Coffee Ceremony

Nobody can say that there is no hospitality in Ethiopia. Selam threw a beautiful coffee ceremony on Tuesday of our last week. It starts with fresh grass and flowers on the floor and Selam sitting on a little stool next to a charcoal stove. She grilled and boiled corn on the cob for us which was delicious, made popcorn and then began making coffee. We had just had our first cup(you have several) when Ninacachu(the AHOPE driver) stopped by and he had Sr. Minor(AHOPE nurse) and a bunch of our teen girls with him. They came in for coffee and let me tell you Big Sister(from my earlier post) is quite the hostess!!! Then they left and Samy, my favorite guard had tea while we had another cup of coffee. It was so beautiful and Selam gave us gorgeous scarves- I love mine, I wore it to take Jen to the airport that night.

Donkey Mobile Library

During my weekend to Awassa-- great city and I got there all alone in a 5 1/2 hour bus trip. So wish I would have done this earlier, as I realized how easy it was to travel independently through Ethiopia- I made it to the Donkey Mobile Library!!!!

I walked over to the Awassa Reading Room to meet with Hidar, who works there. She brought along her brother Desta to help translate and we headed over to the first of the donkey carts. There are 6 of them and they drive them(is drive the right word for donkeys?) into different neighborhoods and then park them, open them up and set up little stools. The kids then can come read books or check them out by filling out a little card. There were already about 10 kids there at 9:30am reading. They get about 70 kids at that cart each day. I gave the little readers stickers, that was a hit. Then Hidar and Desta took me to a second donkey cart which is parked in the grounds of a government school that does not have a library. I got to peek into the school as well. Wow, our kids do not know how great they have it in the states.

Then when we headed back to the Awassa Reading Room, there were about 15 more kids there on a Saturday morning reading books-- very cool. They all got stickers and I cannot tell you how much I love this program and Ethiopia Reads.

I am home!!!

Hi,
I want to thank everyone for following in my journey this summer. I am officially home, have been for almost a week and a half. Still trying to go through all of my amazing photographs. I am going to continue to post some more entries I didn't get to this summer and hopefully put up some photos. I cannot post photos of the kids at AHOPE but trust me they are amazing and I'd love to share them with you personally when I see you all.

A couple of more thank you's:
My dear friend Claire, who was the only reason you all could read my blog this summer, she would get emails from me and post them along with some pretty funny pictures she found-- I was unable to get on Blogger due to the Ethiopian government.

Pete, for loaning me his amazing camera-- the photos prove that it is fab-- cause I am not a fantastic photographer.

Kathy Shaw, my old principal for her donation this summer. I will post soon about many of the wonderful things all your money was spent on!!!