ekodolphin37's Xanga

Oh, the blogging….

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:30:37 GMT

I may work on that this year….no promises. Our internet connection is still rubbish, and then there’s the dilemma of having a friend blog and an “I’m a missionary” blog. In a perfect world, I could swear equally on both, thus removing the need for separation. A good number of my students are “Facebook friends,” which eliminates the possibility of using that as a medium of self-integration.

Whatev.

I am on holiday….I haven’t had this much free time since the fall of ’04 in Grand Rapids, when I was unemployed and sold my plasma for grocery money. If only I had TRL at my new house in Addis I could have some more structure to my day. Kidding. Sort of.

My new house is awesome….and FREE….and I’m sitting in front of a lovely fire, since it’s cold and rainy outside. Still teaching at Bingham, although this year it’s only Music and ESL. Planning to be in Addis for several more years.

I finally got into The West Wing, which was awesome except for a) I have no way to find out who gets shot at the end of Season One and b) every time they show The Mall, I get a little homesick and want to run my seven-mile loop from Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial. I also just watched “Dan in Real Life,” which made me homesick for the East Coast, which I admit is a bit bizarre for someone from Nebraska living in Ethiopia.

This last year was really difficult, and exhausting. Not bad, and actually full of great things, just busy and draining. I’m still processing a lot of it.

No big updates on the social front. It has been confirmed that I am intimidating, but my level of bad-assness is unextinguishable, and I can only anticipate that it will increase.

Just like Christmas....

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 17:49:33 GMT

What up....Yeah, so it's been awhile....what.

My email time was like Christmas this evening....a bit....few differences.

Anyway, I learned that I DON'T have to take the ridiculous State of Virginia crazy teaching license test, which saves me like a hundred bucks, which in Addis is like 900 birr, which is like a month of living for me.

AND, good connections with college peeps who randomly had links to great development organizations I can visit, or who are visiting, or who are just AWESOME.

If your up to speed on HIMYM, that was all done in a Marshall voice.

Just wanted to broadcast a big "thanks God" for working things out for me. There's other stuff, too, that was just a bit of my really blessed emailing tonight.

Addis is good, school is really busy, life is good, probably be here for a bit of time. Bril.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 19:11:32 GMT

I’ll be back in the states on Friday. Crazy. Not sure if I’m ready for that, but either way, that’s when I get there.

Tonight, I built a fire, and then proceeded to cook t’ibbes (fajita meat, Ethio style) over it in the pouring rain while wearing my nice church outfit and high heels for the entire church choir. No joke. Awesome. I had some help, but I still wanted to point out how awesome I am.

We're done with school, although I still have a lot of test grading to do, cleaning my classroom, moving to my new apartment, etc. And, still recovering from the wedding last weekend.

Some interesting drama lately......God has been so overwhelmingly graceful to me that I'm sort of speechless, and when I finally started to grasp that, He started in with pointing out new things I need to deal with and process.

Um, I love injera.

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Sun, 27 May 2007 08:48:41 GMT

"It might be pretty....it might be clean....but it's not enough to change the world we're in."
--Madison Greene. Sums up my thoughts on religion right now.

More info on Alli: my hair is back to blond-ish. I have a lot of grading to do this weekend. We have tomorrow off of school. This week are our "Memory Verse Prize Day" events. We're taking the elementary to a forest preserve park on Thursday and Friday. Should be fun.

Blogspot isn't available in this country, so I started a new life-in-Addis blog: www.xanga.com/alliinaddis.
There's nothing there, but one day there will be.

I need to go buy tomatoes from my neighborhood veggie shack so I can make spaghetti sauce for the youth group.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Sat, 26 May 2007 13:32:50 GMT

It's been awhile. A busy while. The next few weeks will be an interesting mix of excitement, closure, tiredness, adrenaline, and concentration. At one point this week, I thought "I just need to get through the craziness until I can get to DC." But, then I realized that if I'm not happy when I'm tired and busy and stressed here, I still won't be all that happy once I get to DC. So, I decided to be happy. God is good.

Some awesome things about my life

Mon, 07 May 2007 18:47:07 GMT

I have purple hair, at least for a couple more weeks when I dye it back to blond for a wedding.

I get to go through Mercato, the world's largest open-air market/slum, almost every day.

This weekend several of my students met the Holy Spirit for the first time.

I play the djembe.

I got to climb an Orthodox holy mountain last week. Training for Kili.

I get to climb Kili next year!

I have, on my iPod, the last 4 1/2 years of Mars Hill sermons. Brilliant. So encouraging, that I'm not crazy for wanting to follow Jesus.....although he was certainly crazy enough. I love that guy.

In my spare time I've been doing some marketing work for an all-natural bug repellent called Buzz Off. Malaria sucks.

Today one of my KG kids told me about how his brother watches wrestling and "Pimp my Ride." Precious.

Pastor Mark from NCC has been mentioning Rob Bell on his blog.....what a great collision of my worlds. And, he said this:

"God doesn't speak to me when I'm not stepping out in faith."

Just need to find ways to step out that don't get me into trouble. Wait a second. Jesus got into trouble all the time. What an awesome role model.

I love my life. Thanks for being in it.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 22:49:28 GMT

And the winner is…..Mr. T, aka our new buddy Steven Tso.

