”I'm dreaming of a green Christmas...”

We sang this on the way home from school today. Partly because we were being silly and partly because it is a bit weird for us to be celebrating christmas in this weather. Although I've done the whole “Christmas in the heat” thing before, it's different when you're at home in the cold, drinking hot chocolate (Because that's all anyone does in Scandinavia when it's december, right?!!). Malene took a picture when we lit the first advent candle because we lit it on our porch with a very green garden around it. We've been watching a Christmas calender (for those of you who don't know this is, it's basically a Christmas TV show that stretches over the first 24 days of December), at Jeanette and Christians house. They already have their Christmas tree up, so it always feels very christmassy to come over to their place.

One thing that has become very big for me this past week is how absolutely absurd the Christmas story really is. First of all Mary gets pregnant through the Holy Spirit, how weird is that?! Secondly, God in all his majesty is born as a little baby. I've heard the Christmas story about a thousand times and I've thought about it about a thousand times more, but never before has it dawned on me just how crazy it is! I mean seriously, God sent his own son to the earth as a baby! Jesus, the Lord of heaven and earth, had to learn to walk and talk and eat! I can't even begin to fathom a love like that, a love that makes you 

willing to risk your own son's life in order to save a bunch of people who do you wrong every day. I must admit, I don't quite understand the Christmas story. I think it is crazy and weird and sometimes maybe even a bit farfetched, but I also think that that's part of why it is so incredible. What God has done for me, for every human being on this planet, is so great that my little mind can't even begin to understand it. It's hard to comprehend that God loves me so much that he would set out this grand scheme just to save me. To be honest I don't think that the fact that we're having a green Christmas has that much to do with my little epiphany, I still get hung up on insignificant things like decorations, and which Christmas cookies to bake. But I am very, very thankful that I now can grasp just a teeny bit more of just how grand the Christmas miracle really is.

It's December!

Happy first of December! It's good to be back in Hawassa and we're doing our best to make our house feel a bit more Christmassy. Which isn't that tough when you have a roommate like the one I have! I got home to the image below. And yes, that is an advent calender with a gift for each day I feel pretty lucky. We're doing our best to keep up with the date on our advent candle, so far it's not going too great!

A house tour!

Here's the long awaited photos of our house! I forgot to take pictures of the kitchen, so you'll have to see that another time!

First up: My room

This is the bathroom

I'm standing in Malenes room taking the picture below and we got the pictures in hallway for Ethiopian New Years where kids go from door to door selling handmade pictures.

Guestroom

Living room

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We had the kids that we teach help us with the livingroom decor 

This is our screened-in porch that we love very much! 

And last but not least, Elisabeths pet deer!

A shopping trip in Addis

We''re in Addis now while the kids go to an international school here and so they can practice their English and being part of a larger class. The other day I went shopping and it was a pure delight! You can get quite a few more things here than in Hawassa and I can walk around almost completely without being yelled after for being a white girl. I only had to go to two different stores and got both sausages, bell peppers, yogurt, zucchini and quite a few other fruits and vegetables. 

We always have to clean our vegetables in chlorine before eating them. but it's something I've quickly become accustomed to, especially after my Tanzania days. 

 Sausages! From Denmark, this excited me a bit too much and the didn't taste nearly as good as they looked :-) 

I always bring my eggs home in a plastic bag, but this is the first time one of them's broken.

My job here in Addis is mostly to sit outside the room in case someone needs me, so I've been reading lots! I'm so proud of my students though, they are really incredible.

We went to Langano!

Last weekend we had a girls weekend (except for Moses) at Langano. Langano is the only lake in Ethiopia that you can swim in because there’s bilharzias in all the other lakes in Ethiopia. Although the water was brown and the sand wasn’t as white as Zanzibar, I think I enjoyed it just as much as I would’ve enjoyed Zanzibar! It was absolutely wonderful to get away for a weekend and relax. We played a whole lot of games. Especially Settlers of Catan (Settlers for i danskere!) Our last night there Malene and I hardly slept because it was raining so hard and when we got up it was still raining. The kids really wanted to go swimming (and if we’re being honest, so did the the volunteers!) so we ended up driving to the beach, running into the water while it was pouring, taking a quick swim and the running back up to the car to get warmed up again. It was so cold that my face was blue until I started swimming, but it was great fun and we felt like very cool volunteers!    

On another note my grandpa turns 70 years old today! I wanted to send him a video greeting on Skype and found this verse in process. “See, God has come to save me. I will trust in him not be afraid. The Lord God is my strength and my song; he has given me victory.” Is. 12, 2. In many ways I feel like my grandfather has lived his life on the peace and hope that is found in the victory that Jesus gave us, and it is a good reminder for me also. God is my peace, God is my joy and with him I don’t have to be afraid. I am so incredibly thankful to be in Ethiopia and I have truly fallen completely in love with Ethiopia, but that doesn't mean that it's always easy. It’s not always easy to be so far away from my family, to live in a country where everything is so completely different, to always to the center of attention when you’re out and yet still feel alone at times. BUT God is my strength and my song. That is why I can say that although being here is tough, it is worth every minute.    

