We were soon cruzing along a fairly smooth highway southward, to Nazareth. We were to make a stop there to introduce my fellow SALTer, M., to his new home and work. We pulled up to the school run by a partner organization there called Remember the Poorest Community. Upon entering the compound, we were greeted by children standing in neat lines chanting, "Welcome! Welcome! Welcome, " in unison. They wore paper hats and held signs welcoming M. to his new community and job. It was very cute. We met the head of this project which provides education, scholarships,and extra-curricular programming to AIDS orphans and children who would otherwise be on the street. This man himself had been a blind orphan, raised by an MCC school for blind boys. Now he is a brilliant leader. He had memorized M. and my bios and asked me such detailed questions such as whether I was raised in St. Paul or Minneapolis and whether my family was Scandanavian etc. based on that bio. He guessed M.'s exact hieght by feeling his shoulder. This is one of the men I had read about in the book Beyond our Prayers by Hege, which chronicled the history of the Mennonite Church and MCC here in Ethiopia.
After meeting M.'s new family and dropping off his bed, we headed north-east on the road towards Afar. The constant change of landscape as we drove was astonishing. We began with lush grassy areas filled with trees. Then there was less grass and vegetation. As we entered the Rift Valley it became drier. Rift Valley had deep gorges with some vegetation. As we drove the scene alternated between views of dry rock as far as the eye could see, some greener areas, black lunar-like volcanic rock and sandy desert-like regions. To be sure, the further we got from Addis the hotter it got, and the less "developed."
We stopped for lunch at a roadside resturaunt with an open patio. It used to be Mobile station. They only served injera and tibs, so we ate them quickly with our hnads and guzzled coke from glass bottles. I went around back to look for the bathroom and was pointed to a hole in the ground. I decided that I could hold it.
When we arrived in Logiya, I wished I had gone in the nicer bathroom earlier. At least that one had a door that closed. Logiya is on the road to the port in Djibouti so it was a logical stop for Ethiopian truckers. I was glad to have a 7 by 9 foot room to myself, that even included an overhead fan and a mosquito net. It was near 100 f. in Logiya that night. Many men were sleeping in beds covered by nets in the open area of the u shped motel. The showers were clearly built for men. The two showers were ajoined by a window. In this highly conservative area, where I had kept my head covered all day, it was more than a little akward showering(be it in my swimsuit) next to Muslim truckers.
That evening a young Afar man from our partner organization (APDA) came to intoduce himself to us as our guide. The CR., J., and our Ethiopian driver, Gosh A., were off fixing the Land Cruiser. The man told me about the Afar people and the MCC sponsored goat project that we had come to check on. When J. and Gosh A. arrived, the guide, A., informed them that the nomads and their goats that we wanted to see were very far north, almost to the Eritrean boader. As politcal tensions along the boader can be volitile, J. and Gosh A. conferred as to whether it would be safe. When they announced that we would go, I knew the following day would be quite an adventure.