Soddo

Alarm screams at me to break dead silence.  Amharic music plays signifying the beginning of our adventure.  We wake, we walk, we fill the van of sixteen and we drive to collect two more.  It’s 4am by the time we exit the city gates that is lined by Ethiopian Air force fences.  It doesn’t take long and I am back to sleep along the steady roads between here and there.  Here being DebreZeit, there; Soddo, Wolayta.  

My sis squashes behind me, fourth on a three seated row.  She laughs as the girl next to me asks me something and I reply with a request for a repeat.  No repeat, just a shocked look and a turning head.  An obvious sign that her English vocabulary is entirely limited.  And she’s in University? I think.  Does she not even understand “Did you say something?”.  No she doesn’t.  So my sister giggles to herself in lone observation.  

Four and a half hours later and we drive down into the city which sits in the valley all wet and dirty.  It’s dressed in beautiful green mountains and far away lakes: Arba Minch.  It’s soil is red and It’s roads are hilly. 

We pull into the University grounds to unload the baggage mountain that steeples high on top of the van.  Seventeen students disembark and head to the buildings that lay ahead of the cobblestoned drive way we are parked upon..  My sis leaves me with her suitcase as she combs dormitory lists to find her name and her new home for the coming nine months.  She finds, we leave.  Suitcase and bags in tow and an excitement that is the product of knowing that there is a space that exists securing her place in her third year of study.  

The study though, is not what SHE would have chosen.  The University neither.  But the government has chosen this career for her out of lack of other places in areas of study that might have brought her joy, in a city that may have brought her comfort.  Instead she endures and she suffers.  She is strong though and I admire her deeply for that. 

Smelly hallways with dirty walls usher us into her new dormitory which houses six girls on three bunk beds with little room for anything else other than one small desk and a chair.  There are six cupboards that enclose one bunk against a wall and mattresses and pillows are additional condiments in this disastrous recipe.  I ask how she can sleep on these dirty pillows and she tells me of a fungal infection she had on the back of her neck the year before.  A new pillow is a critical necessity we buy. 

Once settled we board unfamiliar bajajs.  Theirs much wider than ours.  Able to fit four rather than the three “our” bajajs can hold.  I tease about the second hand bajajs being sent to this city.  But we climb a hill and reach the top for only two birr.  She teaches me about Quanta meat and the drying and salting process that preserves the meat we now eat mixed in with injera and spicy wot.  It’s totally agreeing with my taste buds and gets washed down with my first macchiato for the day.  It is already 11:30am.  

Walking through landscaped footpaths that lead into the next tourist town, I already notice the difference from here and there.  Or rather, they notice the difference in me.  Am I a foreigner? An Ethiopian?  Mixed blood? or Chinese?  Long straightened hair confuses India in the mix to which my public denial sends teenage girls into a cackling applause.  For two days, the attention is manageable.   A lifetime of curious gestures and stares would have me begging for anonymity.

As planned we arrive at the Soddo Christian hospital around lunch time.  Led down a rocky path through beautifully landscaped gardens, we arrive at the doorway to the beautiful home that belongs to the Doctor, his wife and their two beautiful children; one blond and blue eyed, one with gorgeous dark curly hair.  Furnishings which contend with American homes and well established home school routines.  They offer us lunch in true Ethiopian style to which we decline for a retreat to our bedrooms.  Back up the path and adjacent to the entrance of the hospital lies the place we call home for the night.  The bedroom crying for our company; tired bodies desiring still to be horizontal.This relationship has to wait.  

With power outages at home, this generator backed up power supply with kitchen and shower in tow, begged for some attention.  With permission to use the facilities and ability to do so, I bake in the company of my sis.  Wifi opens up the greatest recipe book that has ever existed for mankind and I scale it’s recipes for the lemon meringue pie we will share for our desert with the Doctors family.  To start the process I make the pastry and we head out the door for additional ingredients for the baking I will do later in the night. 

On our return, I meet Dr “Ears, Nose and Throat” who sits on the board for the Pan African Association for Christian Medical Centres (or something to that affect.) He tells me of the Mission medical centres they are responsible for and one sounds familiar.  The Kenyan one our friends visited before they visited us eighteen months ago.  Frustrated yet impacted they had arrived at our airport.  We played games and shared stories.  They brought us shopping and left us with news of ongoing supporting.  One day, we know they will return.

So we talk and he admires my baking and me and sis head off to dinner with the family.  Enchiladas, Mexican rice, tortilla chips with three different dips all lay upon the hardwood table.  Aquas and reds splash through the house and hug the coffee into the cup we hold to compliment the dessert.  This beautiful and patient wife saves her husband some dinner for when he arrives from his last minute call out that left dinner in his dust as he dashed out the door on our arrival.  My curious nature calls for question asking and ever learning the stories of those who come to serve the people we have come to love- the people of Ethiopia.  A Muslim man converting to Christianity because of an arm being bitten off by a lion and him receiving surgical miracles through this ministry.  Mission organization stories and furlough trips home. 

