This recounting won’t really follow the trip’s actual itinerary; rather, it’ll be in the order of 1)the pictures that I’ve gotten processed and 2)what I’m thinking about at the moment.
Most of the pictures I have processed came from the Bantu region, which is the most remote place we stayed during our time there. If memory serves, we were there for four days, sleeping in the empty ward rooms of a clinic in the area, no electricity, a 2 burner gas stove with which to cook for 9 people, and all the mosquitoes you could ever ask for.
The scenery outside the barbed wire boundary, which during the days made me feel as if we were carnival fare: objects of gross fascination, spectacles of the macabre or something, as the kids (who were all, supposedly, supposed to be in school) stood staring at us for hours when we had some down time. Never being one to disappoint an audience, I took to entertaining them by juggling rolls of toilet paper.
A couple of families lived inside the clinic, and when we arrived, the smallest boy just stared wide-eyed as all of these white people piled out of the van. Until I got out. At that point, the boy ran and hid behind his mother’s skirts, at the site of this, well, mountainous mountain man. I’m a pretty corpulent fellow, and I have a large beard, and at the time, my hair was also pretty long, too, so I can’t really blame the kid.
After we pulled out the Frisbee and taught a few of the people there how to play (they were almost instantaneously better than we were), the little boy, whose name I could never pronounce and have now forgotten completely, decided that we weren’t so bad after all. He ran around with us, picking up the Frisbee and throwing it as hard as he could, usually resulting in the Frisbee’s landing about 3 feet behind him. Just thinking about it now curls my all too cynical lips into a smile.
After a couple of days, he warmed up to me, and rather enjoyed playing with my beard. He also rather enjoyed playing with my camera, and I was glad of his extreme youth, which allowed me to keep the camera just out of reach.
The boy was truly a joy to have around, and we all had a good time playing chase or peek-a-boo, or whatever other games we could play through both the language and age barriers. He lifted our spirits in the midst of some pretty heavy times on the trip, and his presence couldn’t have been more welcome.
More stories from Ethiopia tomorrow!
NaBloPoMo entry #8.
What a wonderful picture of you and the little boy. This trip sounds fascinating. Why were you there? What were you doing? What inspired you to go? It sounds like something you will never forget.
Jamie: It was a humanitarian aid scouting trip. 7 students at my school, LeTourneau University, decided we wanted to do something there, and we started planning. We never found a faculty sponsor, so it ended up being just us, which was pretty cool. Basically, we went to several places looking at micro-finance, water purification, and educational opportunities so we could pick an area (probably a village) and work there specifically, hopefully to the point they wouldn’t need us anymore and we could move on to somewhere else. That’s it in a nutshell, anyhow. You’re right, though. I won’t ever forget.
Whenever my school gets around to posting their publication online, I’ll put a link up because the last issue I shot the cover and they gave me about 1300 words to write about it, as the cover story. It’s a little more informative than these posts will be.
The sentences in this post were all like umm . . . crazy. I guess I’ll just stick to that whole “look at the pretty pictures!” thing again.