A COVID Wracked Wrap-up Before Homeleave

Oren off alone last week.

It has been too long for an update and that is the result of a lot of work as we approach a summer homeleave, as well as the fact that the past 3 weeks has been spent primarily in Addis at the office, so no great field visit updates.

That is not to say that the time has been uninteresting, it has been so in both good and very challenging ways. I will say by way of beginning that I am 40,000 feet over Western Ethiopia at the moment as we have just reached cruising altitude on our trip back to the US. By the time this is posted we will be in Maryland.

David, Rebecca and I are currently enroute as Oren actually went on this same flight exactly seven days ago. This was to be a first for David and Oren trying their hand at flying internationally alone. Unfortunately, the day before they left, David got a positive COVID PCR result and was not able to fly. Oren decided to go on alone to have an extra week in the US. There was another family on the flight who we knew, so that gave him a boost of confidence as well.

He did arrive without incident and was picked up by his grandparents at Dulles. David is admittedly jealous that he is already there, and without school, has been needing to occupy himself while we work. He did two 1000 piece puzzles and took apart and rebuilt a lego technics set twice during the time while listening to Artemis Fowl novels on his iPhone. He was very happy to have the week completed.

COVID has been a cross-cutting theme throughout the past 3 weeks, and it was a most unwelcome visitor that seemed to take over our lives (this is despite the fact that I and everyone I know is vaccinated). Admittedly Ethiopia had avoided the omicron variant for months while the US was in its thrall (my parents, in-laws and all siblings got it in the past 8 weeks). We had become quite lax about masking and the govt. dropped all mask requirements at public events. When it came, almost everyone we knew started getting it. Most of the people in our church, then our accountant Eyerus and her husband Moses got it.

Within a few days, Oren woke up to tell me he had a sore throat. We almost panicked as he was in the middle of his final chemistry and history A levels. This could not have ben worse timing. There is no simple option to make up, and this is part of a 2 year cycle. (The Cambridge system is quite unforgiving).

He went to his last test and when he came home I gave him a rapid test, only to find he tested negative. I was not entirely confident about the result, and about 5 days later David started coughing and sniffing, this time with fever. I tested him as well as he was due to leave Addis to fly to the US in 7 days. He was also negative with the rapid test. Two days later, despite feeling better he asked to be tested again and this time I got a positive result--what we suspected about Oren and him all along.

On Friday we took them for a PCR test as they both felt very well. Oren was negative but David’s was positive, so we had to rebook David to fly with us. (Ironically the US lifted the PCR test requirement for travel 5 hours after Oren’s flight landed!)

In the meantime, the rest of our office staff has had COVID. For some reason, Rebecca and I remained asymptomatic throughout (thus far) despite extensive exposure to children and staff in the office. Unfortunately, the day before we traveled, probably the result of a team party at a restaurant, Rebecca got a gastro infection and had to get a course of Cipro 24 hours before we left. But at this point, we are all in good health traveling back.

 

Our team with Hana in the back

A long introduction but I do want to recount a few of the highlights of the past 3 weeks. Probably most significant was the recruitment and hiring of a new staff member. Our accountant Eyerusalem is expecting to go on maternity leave in November, and with our upcoming homeleave we felt there was a pressing need to recruit a new part-time bookkeeper/accountant who could both assist and learn from Eyerus to be able to cover for her during her leave.

I can’t begin to tell you how important our accountant is in our office. There is really no one in the office that could cover her duties because of the amount of record-keeping required by Ethiopian law. Every single transaction has about 6 pieces of documentation attached, all of this in hard copy. She spends a lot of time keeping us in compliance with our auditors. We could not risk having no one to cover for her.

Belie our language teacher

Hiring is not a quick process though and we worked with our regional HR person to prepare a job description, announcement, calculate a salary and budget, way of receiving applications, processing finalists, interviews (4 candidates) before were able to make an offer to someone. We have now hired a young woman named Hana who, Rebecca and I have met through our church where she is also a member. We were able to have two days of orientation with her before we left on homeleave. Eyerus will continue to her in July and she should be fully trained by the time we return in August.

Our team was please with the hire (two of them were on the search committee), and we had several team events with her including a long team meeting, and a team meal together at a nice restaurant (where Rebecca may have gotten her stomach illness from eating a piece of raw meat she mistook for a beetroot.)

with MKC church leaders

Work has been very busy besides recruitment because of our departure. We are not on vacation most of the time and I will be checking email daily, but there are things that are best done in person. We met a number of partners to discuss future projects, and we have been processing a number of emergency requests, including a proposal to continue our relief work in Tigray. We now have a way to bring some funds on UN flights through a project manager at the MKC church. We are working on this as well as continued work in several IDP camps close to the Tigray border.