The other day I went to the post office, that was quite an adventure in itself! Apparently you can easily help 3-4 customers at a time, especially if one of them is a white, quiet girl who hardly speaks any amharic. Turns out it is pretty cheap to post letters though, and they all the stamps necessary. What really made my day though, was walking outside and seeing this sign!

We have power, halleluja! I don't think I've ever loved my oven and frigde more!

In the dark

We're on day 7 with no power here in Hawassa. Apparently the transformer for our exact area blew during a pretty bad rain storm. The positive thing about it just being our transformer is that there is power on the compound where we work and where several other missionaries and volunteers live. This means we were able to save most of what was in our freezer and refrigerator. it's funny the things you realize when you in without power for so long. First of all I'm pretty spoiled, my first instinct is to complain that there is on power, complain and be grumpy. When in fact there is internet at the other compound so I still get to charge my phone, go on the internet and marvel at the miracle of light! In reality I have it so much better than many of the people I live among and yet I still want to complain. Secondly, you need power to wash your clothes! We are starting to get to the bottom of our clothes piles. Thirdly, evenings in Ethiopia without power are very long. I tend to go to bed around 9 because the darkness just makes you so tired. The fourth thing I've learned is that people are incredibly generous and helpful when you don't have power. We've been invited over countless of times by the missionaries and volunteers that live on the compound with power. It has given us a chance to get them better, and for that, I am thankful. Furthermore, you can do many things without power, especially when you own candles and a headlamp! I've read a lot, crocheted and in Thursday we had 15 people over for prayer meeting in the dark, and our guests helped prepare the food! Lastly the amount of food you can cook on one gas plate is pretty limited, but it is most certainly better than not having gas at all! And Ethiopia has lots of wonderful fruit that you can eat without having to cook it first. I must be honest and say though, that despite having learned many things through this power outage, I really do hope we'll get power again soon!

The picture below has nothing to do with what I just wrote, but I wanted you to see some of our "wildlife"

  

Scenes from our garden

Here are a couple of scenes from our garden 

We have a whole tree with these flowers!

These two pictures are of our house

I'm pretty fascinated by our garden monkeys!

My first week of teaching English

I know it's been too long since I last wrote! Everyday life is kicking in and as it turns out that means (surprise, surprise!) I have less time to blog. Add that to the fact that we don't have internet at our house you've got quite a bit of excuses! The truth is that I've missed blogging, so I'll try to get started again!

I had my first week of teaching English last week. It was incredibly challenging, but it was also really nice to just get started. I was so nervous the week upto so it felt good to just take the plunge! My students are fairly good at English so we will focus a lot on reading and writing whereas some of my colleagues have groups where the students hardly understand as simple words as man, woman, chair or dog. The students are all incredibly appreaciative so that makes it much more enjoyable. It's really nice to know that they aren't just annoyed that they have to learn English, but that they really want to! It's really interesting (and a but frustrating) to observe how much the way they're used to being taught influences them. They have an incredibly hard time using their imagination and responding to my "do you understand?" questions. They are however, incredibly at memorizing and very fast at copying things from the board. I did expect this a bit, but I'm still surprised at how severe it is! Most of all I love that we're teaching English at a Bible School so we're using a lot of Bible texts and using a lot of the new words in a biblical context. The first time I met my students, we prayed together. Even though the only word from the prayer that I understand was "Amen" it was beautiful and so touching.

Salt shakers, french fries and pizzas!

blog 18-9 the other day, malene and I decided we were craving burgers. I had been shown a burger place in town, and was pretty sure I'd be able to find it again so we set off. After walking for about 20 min, however, we realized that we'd been walking the completely opposite way of where we should be going (so much for knowing the way!) so we turned around and I was finally able to figure out which way we should go. finally we found the burger place and went inside, there weren't any other costumers so that worried us a bit, but we decided to give it a chance anyway. However when we ordered our burgers we were told that they had run out of french fries! We decided that we couldn't eat burgers without fries and left. We remembered that we'd heard about a pizza place not too far away, so we decided to try and find that. It took us quite a while, but eventually we found it. Here we got our french fries and some very interesting pizzas. turns out they didn't have the salami that was supposed to be on our pizzas, so they substituted it with ground beef. My pizza was also supposed to have Italian ham, but instead I got some sort of chicken sausage, gotta love eating in Ethiopia! suddenly Malene noticed that our salt shaker looked kind of funny and after a closer look we realized it was and old role-on dove deodorant bottle where they'd drilled holes in the lid! We got a good laugh and I, of course, snapped a picture! All in all trying to have burgers for lunch turned into quite an adventure, but we got to see more of hawassa and laugh some more of this wonderful country we're living in!

Our walk home - in pictures!

Since we live on the same compound as the kids, we walk them to and from school every day. There are always lots of kids shouting “foreigngy” (foreigner) and “Give me one birr” (the Ethiopian currency), as well as goats, donkeys, lambs and birds. Often we can also the Orthodox Church on their loudspeakers. The other day I decided to bring my camera on our walk home, and it turns out it was pretty popular to be photographed by the weird white girl. The mountain we walk by is called Tabor Mountain (which is why the college we will be teaching at is called Tabor Evangelical College) and is a prayer mountain, on all hours of the day you can hear people praying up there. At the end it started to rain, so I didn’t get the very last part of our 10-15 min walk. Anyways, here’s what a walk home might look like: