March 27, 2007
Today I met four of the most strong, resilient women I’ve ever had the privilege of talking to.* Four women who raise the standards of mothers. I can only hope their children will one day understand how amazing their mothers are.

After two hours, we arrived in Walliso, a rural community 110 kms from Addis. As soon as we arrived in town, children ran alongside the truck, pointing at the white people inside. They giggled when we waved, even more when we spoke to them in English.

The first mother I would meet was Elech, and her daughter, Sig. While I waited for my questions and her answers to be translated, I made faces at Sig, who rewarded me with wide, toothless grins. She waved her arms in the air and made thwacking sounds on the smooth wooden desk in front of her. When Elech caught as at our game, she smiled shyly.

Elech summed up her need for help simply: “I am poor.” She rarely looked at me when she spoke, but rather she kept her eyes on Sig, who wriggled in a stained sling wrapped around her mother’s body. But despite her shyness, Elech looked regal. Her strong face displayed her will to survive. She was not giving up. She was humbly plowing forward, inspired by the grins and laughs of her child.

Nesh was the second mother I met. Her daughter, Bec, was a blur of activity, exploring the small office where we sat. When she discovered no toys or food, she climbed back in her mother’s lap, tugging impatiently at her blouse.

Nesh seemed tired. More than just raising an active 18-month-old tired, but something deeper, harder. I soon learned that she has a heart defect that drained her energy and left her weak. But still, even through her exhaustion, her love for her child broke through. As she waited for the translations to finish, she looked tenderly at her feeding daughter, gently smoothing her hair and kissing her forehead.

As I took the pictures of Elech and Nesh, I knew those flat images couldn’t capture what I saw. The fierce determination. The humble power. The weary love. The beauty. But I took them anyway, a memory burned to photo paper, saved to a hard-drive, emailed and posted and printed. Their stories must be told.

After a brief lunch, we went on to the next project. I was excited that this time I would be visiting two mothers in their homes.

Kesh greeted us at the fence that surrounded her home. A latrine leaned to the side near a water pump. By her community’s standards, life was not too bad. Len, her 17-mongh-old son stood in the front yard, naked from the waist down. He waved to us, then ran around, chattering in either Amharic or his own invented language. I couldn’t tell the difference.

As we began talking, rain fell outside, thunderous on the metal roof. I leaned so close that I could brush away the large flies that lit on the scab that covered Len’s knee.

I quickly learned that Kesh has AIDS. Like Nesh, she has little energy to care for her active, headstrong son. Even wrestling an item out of his hand visibly tires her. But Kesh has retained her sense of humor. When I asked her what her hopes for her son’s future were, her answer inspired laughter to fill the room—“I hope he will go abroad.”

It saddens me that Kesh takes a 3-hour bus ride to the city each week to receive medical treatment. It saddens me because a hospital is a close walk away, but the stigma of her disease is too great to risk being seen by her neighbors.

The stigma she’s afraid of shouldn’t exist anymore. It is her own silence that holds her prisoner. The likelihood is each person in her community has teen touched by AIDS. Perhaps her next-door neighbor suffers from AIDS. Perhaps the woman she boys vegetables from in the market. Her best friend. Surely someone she loves has AIDS. Why hasn’t she learned yet that AIDS is not a punishment? When will her neighbors understand that they can’t catch this disease by shaking her hand or giving her a kiss on the cheek?

The last home we visited was tiny, surrounded by narrow strips of muddy ground. Here, Mara shared the 2-room home with her mother, two sisters, and her 11-month-old daughter, Helena.

Mara left home when she was in the 8th grade. She worked at a bar, and her days were filled with leering men who quickly stole her innocence. When she was 21, one of those men left her pregnant and alone. With no money, no husband and no way of supporting her child, Mara returned home.

When Helena was born, Mara was poised to flee again. Raising a child was hard. The newspapered walls of her home seemed to close in on her. Most days, Helena lay on a stained pillow until her grandmother would comfort the crying child.

But when Mara joined our program, she began to learn how to enjoy Helena. She felt less restless as she spent her days learning about nutrition and hygiene. She began to have coffee with other mothers, and together they brag about their growing children. And when Helena smiles with her chubby cheeks, Mara feels her heart tug. She’s still young. She’s still inexperienced. But finally, she‘s a mother.

As we left Mara’s home she stood shyly, her young face serious. When I took her photo, I had to convince her to smile. I wonder what keeps away her smile. The tiny, dark house? The responsibilities of motherhood? The hunger in her stomach?

But finally, the smile comes. Maybe it is from the warm, wriggling body of Helena. Maybe our conversation had served as a reminder of the hope she’s found. Perhaps she is recalling her answer to my last question that I asked a moment ago, when I inquired about her daughter’s future—“I want her to be a doctor,” she said with a wide smile.

As we pulled away onto the freshly muddy streets, we are surrounded by children. I hang my arm out the window, and they eagerly reach for it, shaking my hand, touching my skin. I can still feel their fingers, even as we pull onto the paved road miles away. Still hear their shouts. Still see their eyes.

Ethiopia is inside me.

(*The names of the people in this story have been changed.)

March 26, 2007
Today softened my view of Ethiopia. In the center of this busy city, I found beauty. Beauty in the faces of dozens of students who piled out of their classroom to smile for my camera. Beauty in the young boy who tugged at my shirt. As I bent low he asked me “How are you today?” then grinned widely at my words of praise. Beauty in the parade of children who followed me around the playground, shouting to all of their friends “Look, she’s white!” Beauty in the squeals and giggles that erupted each time I touched the top of one of the small heads at my waist. Beauty in the sweet little girls who swung on the gate as I walked back to the van, blowing me kisses each time I turned to wave.