I had a particularly odious task with Wonde to try to update power of attorney authorization for he and Solomon who need documentation to act on behalf of MCC in my absence. This requires an incredibly complex process of getting a document approved at several offices, and stamps from multiple officials, and several reviews of translation of the document. It took us 2 days of visiting offices and at the last minute the woman serving was going to refuse because she said I could not read the Amharic translation so I could not approve it. I insisted I could (almost but not quite a lie) so she handed me the document and told me to read it aloud. I have in the past 4 months learned the alphabet so I was able to sound out several lines before she rolled her eyes and told me to stop. She begrudgingly approved (although admittedly I did not understand much of what I read.) Still it felt like a huge accomplishment.

I will also add a note about church. Sunday school is done for the semester, and as many of the congregants are foreigners, they have also gone to their home countries for the summer (which is an intense and dreary rainy season in Addis). We had a good bye Sunday in which we said good bye for good as well as temporarily to many friends. We also had a final youth event where we took youth to Entoto park and did a ropes course. Beriket, Oren's friend who went with us as well. It was a lot of fun and I was impressed with how large the youth group is getting.  

After all the farewells it felt like we were almost the only ones left for a couple weeks. That has meant in the past 3 weeks Rebecca and or I have been preaching, leading music, and leading the service. This coming week they convert to a Bible study informal service. We have enjoyed being part of a congregation where we feel like we are needed!

Language study ended for the time being with a big ‘end of unit’ exam. About 45 minutes of conversation. No written test at this point. I wish I could say I was as conversational in Amharic as I was in Swahili at this point, but it is a more complex language. I do enjoy recognizing words though on signs as we now can read. Rebecca does better conversationally than I do.

Other activities which fit well into the end of the school year was some compound maintenance. We try to keep the MCC compound updated and this year we did two very satisfying projects. The first was putting down some stucco tiles on a back covered terrace (which functions as an outdoor covered conference room for COVID, as well as our lunch room for us and staff on work days.) It looks great now and just on time for rainy season. (The concrete slab that was there was not well leveled to let water run off. Now it look fantastic. 

The other exciting project to add to our growing farm is a vermicompost enclosure. Our guard Solomon who is also a builder made a great little structure and now we will be able to enrich our soil with worms and worm compost (as well as feed the chickens with surplus worms)! We are very excited and the worms arrived a day before we left once the structure was built. (The soil in our yard is quite depleted.) This is one advantage of having a food security manager on our staff (Mesfin)! Because we first saw these things in some of our food security development projects. 

Rebecca continues some of the highlights of the past 3 weeks here.

We enjoyed one delightful surprise over the past two weeks. On a Friday evening, our German neighbors Hana and Lukas came over to purchase a few eggs. As they exited their gate, they heard a mewling in the bushes. They investigated and saw a tiny kitten, abandoned by its mother. Passersby urged them to take the kitten and feed it. So, they picked it up and knocked on our door: “We hear you have a rat problem,” they said. “We have a solution!” The little mite was dark brown and very stinky. We did our best to wash it and try to give it drops of milk from our fingers. We mutually agreed that Hana and Lukas would try to raise it for the time being, but that if it survived, we would adopt it when we returned from home leave in August. It was so small and it seemed that it might not make it. They brought the kitten back with them for bible study, and we were quite shocked. It turned out that the kitten was actually black and white, not just brown (I guess it really was covered with a lot of mud and poop when it was found!). H&L had bought a tiny little dropper bottle and it was eager to drink milk like a baby.

Over the past two weeks, we have taken turns cat-sitting during the day while H&L needed to go to the office for work. Care of the kitten was on the intense side. But meanwhile, our kids were home from school, so they had more time. For a couple of days, David was sick in bed with a fever, but he just snuggled up with the kitten, fed it milk, and kept it company. Even Oren thought it was pretty cute and took some turns cuddling it. As David got better, he also started multi-tasking with the kitten: putting together a lego set or a puzzle, with the kitten perched on his shoulders, while listening to audiobooks.

