Our Trip to Ethiopia, Day 4

 Sunday, July 3, 2022

This morning, my friend Muna came to the guest house to see me. I met her for the first time back in 2015 at an orphanage we visited, and we have kept in contact ever since. It was good to see her again!

After breakfast, we headed to the International Evangelical Church for services. Our friends Gary and Peggy and their niece, Ginny, happened to be in Ethiopia, too, and were at church that morning. We visited with them for awhile after the service. 

We spent the rest of the morning at Sheger Park, near the Prime Minister's palace grounds. 

J and J beside a stone bearing the name of their tribe.

Ashton was amused that random strangers wanted to get their pictures taken with him.

We had lunch at Kategna, a traditional Ethiopian restaurant.

In the afternoon, we headed to Korah, a community of about 120,000 people who live in and around the city dump. It started as a place where the blind, crippled, leprous, etc. moved to be together and raise their children. The people there scavenge the dump for food and things to sell to make a bit of money. Tesfaye, a man who grew up in the dump, shared his testimony of what life is like there and how he came to know Jesus Christ. He shared a story of a time when he was desperately hungry, and was delighted when he stuck his hand into the trash and pulled out a potato. He took a bite before he realized that is was actually a dead rat. He also told of the time when a new kid came to the dump, and they were looking through the trash brought in from the airport that morning. All of a sudden, he noticed that the new kid had moved away and was eating something out of a bag he had found. Turns out that it was someone's barf bag from a plane. 

Korah was quite an experience. The living conditions there were absolutely heartbreaking, and there were huge vultures hovering above us. Even though the people there have nothing and live in tarp "homes," they were so welcoming and invited us into their living quarters. The children there followed us around, and we got to spend quite a bit of time with them. 

One boy wanted Adrian to autograph his hand. 😊

Before leaving, we handed out some food to the kids by our bus:

After going back to the guest house for awhile, we had dinner at Chanoly Noodle, one of my very favorite restaurants in Addis. Wass's wife, Mimi, met us there.