our selections.  I was going to have the Chicken Chimichanga and my friend was going to have a Chicken Tostada.  We got half way through our order, and were even asked a couple of questions about it, before the waitress interrupted with her sudden recollection:

"Oh!  I forgot!  We're out of chicken."

Are you serious?  How could a restaurant be out of chicken? 

How could a mexican restaurant be out of chicken? And it's only Wednesday, for crying out loud!  We quickly made other choices and settled in for another round of giggles and disbelief.

Back for our ice cream we went.  We were tempted to ask if the BBQ was ready yet.  When I received my Heath Bar "flavor" of soft serve ice cream I pulled the spoon out to take my first bite.  The pattern of ice cream left on the spoon looked to my friend like I'd been given a fork rather than a spoon.  We had another big laugh over how perfectly hilarious it would have been if it were indeed a fork and we'd been told, "We're out of spoons."

So there you have it.  My escapade at trying to have lunch in very small town.  On a Wednesday.

Ethiopia - The Clothing

I have always loved the draping clothing of cultures far across the globe. 

Interesting how this woman is wearing long pants underneath her dress.

I wonder if these were members of one of those weddings parties since they're wearing the same outfit...

Pretty in pink.

The draping layers and hand carved walking stick just don't seem to go with the plastic yellow shopping bag.

What a beautiful outer garment.

Now, here's a dapper gentleman for you.

And if a woman could be "dapper", I think this one certainly fits it.

 

I'm not sure if that's a baby tied onto this person's back or something else, but this seems to be the manner in which they create a baby sling.  I just don't get how it stays on.

I think I should have put this next photo in with The Poverty photos.  My, look at those torn up clothes.

I love this photo below.  Aside from all of the treasured faces of the people, I think it's my favorite one of all the photos The Fisherman took. 

An unknown woman wrapped in beautiful folds of bright fabric, looking out onto the valley below.  I love how it evokes so many questions.

Who is this woman?  What are her circumstances? Does she live nearby?  Is that her home she's looking at? What is she thinking?  Is she pondering, as she rests there, the remainder of road left before she reaches her destination?  Is she troubled? Is she praying? Is she marveling and the beauty before her?

Ethiopia - The Burdens

These physical burdens represent to me the larger burden of poverty these people bear.

Not all of the burdens are carried by people.

But it is the ones born on the bent over backs . . .

. . . of weathered and worn people . . .

. . . that move us the most.