So a few weeks ago my younger brother David asked me to write down my Ethiopian experience. It came as sort of a shock to me that my 14 year old brother would have so much insight from the examples and suggestions he gave me. So I've officially dubbed him as my Editor. Here is just a sample of the first page from my book so far. I'm not very far at all, just 5 single spaced pages in Word, but it is a work in progress.
A quick, yet refreshing breeze brought me back from my deep thoughts as a mini bus sped by at 80 kilometers an hour along the only one lane paved road in Arsi Negelle, Ethiopia. I had to do a double take to make sure I really had seen what I’d thought on top of the minibus. Two goats tied together, heads thrown back, tongue flapping in the wind, screaming as their lives flashed before their eyes. It sounded like the Ethiopia version of a train speeding by, but with screaming goats. I couldn’t help but laugh as I turned to Sarah trudging along beside me,
“Did you check out super goat on that minibus?”
She shook her head and sang under her breath what would become the theme of our so called excursion “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.” Thank you Dory. Who would have thought that the greatest words of wisdom I’d heard before coming to Ethiopia would come from Pixar’s “Finding Nemo”.
You’d think that after 3 weeks of living in Arsi Negelle, working for a Non-Profit Organization, we’d be used to the strange things that kept popping up like daisies, but I’d already resolved to the fact that I would never fully get used to everything here. We kept walking down the road in the heat of the noon day sun, about another mile from Village of Hope, looking forward to the inevitable rain that would hit that afternoon. The rainy season is almost as predictable as BYU losing their next bowl game. It seemed like the rainy season was the only constant I’d found since arrival.
