Ok, so I am finally sitting down to write out a TON of blogs! I know. I said I would do that like two weeks ago. I’m sorry, that’s all I can say. So I don’t want to forget about Ethiopia, but lots of things are going on now. I will work my way through Ethiopia and end with what is going on now, or I will throw in the current stuff while putting up posts on Ethiopia. Who knows how this blog dump will go.

We will start with where I lived in Ethiopia and what we did there. We lived in a small oasis of sorts in the midst of the big capital city, Addis Ababa. It really was like an oasis, we had big walls around our compound and there was a beautiful yard with a Hollywood swing, some other lawn chairs and umbrellas. We built a fire pit while we were there so that pretty much completed the oasis picture.

First breakfast outside

The swing with the smaller one bedroom building behind

The compound is made up of three buildings. There was the main house where the missionaries lived, and where we did a lot of our construction work, there was another building that had three bedrooms and one storage room. The third building simply had one bedroom with a bathroom as well staff showers and a space to dry laundry.

View of main house

Our quaint little kitchen

We did quite a bit of construction work while we lived in this quiet oasis, which certainly was not quiet while we worked! We did several projects. One was to take apart three rooms to replaster and repaint. Before we did any plastering, we had to pound four holes in the walls to make room for some plumbing. This sounds like a one day thing, which maybe it would be in North America, but we were in Ethiopia. The walls that we had to pound holes in were made of solid rock and cement. Again, walls in North America can be made with solid rock and cement, but in North America we have power tools, and again we were in Ethiopia where they do not have such power tools. The walls we pounded holes in were 50-60 cm thick and all we had was one chisel, hammer, and a giant crowbar.  Not any easy task!

Ruslan pounding away at the giant rock

Making a trench for the plumbing in a small dusty room

I will make a long story short and just say that after pounding and pounding, recalculating, pounding some more, recalculating again we discovered that one of the walls was 2 meters thick making the plumbing project impossible! This naturally was only discovered after 2 of the 4 holes had been made. Since the calculation was not our fault we were treated to a burger and pizza joint, making it all worth it.

Mmmm, my first burger in 3 months!

So now our projects turned into filling in the giant holes, before replastering. We replastered and painted three rooms before we left Ethiopia. We also built a nice fire pit, moved a rock pile, cleaned up some areas around the compound and created a wood pile. All of which we were able to enjoy.

One tough team, moving rocks and mountains!