It's bedtime in Ethiopia

I know this because I added a clock for Addis Ababa. Look to the right. Kyle will be there in nine days. He'll be staying for three weeks, visiting orphanages, doing Bible Storying (not sure what this is, but he's reading up on it) and visiting his Compassion child, Teshome. I'm confident Alison will ask more than once a day what Dad is doing, and it's easier for me to imagine what that might be if I have an idea of what time it is. For the second half of each day, I'll be able to tell her that he is sleeping. Amazing. I think she is getting the concept that there is life happening on the other side of the world. For the first year of her life, HER life was happening on the other side of the world. Or maybe - better put - our life was happening on the other side of the world.

Ethiopia is the only African country that was never colonized. It is a proud place, and the culture is rich and deep. The people are full of life and and gracious hospitality. There are 5 million orphans in Ethiopia - which is most likely an extremely conservative estimate. Most of the children are true orphans - the technical definition for an orphan is a child who has lost both parents to death. The children are orphaned because of AIDS, tuberculosis, hunger, malaria. We can do so little. Anything seems like an almost worthless drop in the bucket. For a long time, we couldn't imagine investing so much into a place that seemed without hope. For a while, I began asking God why He would allow such a pandemic to exist - parents dying of AIDS every few minutes, children being orphaned. Why, God, don't you do something about this, since you have the power? You could ask that question about a lot of things. Why allow war to continue? Why allow people to live in dark places where they are treated without dignity? Why doesn't God do something about it? And then, I realized that perhaps the idea is that those of us who are supposed to be the hands and feet of God here on earth are the ones who are supposed to be doing something about it. There are enough of us here, and if we decided to do something....anything....then perhaps quite a lot could get done. We seem to find ourselves doing so many other things that seem sort of trivial. Me included. I'm the queen of trivial time-wasting. I'm sitting here blogging aren't I?

So Kyle is going to Ethiopia, not to save 5 million children, but to look some of them in the eye and let them know that there are people on the other side of the world who care. And it's true. We have about 500 shoes in our garage to prove it. But that's another story....