Hi to all Hopethiopia partners and encouragers,
I have now been back for a few days in Ethiopia. Hot and dry and not a snowflake in sight. The turn around on this trip has been very quick with a wonderful opportunity for our Ethiopian team to be here for the Prayer Mountain gathering in Ambaricho in southern Ethiopia. We will leave on our long drive to the mountain which has a peak at about 10,500 feet this Friday morning.
In the mean time it has been quite busy here in Addis and at our Hopethiopia project site. I started off the morning with Yemarshet and her survey engineer. She is the engineer that is heading up our water and sanitation system for the project in HC. We figured out some details and they will hopefully have the plans for the system soon. That will then allow us to hook up the children’s homes and the volunteer house that will soon be built.
Then it was off to meet some of the leadership of Ethiopian Airlines. Always super welcoming. Esayas, the Global sales VP was very busy but we met for a few minutes and arranged another lunch meeting next Monday. I then met with 3 women, all who are higher level administration of corporate sales and they are the ones that have been figuring out the discount agreements for Hopethiopia. They all have worked with EA for more than 20 years each. We worked out some details and then I got off on a tangent of leadership training for girls and women in HC. I explained what the girls in the high school had told Jenn (our oldest daughter) last time in Nov 2011 and that we needed to empower and encourage them. The 3 ladies were very interested in the opportunity (along with the director of PR for EA who is also female). Hopefully we can arrange for them to come out and do some leadership training.in Harbu Chulule
From there we went to purchase lots of electrical supplies that will provide all the power and lighting for our brick building facility. 3 phase power 380V will be used to run the machines and the area will be well lit as required.
Then we met with another brick building company that will provide the training for our team of workers that will build the bricks. We watched the process of building bricks and asked lots of questions. Hopefully we will start the training in the next couple of weeks
Lastly we went back to our head office in Alemgena where I met with Weinu, our accountant, for a couple of hours. He went through all our year end info, processes, and reports. Its amazing how far we have come and how God has blessed our operations and what is happening in the lives of the people in the community and to our team.
Tomorrow back to HC. It should be a really fun day.