We indulged in good conversation simultaneously while indulging in good food.  The cute child conversations always taking precedence though before they headed off to bed.  We head off too.  Thankful for good company and delicious food, a place to rest and the offer of unlimited wifi. To which I take advantage of to make necessary skype calls to my boy.  He is staying with my mum.  We talk of plans to reunite, undisclosed information is shared and love is exchanged.  He’s growing up my boy.  Freedom is calling us apart and the approach of manhood drawing him away.  What to do with our separate lives and desired connection, we decide every day.  It’s a daily journey which is made easier by instant access in our hands yet made difficult by the limited waking hours that we share.

After skype calls and facebook crawls, we pack away two dozen freshly baked muffins and head to bed.  Finally, my body screams as I suddenly become aware of it’s tiredness and the lack of stillness it had experienced over the last twenty hours.  Not as normal, my eyes close and instantaneously sleep begins.  Not even woken by Muslim man crying at the five am call to prayer.  I sleep through to 6:30 and arise to make fruit salad for breakfast.  

So we eat and we shower and I read half an hour.  My eyes drawn to this book about the Holy Spirit that sits upon the bookshelf in the dining room. Chapter one talks of the journey of a man through the desert in a seven year growth of none in his ministry with thousands waiting for his prophecy to be fulfilled.  He is prepared in the desert and I am akin to the place in which he had learnt- the desert place where humility is gained and heart motivations are changed.  He later shares an important season in the harvest of his prophecy fulfilment where family are neglected and church leaders left holding down his fort.  It shook me and opened my eyes to something I had never read before.  I let it take root deep in my heart and have locked that pearl of wisdom away for when my harvest will come.  Ready though, to apply it today. 

Wailing starts wafting through the room like a wind through trees.  The sound of a woman in heart pain fixates with my heart and we lean towards the window sill to see what lies behind her cry.  “He” is in pain.  We find out who he is during our hospital tour.  In fact, we see him in the emergency room, covered with blood stained sheets, surrounded by doctors and nurses.  They roll him past me intercepting my procedure to the new CATscan building where our three tour guides await; so I stand and wait and they try to navigate his bed around the corner on which I stand.  He is old and grey and lacking life but she doesn’t know that yet.  We walk over his blood further down the ramp and as we cross into the cafeteria we hear screams of mourning.  “Abaye!Abaye!” requiring of us tears not just from me and sis but by many onlookers who are working at or visiting the hospital.  It is the resounding cry as we walk the next few blocks through.  “Many doctors come from the States and Europe and can’t stay for more than a year because of the emotional impact they experience.” “Abaye!” means “My father” in the most affectionate way you could say it.  Not just said with words but with the beating down of her body upon her legs.  I wouldn’t be able to handle it either.  Oh, you strong woman, I think.

We meet other doctors and hear the story of how this institution began.  We hear the vision to expand and the amount they need to expand it.  Three million dollars is a lot of money in Ethiopia but it is not a lot to the God who resources what He requires.  The paediatric ward was filled with babies suffering from Measles to epidemic proportions.  The emergency area was lined with unseen patients and the orthopaedic waiting room was not unlike the one I had visited in Addis earlier in the year- FULL of people with something broken.  This in the small town of Soddo.  A city surrounded by rural villages and neighbouring tourist towns.  A city whose streets are lined with homeless orphans with no shoes and monumental statues with classic cultural attire.  Oh, my heart ached for the city of Soddo.  This is where God requires His light to shine.  So we pray for his resources to flow and fill like the lake that furnishe. 

After a final girl talk over tibs and injera washed down with chlorine tasting Ambo water, my sis helps me get on a bus in the crowded bus stop.  The reality of being in the middle of nowhere hits you when faced with the realization that if I didn’t get on a bus at this time, I may not get on the road at all that day.  So we push and she asks the first man on the bus to save a seat for me to be the last girl on the bus.  The seat is saved and the way is paved for me to get on the road.  

We set off back along the road that I saw many people collect water from on the way down.  Puddles of water created by the night before’s rain, allowed people to drink that day- to wash their clothes, to cook their vegetables and lentils.  I saw people beating piles of corn and wondered if the popcorn I ate on many coffee ceremony occasions was sourced from the sides of these roads.

I listen in to the sound of Israel Houghton and switch over to Brooke Fraser.  Blessed to be a blessing is the theme that runs through my playlist and I am thankful for the blessed life I live.  Blessed to be around family and to have mine still intact.  Missing my husband more than ever, I wonder if I can be separated from him again to be reunited with my son.  Maybe its okay if I don’t go, I think.  Other alternatives are contemplated.  Something to talk over with the hubby when we reunite.  However, another reunion is awaiting.  I have three hours behind me and I arrive in Shashamene- the home of Rastafarianism and I jump off one bus and onto another.  Three hours later, I arrive in Koka.  It’s eight o’clock at night and I find myself walking in the dark again.  Boy, two days go by fast.  Instead of getting into a van full of strangers this time though, I jump into the back of a Ute filled with friends.