Day 1- The Start of a Heart Transformation

The sun rising over Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

This morning we met on the seventh floor of the hotel as a team for devotions. The view of Addis was amazing! We talked about how blessed we are and how rather than feel guilty about it, we can use our wealth and talents to help others, as God would want us to.

Soon after the meeting, we gathered our supplies and left for Sendafa. The van drivers were members of the PAAV (Project Adopt a Village) team, and some of them doubled as translators. When we arrived in Sendafa, we were immediately struck by the level of poverty that the village was steeped in. I mean, you see those things on television, but when you see it firsthand, it really hits you hard.

Two boys watching us work on the water tank

The children are what really breaks your heart. Those dark, innocent eyes staring up at you, untouched by the hardship surrounding them, as they smile at you and try to hold your hand. It is so heart-wrenching. You want so badly to help each and every one of them.

We split into five teams of five people each. Two teams distributed ionized salt in one kilo bags to the people in the village with children. This is one way of getting them the healthy minerals that they need and that we take for granted. Two more teams went to visit single Mothers with AIDS. While they were visiting, they laid vinyl on the dirt floors and stapled fabric to the mud walls. This gives them a huge improvement in quality of life. They now have a surface on the floor that they can wash, and the bright fabric patterns on the walls lift their spirits.

The first chlorination system mock-up

I was on the fifth team. We are working on a chlorination system that will make the city water supply safe to drink without boiling for the first time… ever. We dry-fitted two chlorination systems (one for each water tank) to determine the dimensions of the block building that we would build atop the tank to contain the system. We also needed to ensure that we had all of the parts that we needed. After that, we went out to purchase enough cinder blocks to get started on one of the structures. We also hired a local mason to help us (mixing concrete is a little different, since they do not have bags of ready-mix in Ethiopia) and a horse-drawn cart to deliver the blocks to the tank.

After a late lunch, we all headed back to our hotel in Addis Ababa to inventory and seperate all of our supplies that we would need for the rest of the week. (we brought a couple dozen suitcases full of vinyl and fabric from the States)

Pile of dung patties

One thing that I saw today that I will never forget is this lady that we saw working near the water tank. In Sendafa, there are a lot of cattle, and not a lot of extra to use as fuel, so people use dry dung to burn for cooking fires. On the way to the village this morning, I noticed there were nicely shaped dung patties of uniform size stacked in piles for sale along the road. I knew someone had to have formed them into patties, but I had no idea how… until I saw this lady. She had a large pile of dung to which she would add some water to small amount of it at a time and pat this dung mixture into “cakes”… with her bare hands. You read that right. Bare hands. No gloves. She had dung covering her hands and halfway up to her elbows. After the patties dried in the sun, she would stack them to sell and make another batch. This is how she made her meager living.

To think that we complain about our cushy 9-5 jobs or our long commutes, or that we shake our fist at some jerk that cut us off and delayed us by about 2 seconds…

This was day one of a painful yet cleansing heart transformation process.