Initially, when the kitten appeared, the dogs were very, very disturbed. On the first night, Friday tried to nip it at one point. But over the past weeks, they have become more adjusted to the little creature. Of course, when the kitten is around, it is the most interesting thing in the room, and they can’t stop following it with their noses, licking it, pointing at it. At some moments, we could see instinct battling with the dog super-ego, Bella sniffing and sniffing and shivering because she wanted so much to nip. But they got to the point where the two dogs, David and the kitten could all hang out on one bed together very peacefully. The kitten is so small, so not a threat to them, just a curiosity. They know they are more important than it. There does seem to be a little competition between the dogs, though, over who will be more maternal. Hana and Lukas plan to keep bringing the kitten over once a week so that the dogs remain accustomed to the new little member of our family. And truly speaking we need this cat. We DO have a rat problem. As we were finishing the packing this morning, a whole herd of rats were cavorting heavily in the ceiling. They sound as big as cats. They can’t get down into the house but they make quite a ruckus.

Another dimension of this past month included a week of the Great Lakes Initiative Leadership Institute. For many years, I have been part of this gathering of Christian leaders from East Africa, joining together physically in Uganda for theological reflection on God’s mission of reconciliation. However, COVID is still a reality that limits travel, and so we held the Institute virtually for the second time. This year, I was part of the content and design team, which meant that I’ve been meeting often to select and invite the main speakers, plan the program and troubleshoot the many issues that arose as the Institute neared. The theme we selected this year was “Tackling Identity and Ideology Conflicts” – a theme that really hits home no matter which country we come from. On the one hand, God has given us a wide range of diverse and beautiful identities. But when those differences are weaponized to divide communities – worse, to divide the body of Christ – then we need to confront the divisive narratives that undermine God’s reconciling work.

This year, we were able to recruit some truly stellar plenary speakers – several of them long-time founders of GLI, but two of them newer. All of them were African scholars and practitioners who brought fresh insight to the scriptures and gave us theological insights to chew on.  We also had some excellent testimonies from people involved in grassroots reconciliation efforts. I was responsible for the worship times during the week as well. (Mainly I drew on the musical gifts offered last year by participants). The major challenge of an online conference is that it is just very difficult to keep people’s attention on that medium. We did our best to tighten up the program, provide opportunity for interaction, and have moments of worship response after speakers to give participants a chance to transition. Technology glitches are also a constant fear, and I did have one day where every form of wifi failed me towards the end of the worship session. On another day, a powerful hailstorm provided lots of background noise during worship, even in spite of my best efforts to be in a quiet secluded space in our guest container.

I think participants really appreciated the conference this year – almost all were able to stay through the entire 2.5 hours of sessions for five days in a row. I also was grateful for the time of learning. But it was also a stressful load that week, trying to fit in all the work and appointments in the morning, and then shutting myself off for almost 4 hours each afternoon, during the week the kids were off school. I was totally exhausted by the time the conference was over Friday night. Which is when I found out that David would not be traveling after all – parenting would continue for another week. I nearly had a meltdown about that, because I was so tired.

Fortunately, it turned out that David decided to be extra agreeable this past week. Since I really needed a good rest on Saturday after GLI, I suggested that we take a healthy walk back at Entoto Natural Park. David said, “Sure, I’ll go. I have nothing better to do!” And so we set off at the bottom of the hill, intending to walk the entire triangular circuit of the park this time. We had nice conversations about a lot of things and finally got to the far end of the park with the viewpoint. We were a little footsore at that point, so it felt good to sit down and have an ice cream cone. Then we started to look for the new path that would lead back to our starting point. Sadly, we realized that this leg of the path is not yet completed. We had no choice but to totally retrace our steps and walk back the way we had come, a total of 13 km. It was a little more than we had bargained for, but David did a great job holding it together, listening to his audiobook on the walk back. The fresh air was great, but what a way to rest! Not! When we got home, I think Paul and I both ended up sleeping for about 2 hours.

This week has been really intense with work and we’ve more or less ignored our son. But we’ve tried to have time to play a game with him each evening and watch an episode. David has been relatively cheerful about our distractedness, thankfully. One night we Hana and Lukas come over with the kitten, and after our dice game, we ended up playing with the kitten as it played with the dice. It was very cute and funny and we had a lot of laughs. David has even been extra helpful in tidying up the house and trying to leave it in a condition where our housekeeper Yeshi can easily clean it.

Paul back to finish up:

We left early Saturday morning and got on the Ethiopian flight that goes pretty much directly to Dulles airport. We tried a new route through Lome this time and found the Boeing 787 about half full. That was great for stretching out across seats for sleep. We arrived about 8 hours ago and picked up by Rebecca’s parents and Oren.