Day 4 for real

The night of rest was sort of a mess. There were people knocking on the gate starting at 5, and we didn’t get to sleep until around 1. The bus got stuck as it was trying to leave and so they wanted us to come and help push them, but that was not happening. They eventually got themselves out around 7.

There was NO food here and so the guard and I went to town to buy bread for the kids. We took a “taxi” and it took about 25 minutes for the whole turn. If we had walked the entire way it would have been about an hour or more. 50 small loaves of bread for was about $4.5, so that was cheap enough. The kids ate and are now playing in the yard.

There is so much to do and so little to do it with. The land lord is going to paint the bedrooms today, which mean we can’t allow the kids to sleep in those rooms until tomorrow. We will have the same sleeping arrangements tonight as last night, but there is a roof over our heads and the rain isn’t on us. God is so good.

We had a meeting with a “social worker” who is advising the staff what the best means to go forward on several fronts. He really likes the idea of the donkeys, especially when we told him we thought they should pay the “fund” back so that there would be donkeys in the future for other needy widows. He suggested that they start a water service; meaning the widows would hire a man who would work the donkey and get water to sell to the local workers. The widow and the man would split to profits and he would provide housing and she would provide food and she could still probably put a little money away at the end of each month and provide her a “salary”.

We had pasta for dinner. The Ethiopian food gets to me after just a few meals and so it is nice to have something that is normal to me.

Tonight we are sleeping in a hotel and here are a few pics of a "5 star" hotel in Sodo. This literally is the nicest one. The first night we had only a cold shower, the second night there was no water at all.


Overall a good day and it seems we got a lot accomplished.