Anatomy of a Decision

 

Rebecca enjoying a closure walk with
Bible study friend Eskedar at Entoto Park

We have big news and it deserves its own blogpost. So we will let you in on what has been happening under the surface in the past 3 months.

As you might know, Oren visited us for his winter break in December and January. During that time, we traveled to Kenya and Tanzania to reconnect with old friends and revisit places important to our family. We talked and wondered and heard Oren reflect on his own experience of spending his last two years of high school in Ethiopia. His conclusion was that it was tough on him. Although he made some good friends, he never felt like he was really graduating with his own class. He didn’t bond to this place. Two years was too short.

During our Christmas holiday, we also got a lot of questions. People were constantly asking us, so what’s your plan? Are you staying in Addis? How long? We wondered about it a lot ourselves. Upon our return to Addis, we spent some serious time talking through our options as a family. And we came to some unexpected conclusions.

David trying pottery on the
Eid holiday from school

About 9 months ago, we decided to extend our MCC term in Ethiopia, from June 2024 until June 2025. That would take David to the end of 10^th grade, a natural break in the Cambridge system. But this fall we had been watching with alarm as David’s high school became less and less satisfactory. This year, the school is so under-resourced that almost all 11^th and 12^th grade classes are being taught as online courses, not by direct instruction. There are far fewer qualified teachers for the high school level at all, including grades 9 and 10. The teachers who are present are stretched thin, trying to cover administrative duties as well as just a very few non-academic activities. The only real options for extracurricular activities is one sport team a season. Music, drama and leadership development opportunities are non-existent through the school; we forced David to join the community choir (which we love!) to have another musical expereice. We don’t want to blame the school – Addis Ababa is a hard place to live, and it's not a very attractive option for teachers who have to raise their own support to come and teach here. Recruitment has been tough. But we have also noted that even when David has been befriended by some amazing kids here, he also has never bonded with this place. He hates school and is unenthusiastic about learning. He has drawn increasingly inward, losing his curiosity about natural science (there’s no scope to explore), with little opportunity to grow in pursuits he tried and enjoyed in Tanzania: swimming, drama, arts and crafts, golf, fishing, etc.

We laid out our options as a family, and thought through each one carefully:

David with friends at Mama's Pottery,
a new option at Gulele Botanical Garden

1. We could complete our MCC Ethiopia assignment in 2025. But there were big problems with that plan.  The idea of pushing David through one more year of unenthusiastic school was hard for us and him. And then the idea of moving him to a new setting for grades 11 and 12? We heard from Oren how hard that was for him. We’d always assumed we would return to the US in 2025, and yet David said he would rather stay in Ethiopia than finish high school in the US. We realized that whenever we ended our term in Ethiopia, we were basically finished with international work with MCC. We had no desire to try to live and work in a totally new place; we have moved too much and are tired of building new communities and learning a new context. Yet, Paul is still very much at the top of his game in the international development field. It doesn’t make sense to consider retirement yet. And we have no illusions about how hard it would be for him to find professional work, returning to the US in his mid-60s. It also will put us in financial hardship. While we serve with MCC, we receive the rent from our US home as well as a college scholarship from MCC; paying for Oren’s college would be doubly hard if we left MCC.

2. We considered if we might extend our term in Ethiopia longer, to 2027. That would allow us to keep serving with MCC for 3 more years, solving the financial conundrum. But continuing longer here in Ethiopia, through David’s graduation, did not seem viable at all because of how hard it would be on David, stunting his learning and development at a key age. Staying here works well for some kids, but we don’t see it working well for the person that David is. Friends have cautioned us to make a decision to leave BEFORE we reach a crisis point.

Addis the process of beautification

3. We spent a fair bit of effort exploring a third option. We could plan to stay and work in Ethiopia until 2027 and send David to Rift Valley Academy, a boarding school in Kenya. To see if this could be a possibility, David and I took a special trip to Kenya to visit RVA. We were both really impressed by the beauty of the campus and the wide open spaces. David was blown away by the possibilities for art courses and sports, wood shop class, and science classes. He said that he really loved the school, but he would only go there if we moved there and be on staff so he could live with us. Clearly, that is not an option for us. We pressed the question, but David expressed clearly that he does not want to go to boarding school. We have enough experience with mission families and Paul’s own experience in boarding (which was fantastic for him) to know that there is nothing worse than forcing your child to go into boarding when he doesn’t want to, just so you can continue your mission work. And so that option was off the table for us.

