Operation Rescue Ethiopia

Hi all!  And thank you, everyone, for your sweet and thoughtful comments on Daniel's blog entry last week.  Your support and interest in our lives has really made this weekly reflection meaningful for us.

Today, I'd like to write a little bit about Operation Rescue Ethiopia (ORE), where our family is volunteering. It's kind of like a Boys and Girls club for the very poor of Mekele - almost like an all-ages before and after school program.  Rather than delve into the history of this organization here, let me just provide a link to their website and allow you to peruse it at your leisure.

http://operationrescue.ch/wer-wir-sind/founders-and-history/?lang=en 

Mark and I teach English classes every day, from 2-3 pm, and then play with the kids for another 2 hours or so.  By some stroke of luck, I was assigned to teach older kids and Mark was assigned to the younger set.  There's a lot more drama in his class than in mine; he often has to pull kids apart.  I'm sure it's both frustrating and a relief not to speak Tigrinya well in those cases; he knows enough to say "Stop it!" but not enough to get into who started it and why.  Daniel and Micah are in the class with him every other day, on their afternoons off from home school.  Eli helps out in my class and I have mainly reminded my students not to learn English from Hip Hop and gotten them to practice saying "the" and not "ze".  I'm just kidding, I do a little more than that, but being a bio teacher has not prepared me for teaching English.  That's for sure.

But I really wanted to tell you about a visit I was able to make to an ORE family after a friend of mine donated some clothes and toys a few weeks ago.  As she drove away, she said, "I'm not sure if anyone can use them, but if they can't, just get rid of 'em."  I forgot all about those donations until Heywota - the head of the kitchen and all around mother of the place, and Birho - the nurse/social worker at ORE pulled me aside and told me about a family that had lost the mother to brain cancer 7 months ago.  Heywota asked me to come by and take some pictures for my friend so she could see how useful her donation was.  When I came to take the pictures, the two youngest girls in the family had just taken a shower at the center and Heywota was fixing a ribbon in the older one's hair.
Their father is a daily worker which means sometimes he finds work and other times he doesn't.  Their primary caretaker is their sister, a lovely young girl of ten.  A more mature ten year old you have never seen.

Heywota had explained that the little toddler was still not potty trained and was always in soiled clothes.  Any mother knows that when a toddler is getting potty trained, having clean clothes handy is crucial.  But what if there's no mother?  What if the closest thing you have is a ten-year old sister who doesn't know how to wash clothes well, and who might not have access to nearly enough running water, and who needs to go to school and somehow get dinner on for everyone in the house, while taking care of you?  Birho had visited the family and saw that the two little ones were eating a stew that looked like it might have been sitting out for days.  She and Heywota knew that such young ones were not usually admitted to ORE, but took it upon themselves to get special dispensation for them. 

As if to ensure that I understood the situation, Birho suggested that I pay a visit to the family home with her, which I did.  We took the route the ten year old sister takes with her tiny siblings to and from ORE every day when she drops them off and picks them up.  It was at least a twenty minute walk that took us across two major roads.  The family lives in a small compound that they share with a few other families.  The six of them (dad, oldest brother, another brother, the ten year old sister and the two little ones) share one room of that compound.  In the room is one large bed with a couple of mattresses rolled up underneath it, a china cabinet, several large barrels for water storage, a small bench, and a little tv.  It was clean, because our young hostess had stayed up late the night before, cleaning it for our visit.

Birho dispenses wisdom.

It was so great to meet this family. And please don't think I'm romanticizing childhood when I say this, but I know that children are extremely resilient.  Seeing these kids live their lives as little adults is not an easy thing, but I get the sense from looking around at the success stories at ORE that they'll make it.  When I asked Heywota and Birho (separately) how these kids would survive, they both looked at me and said without any grandstanding that they'd had it worse as kids.  That's hard to believe, but they both stressed that that's why they wanted me to see with my own eyes what drives them to do the work they do, and what should be in the back of my mind every time I or anyone else thinks that a donation of clothes or toys might be useless.  Behind our little ten-year old hostess is a pink plastic bag of goodies that my friend donated.  No way would we ever have gotten rid of that bag.

Okay, I'm sorry.  I can't help myself.  But I did mention that this family had a small TV, right?  Well, guess what was playing when we came in?  You guessed it; Shinkur Libotch.  My favorite soap opera.  Before you cast judgement on me for bringing this up at this moment, consider this; I had a full-on conversation with those two kids about the awfulness of Hazal.  We bonded over this common feeling, and I think we got to know each other a little bit better because of it.  They also confirmed my feeling that her grandfather, Ato Rahmi is (in my broken Tigrinia) good in heart, but bad in head.

In all seriousness, thank goodness for ORE, and for the staff of ORE who never restrict themselves to one role, ever.  It's a privilege to work alongside them, I tell you.

Speaking of not restricting themselves to one role; the gardener/handy-man, guard, and one of the social workers at ORE invited us and the departing Swiss volunteers to witness the slaughtering of a cow.  This is an annual tradition in which the Swiss missionaries buy a cow, watch it get slaughtered, and reluctantly eat it the next day. I feel the picture of the boys with the unsuspecting cow in the background tells you everything you need to know about how they felt about it.  For my part, I can now say been there, done that.  I don't intend to ever watch that happen again, thank you.

So dear friends, it's late, and I feel very tired.  But a reader asked how to help support ORE.  Well, hopefully reading this has made you think about the children's clothes you have that you're about to get rid of.  Maybe you want to drive it over to my house in Silver Spring, MD before December 15 so that my dad can pack it up and bring it out here with him when he comes for a visit.  If this is something that interests you, please let me know and I'll get you the address and more specific info.  Soon, we will also let you know how you can sponsor a child, if you like.  But for now, if you're praying for us, we thank you.  If you're thinking of us, we thank you for that, too.  

If you're not thinking of us then you wouldn't ever be reading this.  I think it's time to go to bed.

PS....I know I already brought this up, but what the heck.  Hazal's evil knows no bounds.  She is pretending to be paralyzed so that everyone will take care of her.  But we all saw her toe tapping and it's just a matter of time before someone else sees it too and throws her into the Bosphorus once and for all.