so yeah...long time...

So, I decided to skip school three weeks before the end of the semester and head off to Africa. It might have been a silly idea as far as academics go, but it was a great idea for many other reasons. I joined a humanitarian expedition that my father, sister and some other people I know from back home were going on with a group called ASCEND Alliance. They run a lot of missions down to South America, but they also have a standard biannual run to Ethiopia. So, I jumped on that bandwagon since Ethiopia is only a hop-skip-n'-a-jump away from Israel.
It was an astounding journey. I met up with everyone in the capital of Addis Ababa, after having tried my best to cram all the Amharic I could from the word bank found in the travel magazine of Ethiopian Airlines. I think I can still count to 10 and probably say thank you, hello, and what's your name? We took a small tour around the capital, above you can see us on tour at the main Cathedral of St. George, they didn't have electric lights in one section of a museum there, so we had to use liturgical candles to light the way. We saw Lucy, the oldest human fossil remains ever! (not as impressive as you might think...the picture to the left though is the menu from the restaurant right outside the museum though), and then headed down south to the town that we were staying in. The village we worked in, Bikkajjoo, was about 45 minutes outside of Debre Zeit. It was a larger village than I thought it would be, about 1500 people I think they said.
Anyway, it was a great experience. I mainly ended up helping as a gopher/small time first aid caregiver in the medical clinic that my father helped run because, as an EMT I have a little bit more than "none" in the medical training department. But I also rotated out to see the other projects and things that were going on. The group also helped refurbish a school (repainting, plastering, etc), building latrines for the community, playing soccer with the locals, giving out donated goods and clothing, and teaching courses on personal finances and personal hygiene.
We of course were mobbed by about a billion people. They all wanted to see the firanjis (white people/foreigners) and we had a lot of fun interacting with them. We ended up seeing about 2000 people in the medical clinic (rough estimate). We saw a lot of parasitic infections, eye problems, arthritis, etc, and a few random extreme cases. The nice thing about Ethiopia (as opposed to poorer nations...not that Ethiopia isn't poor...) was that there was a pretty nice hospital in Debre Zeit (where we were staying) that the villagers could get to if it was required, and the capital with an even greater medical facility wasn't completely out of the question.
So we had a lot of fun. It was another great experience that taught me a lot about how much I take for granted. Humility break now....
The last day, everyone else headed off to see some African wildlife in Kenya, but I had to get back to Jerusalem to finish off the semester. Sadly I also caught a really nasty bug that last day that had me puking outside of a souvenir shop in the capital before I went to the airport...at least I left a part of me in Ethiopia...

Sadly, I personally didn't take a lot of pictures, I was trying to be hard at work in the clinic and didn't end up taking tons. Also, they had assigned someone else to take pictures for the whole group and I will get copies of them (eventually). But here are a few. To the left is me and Tomrat, one of our translators. One of the ASCEND interns that was in-country basically raided the local church branch for members who could translate. There were 4 or 5 who were actually all getting their mission papers together. Tamrot wants to go to BYU for school eventually (after his mission, if you look carefully, you can see he's wearing a BYU shirt) to study chemical engineering. Below is the only real picture I have from in the clinic.