 4.      The last option came up as a complete surprise to us late in Oren’s visit. At the end of December, our MCC colleagues serving as Representatives for the Kenya/Tanzania program announced that they were taking a new leadership role, and the position would be coming open in June. We had not even considered this opening as personally relevant until Oren pointed out that we should consider it. When we stopped to think about it, we recognized some compelling reasons:

 ·       we know the MCC Rep role very well and have managed an MCC program in Ethiopia on a similar scale; This is meaningful work we can both do together and seem to be gifted for. If we applied, we would be able to keep serving for another five years

·       the Kenya/Tanzania program is not totally new to us; we used to work in TZ and know the remaining partner organizations there well, and there are big food security programs that cross borders with Ethiopia; 

·       we have already spent time and energy learning Swahili, and Kenya feels familiar culturally; 

·       there is a thriving young adult volunteer exchange program in Kenya, something we have missed in Ethiopia; 

·       we could all live together and David could attend a good high school (Rosslyn Academy), with all the opportunities for personal growth that are missing for him here. In particular, we are excited to see David have the chance to return to swimming, to try out drama and musical theatre, to learn about pottery and woodworking, and more basically, to hopefully have the experience of enjoying a wider breadth of academic classes in science and humanities. 

·       David would have three years to adjust and build community in a new place, rather than just two, which can make a big difference in a young life.

Not a great effort at sushi, with
ingredients that came in 
our suitcases from other places

To make a long story short – we decided to apply for the Kenya/Tanzania Rep position in February. We knew it would be a competitive process. Praying friends counseled us to just apply and see what God would do. We were invited to interview. In the end, in the middle of our field visit to Tigray to understand the situation of hungry communities there, we received an offer to take this new job.  The same people who hired us are fully aware that they will need to work on hiring our replacements for the Ethiopia program. It was a devastating time to receive the offer, deep in the present moment of interacting with our team and project participants in Ethiopia. Yet in the middle of our 5 days of discernment, David also interviewed for Rosslyn and was accepted to the school, more or less settling the matter for us.

The major drawback to applying for this position was the sense that we would be breaking our deep commitments here in Addis Ababa too quickly. The MCC Ethiopia program is large and complicated, and we feel terrible about the idea of leaving our colleagues in the lurch. We are both extremely committed in our local international church: Paul is the main Sunday school teacher for older elementary kids, and I have served as an anchor on the small volunteer pastoral team for the past 2 years. We have made dear friends here, and it is painful to think about leaving them abruptly. Even at a deeper emotional level, it is not a good time in Ethiopia. We struggle daily with the feeling that we are walking away and abandoning a friend in need.

At the same time, we need to recognize that this Kenya/Tanzania position is the only international MCC position we would consider and we were given this offer. It is also painful to face the work of building a new community in a new place. And yet, we do know quite a few people based in Nairobi when we come to think of it. Work visits to Tanzania would give us the chance to also connect with old friends there. It is a hard and painful decision. But we need to find the energy to both grieve and rejoice at the same time. We were stuck and didn’t see a way out. This new job offer feels like another example of God rolling away a stone, sending an earthquake to unlock chains and open prison doors. It would be unfaithful not to also give thanks for this provision.

From the walk with Eskedar

So here is what lies ahead for us. We will travel to Kenya in the beginning of May for a week of Handover with the outgoing Reps. Ironically, they are the same couple that replaced us as Reps when we left the MCC Rwanda/Burundi program, and again when we released the Tanzania program to a joint Kenya/TZ program! Now we are following them into a position in return.

We will then come back to Ethiopia for about 6 weeks of closure here. We negotiated an arrangement in which we will continue to be responsible for the Ethiopia program administration until the beginning of August, to allow time for a good search process for our replacement(s). Physically we will leave the country on June 25 for a few days in Nairobi. We will then take a brief vacation in the US for July. School at Rosslyn Academy starts early for David so we will fly back to Nairobi to start a new season by August 5.

So now, we are abruptly entering a season of closure without the privilege of much time to prepare. We need to handle other changes and staff turnover on our team in the meantime, and many changes in our church and community. It will be an extremely busy time, and we will need prayer through it to arrive in Kenya as whole and functional people. So, thank you for praying for us.

The trinity of owls is still hovering in our compound