What a blessing those precious little ones were. They couldn’t possibly understand that just one hour with them was enough to get me through the trip back to the hotel. Because for each child who knocked at my window, I knew there were a dozen more who had been provided an escape.

March 25, 2007
I’ve never been this close to poverty. I’ve read about it, I’ve written about it, I’ve seen it on television and in glossy pictures in magazines.

But today, it stood inches from me, separated only by a smudged window in the van I rode in. I didn’t know what to do when a child’s eyes peered into mine, her dirt-caked fingernails scratching at the window. I looked in my lap, at my own clean fingernails, listening to her beg in words that I couldn’t understand. But the message was all too clear.

It appeared again as we waited at a red light on a crowded street This time, as a mother. Her wrinkled brown breast hung out of her blouse, and the baby in her arms reached for it hungrily, his pink tongue bright against her skin. She held out her hands while I stared at the floor.

Over and over, at every stop, one or two would leave their spot in the shade to investigate the rich American. “Begging is bad—you should work for your money,” our Ethiopian friends say as the light turns green and we roll away in a cloud of gray exhaust.

I don’t even know how to close this entry. For the past ten minutes, I have stared out of my window at the darkening sky, waiting for rain. It hasn’t come yet, but when it does, I wonder what all of those people I saw today will do. Will the child play in puddles, allowing the rain to turn the dust on her body to mud?

Will the mother run for cover, shielding her child from the fat raindrops? Will the shade protect the others from the rain the same way it protects them from the sun?

What will I do? Will I stand in the rain, if only for a moment, my hands cupped, catching the rain in them, then letting it trickle to the ground? Or will I hide from the thunder and wind, averting my eyes again?

March 24, 2007
Ethiopia snuck up on me. As our plane landed at two this morning, all I could see were straight lines of streetlights. It didn’t look like Africa. It looked like any number of cities I’ve flown into in the United States.

The drive to the hotel was quick, and the dark streets were empty. My sleep-deprived mind processed little. Dark buildings. Road signs. Flickering orange lights lined the sidewalks.

But this morning, Ethiopia woke up, long before I opened my gauzy hotel curtains. A slum spread out below me. It must have been asleep last night—sleeping off the day of hunger, disease and poverty.

On the drive to lunch, I said little, my eyes trained on the streets teeming with people. I tried not to stare. I averted my eyes as people peered into our van—ashamed at my comfortable clothes, wallet full of wrinkled cash, even the color of my skin. But the sights kept drawing me back. The old men, their bodies twisted, dragging themselves along the sidewalks. The women, regal in their colorful dresses, heads held high. The children—so many children! They darted in front of cars, their dusty bodies gray in the bright sunshine.

I couldn’t shake the images. As I sat with my two new Ethiopian friends, the sound of their foreign words bouncing off my still tired brain, the city spread out below us, my mind continued to feebly process.

“You’re too quiet,” my friends teased. I just smiled at their observation. I couldn’t process it all.

Gradually, the initial—not shock, but lack of understanding—begin to clear. “Pace yourself,” I told myself as I sipped thick papaya juice. “It’s just your first day.”

So here I sit, at the pool at my hotel. Naked children scream and splash. My white skin stands out less here. But I know that just on the other side of the dense green trees and shrubs that shield me, there is another world. One rife with poverty.

A country of people whose story I am to tell.

A country of people who have already crept into my heart.

March 22, 2007
10:30 a.m.
Denver International Airport

I could get used to traveling first-class. Hanging out at the Admiral’s Club. Reading the Wall Street Journal.

Our flight to Chicago is already delayed, but thankfully we had a three-hour layover, so hopefully we’ll be fine. Missing the flight to London would royally suck (get it, London, royally. You know I’m funny.)

It’s funny to me that 36 hours ago, I wasn’t even sure if this trip was going to happen. Some issues came up, some doubts were cast, and I was left in limbo, my emotions protesting at the yanking around they had dealt with. I don’t think they’ll stop complaining until our plane touches down in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia!

I always like to process before a trip…try to figure out what my expectations are, preparing myself emotionally and spiritually. This trip encompasses so many firsts for me. My first time to Africa. My first trip with Compassion. My first encounter with unbelievable poverty. I’ve seen poverty before. I saw it in the tiny cinderblock houses in Brazil, in the long extension cords that shared electricity from the house of the most “wealthy” to the least.

But I didn’t see poverty like expect to see in Ethiopia. I didn’t see children whose stomachs were bloated with hunger. I didn’t see mothers dying of AIDS. I didn’t see houses of cardboard and dung.

Part of me is scared that my heart is hard, that this poverty will just bounce off of it. But then, the other part of me is scared that I won’t be able to handle it. That my heart will implode under the weight of what I will see.

When I shared those fears with my prayer group, the most succinct way I could think to pray was that God will break my heart while keeping me together enough to do what He’s called me there to do. To tell the stories of these beautiful mothers who are doing all they can to raise their children. To serve with dedicated Compassion workers who spend countless hours traveling to distant villages and patiently teaching mothers how to keep their children healthy, their homes clean and their stomachs full. To open my eyes to the ministry of Compassion, and see first-hand the lives that are being changed, even saved.

Well, that’s entry number one. I’m curious to see how this will compare to the entry I will surely write when I return to Denver. Maybe I’ll sit in this very same chair, with the people of Ethiopia embedded firmly in my heart and their stories flowing through my fingers.