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| Oh, the blogging….I may work on that this year….no promises. Our internet connection is still rubbish, and then there’s the dilemma of having a friend blog and an “I’m a missionary” blog. In a perfect world, I could swear equally on both, thus removing the need for separation. A good number of my students are “Facebook friends,” which eliminates the possibility of using that as a medium of self-integration. Whatev. I am on holiday….I haven’t had this much free time since the fall of ’04 in Grand Rapids, when I was unemployed and sold my plasma for grocery money. If only I had TRL at my new house in Addis I could have some more structure to my day. Kidding. Sort of. My new house is awesome….and FREE….and I’m sitting in front of a lovely fire, since it’s cold and rainy outside. Still teaching at Bingham, although this year it’s only Music and ESL. Planning to be in Addis for several more years. I finally got into The West Wing, which was awesome except for a) I have no way to find out who gets shot at the end of Season One and b) every time they show The Mall, I get a little homesick and want to run my seven-mile loop from Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial. I also just watched “Dan in Real Life,” which made me homesick for the East Coast, which I admit is a bit bizarre for someone from Nebraska living in Ethiopia. This last year was really difficult, and exhausting. Not bad, and actually full of great things, just busy and draining. I’m still processing a lot of it. No big updates on the social front. It has been confirmed that I am intimidating, but my level of bad-assness is unextinguishable, and I can only anticipate that it will increase. | | |
| Just like Christmas....What up....Yeah, so it's been awhile....what.
My email time was like Christmas this evening....a bit....few differences.
Anyway, I learned that I DON'T have to take the ridiculous State of Virginia crazy teaching license test, which saves me like a hundred bucks, which in Addis is like 900 birr, which is like a month of living for me.
AND, good connections with college peeps who randomly had links to great development organizations I can visit, or who are visiting, or who are just AWESOME.
If your up to speed on HIMYM, that was all done in a Marshall voice.
Just wanted to broadcast a big "thanks God" for working things out for me. There's other stuff, too, that was just a bit of my really blessed emailing tonight.
Addis is good, school is really busy, life is good, probably be here for a bit of time. Bril.
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I’ll be back in the states on Friday. Crazy.
Not sure if I’m ready for that, but either way, that’s when I get there.
Tonight, I built a fire, and then proceeded to cook t’ibbes
(fajita meat, Ethio style) over it in the pouring rain while wearing my nice
church outfit and high heels for the entire church choir. No
joke. Awesome. I had some help, but I still wanted to point out how awesome I am.
We're done with school, although I still have a lot of test grading to do, cleaning my classroom, moving to my new apartment, etc. And, still recovering from the wedding last weekend.
Some interesting drama lately......God has been so overwhelmingly graceful to me that I'm sort of speechless, and when I finally started to grasp that, He started in with pointing out new things I need to deal with and process.
Um, I love injera.
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| "It might be pretty....it might be clean....but it's not enough to change the world we're in."
--Madison Greene. Sums up my thoughts on religion right now.
More info on Alli: my hair is back to blond-ish. I have a lot of grading to do this weekend. We have tomorrow off of school. This week are our "Memory Verse Prize Day" events. We're taking the elementary to a forest preserve park on Thursday and Friday. Should be fun.
Blogspot isn't available in this country, so I started a new life-in-Addis blog: www.xanga.com/alliinaddis.
There's nothing there, but one day there will be.
I need to go buy tomatoes from my neighborhood veggie shack so I can make spaghetti sauce for the youth group.
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| It's been awhile. A busy while. The next few weeks will be an interesting mix of excitement, closure, tiredness, adrenaline, and concentration. At one point this week, I thought "I just need to get through the craziness until I can get to DC." But, then I realized that if I'm not happy when I'm tired and busy and stressed here, I still won't be all that happy once I get to DC. So, I decided to be happy. God is good.
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