Top Ten List!

After each trip, I put together a list of the most interesting/fun/significant events for my "followers".  This time, it was especially difficult to distill it down to only 10.  But, with apologies to David Letterman, here goes...

10. Discovering that Ethiopia's wonderful natural carbonated spring water, Ambo, has introduced delicious fruit flavors!

9. Spending a great day of R&R at the Wondo Genet School of Forestry with Bob and Nancy, Judy's Peace Corps friends.  Beautiful scenery, lots of wildlife, and delicious home-cooked food!

8. Meeting people in small communities like Waryo, the 35-yr-old 7th grader who came back to school after 20 years and is now active in the school WASH club, and Amina, the proud and fiesty woman who told us how this project had "saved the lives of our children."

7. Holding Tahitina, the beautiful 3-month-old daughter of Mesfin, our translator and dear brother in Christ.  She was born 3 weeks after my last trip!

6. Seeing several of my close friends among our participants "in action" as we visited the communities in which they serve, and seeing the respect and affection that the community members have for them (as do I!)

5. Meeting my running hero, Haile Gebrselassie, the world record holder in the marathon and perhaps the greatest distance runner of all time - and learning that he is a friendly, humble, and gracious champion in all senses of the word.

4. Becoming close friends with our new participants, including Misrak, the charismatic new team leader for the South Ethiopia Synod, and Solomon, Feyisa, and Kasim, the Three Stooges of Wabe Batu.

3. Witnessing our community "teach-backs", in which our participants taught the lessons that we had taught to them, and realizing once again that we were leaving this work in the best of hands.

2. Hearing Arima, one of the community women in those teach-backs, describe how the knowledge that the participants had brought them was "worth more than a busload of money" because it would last forever as it was passed on to their children and their grandchildren.

And the number one experience for this amazing trip...

1. Being blessed with the unique opportunity to share in the entire scope of this project, by seeing our training come alive in the project communities, witnessing the holistic transformation of lives and communities that this ministry brings, and being forever transformed myself by the experience.