So… this was our homeschool science lesson last week! We had to slaughter a cow and the kids really wanted to watch. It was CRAZY! We will include pictures for those of you who are interested, but I will warn you they could be disturbing 🙂 We learned that cow stomach is a delicacy here – we will be trying it later on this week. On a side note, Shane had the pleasure of eating “kitfo” this week with a new Ethiopian friend. Kitfo is raw goat meat chopped up – yum!!

Why did we have to slaughter a cow you might ask? Well, the place where we live is the Langano Mission Station and on the station there is a camp called Camp Langano. The camp is hosting 70 staff members from Sports Friends this week and we needed food to feed them. You can’t just run to out to SAMS or Costco here for the big bulk purchase! For $100 we bought a cow that will feed everyone for a week.

The cow pictures are in chronological order for your viewing pleasure 🙂

The grocery stores are so different here. This past weekend we drove almost 2 hours to a town called Awassa to try to upload our last blog (it worked – woohoo!) and also to check out the grocery stores there. Oh my. We found about three grocery stores, but out of all them , not one place had butter, meat, or cheese. What’s up with that?! Then went to a huge outdoor market for produce where we literally were almost trampled to death. It was bananas. We were followed by a gang of people (about 30) and there were little kids everywhere. At one point some adult ran up and shooed all the kids away, sort of swatting at them, and they shooed Moses away right along with the other Ethiopian kids! I was like, “HEY! He’s MINE!!”

So… after a long day of grocery shopping, I ended up with the following…

Below is a picture of us on the way to church. We go to a little local church right on the edge of the compound. The service is in Amharic which is then translated into Oromifa, neither of which is any help to us. 🙂 The kids are going to be learning to be patient and sit still! Even though it is a bit of a beating to sit through a long service that we don’t understand, it is still so neat to think that we are really here getting to worship God from a different perspective alongside the local Ethiopians. We are definitely motivated to learn the language! We are working with a language helper three times a week and will be going to a short language course at the end of January. The language acquisition course we took in Colorado has been a huge help!

Shane had a fun experience this week. He was able to play soccer with all of the Sports Friends leaders that were here. His team made it to the finals and Shane scored the winning goal in a shootout! He was an instant hero – the Ethiopians threw him up on their shoulders and ran around the field celebrating. Then they interviewed him on video and made this huge deal out of it. They all said they were pretty surprised that a “Forengi” (foreigner) could actually play football. The name of the team they beat was the Baboons. 🙂 If you look closely at the photo, you can see cow manure all over the field.

A Few more pics…

This is a lady with her baby who came to nutrition day to get famine relief.

Mia enjoys coming down to the clinic to help out and she especially enjoys giving out clothes to the kids.

This is Moses on the banks of Lake Langano. The dog is one we have temporarily adopted while her family is in the states. Note that I said temporarily. Sweet dog, though.

We miss all of you and would love to hear from you! On the “contact info” tab at the front of our website we have added a phone number where you can call us. We will just need advanced notice since the phone is at the camp office and not at our house. Internet is still an issue for us and it takes FOREVER to get online. Keep praying that we come up with a workable solution. Someone from home asked us if it is actually kind of nice to not have internet, and, no, it STINKS! We feel so disconnected out here in the middle of nowhere. There are so many of you we would love to write to, but it has been next to impossible. Just know that we love you all!!