We met this cat in Kenya last week, and he had up till Christmas of Season Two.

Thank you, Mr. T. We are indebted.

BTW, Kenya was amazing…..again. Great conference, despite being one of the most white/evangelical/conservative demographics I’ve been in for years. God is good. I learned good stuff, Kijabe is amazingly gorgeous, I had really renewing times in Nairobi, and I was reminded of why I believe a lot of what I do about social justice and not being a jackass (two priorities of the Christian Way in my book).

I got to witness a mugging and the ensuing gunshots, saw "Dreamgirls," ate bagels, saw a dermatologist, read some great books, ran up a mountain a couple times, and had lots of quality time.

I should go to Kenya more often. I don't think it has much to do with the place, but being away and getting beautiful "kicks with a golden shoe" from my Savior are priceless.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 17:31:43 GMT

Okay, friends: A xanga challenge.

Over Christmas, another teacher here received Season One of "How I Met Your Mother." It's a little low-budget, but that is easily made up for by all of the dirty jokes and the "American 20-somethings" cultural references. I love that show.

I have now seen Season One 2 and a 1/2 times. It is time for something new. It has come to my attention that it is possible view Season Two episodes online. Perhaps to download them.

Thus, the challenge:

Anyone that is willing and able to download said Season Two episodes sequentially, burn them onto DVDs, and mail them to

me
c/o Bingham Academy
BOX 4937
Addis Ababa, ETHIOPIA

will hereby be deemed the "winner" and the restorer of my sanity.

Okay, awesome.

Sierra Leone connects to what we go through today....

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 01:49:01 GMT

Sunday at church I was mentioning “The Inconvenient Truth,” and one of my friends said “Isn’t that for Greens?” I said, “Yes, and people who love the Creator of the world.” That stopped the mockery pretty quickly, because really, you can’t oppose that without being a jerk, and my friend isn’t a jerk, so he conceded.

What I really wanted to blog about, though, is the movie “Blood Diamond,” which I bought bootleg and we watched the other night. Great movie, and not just for “liberals” and “hippies” and Mennonites. The situation in Sierra Leone is better now, but the movie did a great job of placing it parallel to the Monica Lewinsky impeachment circus to show how much people actually cared about the civil war and the conflict diamond trade that funded it at the time. Diamonds were only one facet of the tragedy, which included mass amputations and child soldier abductions, as well.

I try to be updated on the conflicts and issues of Africa, but I’ll admit that I get feistier about those that have become personal to me. I’m furious that the US funded the Angolan civil war for over 25 years because I know Angolans. My heart breaks for the issue of child soldiers because I now have friends who have lived through that. By the grace of God, they have been healed of so much of that trauma, but that still doesn’t change the fact that millions of kids on this continent are taken from their families and forced to kill in the name of greed and power.

Sunday in church was a great message about how the Kingdom of God hinges on a) how much we love God and b) how much we love our neighbor. The Greek word for “hate” was brought into the message, as translated as anything “less than love.” I think we all agree that if you love people, you don’t let them a) die needlessly, or b) be kidnapped as a child soldier or prostitute, or c) pay a lot of money for a rock so that either a or b can happen without you having to know about it.

But, if we allow these things to happen and do nothing, or refuse to change our lifestyles, or don’t make the effort to educate those around us, that’s less than love, which God views as hate. That goes for not demanding conflict-free diamonds, for supporting companies like Nestle which have brutally exploited the third world, and even for being exposed to global realities without doing anything to change them.

I read an update from someone I volunteered with in Namibia a few weeks ago that the UN recently put out new figures on HIV. In the Erongo Region, which is by the coast (Swakopmund, the beautiful town on the ocean that I loved to hitchhike to), pregnant women between 20-24 are reflecting an 89% HIV+ prevalence rate. Even with Neviropene, the pre-natal prevention medication, 1 out of 8 of those children will still be born HIV+, and the odds of the mothers (and fathers) living past the next 5-10 years are slim. Beyond the AIDS tragedy, Angola and Mozambique are still reporting 25% infant mortality rates.

This is unacceptable to us as a human family, but exponentially more so to those of us who call ourselves Christians. By allowing these circumstances to continue, we’re definitely showing something “less than love” to our brothers and sisters in the world.

1 John 3:17 “But whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, has not the love of God in him.”

What love do you profess? How does your life reflect it?

Something to think about.

Thank God There's No Water!

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:13:07 GMT

Oh, Snow Days!

No, we don't actually have snow here, but we did get an awesome day off of school today because the city had no water. The past couple weekends, they've turned off the water across the city to fix the system, and then yesterday it went out in the afternoon. The deciding factor for cancelling school today was if it was off at 7:00. It was. It was back on at 8:00, but cut out again at 4:00 this afternoon. If it's still off at 7:00 tomorrow.....yeah, baby.

It's all very good timing, as these are really busy weeks for us. And, quite a few of us have been sick this week....we all came down with this crazy stomach thing at the same time. Monday night I could have sworn at around 3:00 am that I totally had cholera. I didn't. But, it makes the fact that I did have water that night, and that we didn't have school today, all the more amazing.

Other than that, life is good.

Peace.