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This story available online:

www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2008/08913<http://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2008/08913

>Giving thanks

>A PC(USA) missionary letter from Ethiopia

>by Bruce and Lora Whearty
>PC(USA) mission workers in Addis Ababa

ADDIS ABABA - Lora and I are home in Addis Ababa from a
six-day trip to the western part of Ethiopia. We both have
fevers and sore throats and I have no voice at all, so it
will take us a couple of days on antibiotics to feel well
again.

We were accompanied on the trip by Michael and Rachel
Weller, who are leaving Ethiopia after 14 years of mission
work here, and by two young couples who are discerning a
call to service. We were guests, then, at a series of
farewell dinners of appreciation for the Wellers' past
service, but we were also a part of discussions about hopes
for the future of Ethiopian education.

We flew first to the town of Gambella, down in the scrub
grassland/forest that stretches from the Ethiopian
highlands west, marking the southern boundary of the
Sahara. The rainy season recently ended, so it was still
'cool,' that is, about 90 degrees.

Soldiers with machine guns lounged in the scanty shade of
some dusty trees at the edge of the runway. Michael warned
us that photos of the airport (or of any other
infrastructure such as bridges or dams) were forbidden. As
we crunched over the debris of spent shell casings and old
bottle caps toward the barbed wire airport perimeter, he
turned and said, "Welcome to Africa."

Within ten minutes of leaving the airport we saw our first
troop of baboons sitting on the rusty orange dirt road.
Within the first hour, as we drove east up the escarpment
of the highlands, we saw our first group of monkeys
swinging away through the tree leaves. The lowlands grew
vague behind us, obscured by humidity and by the smoke of
fires set by hunters to drive game into the open.

Back on the plateau that forms the heart of Ethiopia, we
stayed at Dembi Dollo, where the first Presbyterian mission
in Ethiopia was established in 1919. The future emperor,
Haile Selassie, heard that there was a Christian doctor
working in Sudan and invited him to come to Ethiopia to
help against the influenza pandemic.

Dr. Charles Lambe agreed, provided that he was allowed to
start a school and a church as well.

We toured the Brihane Yesus ("Light of Jesus") Elementary
School and the Bethel Evangelical Secondary School (BESS),
part of the heritage of that first mission, and we were
greatly impressed by serious students, well-kept grounds
and facilities, and efforts toward self-reliance. A small
coffee plantation, a large corn farm, a pig-raising
project, and a dairy cattle herd all contribute to the
schools' budgets.

We also visited a tract of 50,000 seedlings planted for
future school income. Dembi Dollo, at 5000 feet, looked
like Eden to us, with flowers and jacaranda trees and
bird-song everywhere. Even the starlings are iridescent
blue!

We also had the honor of visiting a tiny village of
Mujunger, a formerly hunting-and-gathering, nomadic people
who are now converting to farming as their ancestral
forests are being cleared. Michael Weller lived with them
for two years and helped them through the transition to
corn-farming and Christianity.

We watched a woman grind corn on a stone slab, rhythmically
pushing the grinding stone forward and back, and marveled
at the new rhythms that now mark the lives of the Mujunger.

We prayed in the small, mud-and-stick church up on the
hilltop, where the afternoon sun through the open doorway
lit the raised mud chancel area and the tattered cloth that
draped a wooden table.

After returning to Gambella, we drove out straight across
the endless lowlands. Cotton fields gave way to scrub
forest, and we saw baboons and monkeys, a small antelope,
even hopeful crocodiles drifting like innocent logs toward
the wary villagers fishing from the shoreline.

"Are there elephants here?" we asked. "Giraffes?" "Well,
there used to be, up until the violence." Hungry soldiers
armed with machine guns wiped out all the big game. Now
even the kites have learned to seek prey along the edges of
the hunters' fires.

We finally arrived at Gilo - a very isolated, Presbyterian
school. Gilo was closed for two years because of violence
that crested in 2003. There were problems between two local
people groups, the Nuer and the Anuak, complicated by
380,000 Sudanese refugees, rebel incursions from Sudan, and
military reprisals. Thousands of people were killed, tens
of thousands fled the area.

Today the school still has no water, because its well was
intentionally filled with rock and scrap metal. We visited
the classes, grades one to four, with up to 117 children
crammed into each stifling room. Like in the Mujunger
church, the only light comes through the open door. There
were painted 'posters' on some of the walls, such as a
diagram of the solar system, but they still show the
pockmarks of gunfire.

For teaching resources, the teachers each have a box of
chalk. They teach art by having kids fire clay sculptures
made from the local mud. We saw lumpy, gray giraffes and
elephants, modeled by kids who have never seen the real
animals. Music is taught by making stringed lutes out of
sticks and UN cooking-oil tins from the refugee camps.

So, this Thanksgiving, what are we grateful for? We find
that our "Thank you" list also provides a list of prayer
concerns.

We are grateful for our hosts from the Bethel Mekane Yesus
Synod. They fed and housed and chauffeured us, and
patiently answered our hundreds of questions. They continue
to wrestle daily with the issues surrounding the church's
work. $70 can repair a child-bride's fistula, for example,
but it could also buy books for the library, or feed the
hungry, or help educate a new pastor.

We are grateful for the service of the Wellers, and
missionaries like them stretching back across the years,
who have created this Presbyterian tradition that is so
welcoming to us. Rachel will be earning a degree in nursing
and public health over the next three years, in the hopes
of returning to the Gambella area and re-opening clinics
destroyed in the violence.

We are grateful for the courage of young couples who wonder
if God is calling them to mission, either as a career or as
one-year volunteers. (Who knows? Perhaps some of you are
being called, too! If you'd like to learn more, please
contact the PC(USA) Mission Service Recruitment by email
[nancy.cavalcante@pcusa.org] or at (888) 728-7228, ext
5280.).

We are grateful for the dedication of the directors of
Brihane Yesus and BESS, serving the church at one-half the
salary they could earn in business, who daily wrestle with
conflicting priorities, such as balancing the need to
provide an education for as many students as possible with
the need to limit class sizes.

We are grateful for the Mujunger, who can teach us about
freely adapting to new rhythms in our lives, rhythms that
are more in fitting with the needs of the present, rhythms
that call us not to repetition but to relearning and to
rebirth.

We are grateful for the example of the young teachers of
Gilo, who labor under conditions unimaginable to most of
us. They reminder us to never give up hope, not even in the
faces of ruined wells or bullet-ridden walls or classrooms
crammed with orphans.

We are grateful for the Nuer and Anuak people, who have
started a joint choir that travels to each other's churches
and sings each other's songs, and who together hosted us
for our final dinner in Gambella.

We are grateful that within a couple of days the orange
dust of the west will be washed from our clothes and shoes,
and we will even cough it out of our lungs, but it will
never leave our hearts. Please join us in prayer for the
day when we will stop wasting resources - especially human
lives - in violence, either against God's creation or
against each other.

Have a Thanksgiving filled with prayer and gratitude.

Information about and letters from PC(USA) mission workers
around the world is available at Mission Connections Web
site [www.pcusa.org/missionconnections].

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