April 11, 2008

Can you imagine my pleasure at turning on a water faucet to the left and not only water but hot water came out?! Who invented this great thing? How does it really work?

I’m in Madrid, Spain, and it is beautiful. The food is amazing! I can’t decide if the favorite thing I’ve eaten is sardines over home made potato chips or grilled prawns served over rock salt. I’m staying with my friend Elena. She read about our work at the Trampled Rose in a newspaper here and has been helping us every since. Another very sweet friend, Patricia also read about us and organized a speaking time for me at the University of Madrid Medical School. I also got to see Patricia who wrote her thesis in Ethiopia about Fistula. We are having lunch today.

Elena took me to the supermarket and you have to wear plastic gloves to touch the produce. Isn’t that cool? I think I’ll start a movement in the USA.

I’m drinking lots of coffee this morning and trying to answer all the emails I could not get to in Ethiopia. The small rainy season should have started by now so there is an extreme shortage of water causing a lack of electricity. I was at the Sheraton Hotel last night hoping to finish some work at the Internet office and they even lost electricity.

Tomorrow I’m going to Paris to meet with Gwadenia, the group Cristina Gompertz started. They have been so helpful with so many things. I can’t wait to show them the pictures of our chicken farm. It’s so CLEAN because we haven’t been able to keep our sweet little chicks alive. I think we got to the root of the problem (we were cooking them in the chicken house). So….. we still have a little time before Easter to make a profit. I always thought that chickens just raised themselves and the humans threw a little food at them occasionally. Now I know. I will have more respect the next time I eat chickens. But now after kissing their little faces and giving them names, I’m not sure I can eat chickens again.

I have to say this has been — if not the best trip ever — one of the very best! It felt so wonderful as each way I turned great things happened. But the very most fun story!!!!!!

Our staff in Ethiopia is all very committed and hard working. There is a great shared feeling of hope and vision. But Kassa and I were the ones to work together the most. We would do twelve hour days and he would still push me for more work. I did make it to the spa and out to dinner a few times with friends but most was work. But it was the fun kind of work that quickly showed results.

On Friday I was feeling disappointed that most of my time had been spent with paperwork and not as much time as I love with the women of the Trampled Rose. So I headed myself on over to their school and sat down to work on my own skills on the Fidel, the Ethiopian Alphabet. We worked for about an hour and I decided that the teacher could not be too angry if I was bored and disrupted the class. So I started singing children’s songs with actions. The ladies loved it and it turned into dancing and singing from all the areas. I felt so lucky to have such friends.

We will have finished our third year of being a licensed NGO at the end of June. I won’t be back to Ethiopia until the last week of July or the first week of August. So we’ve been quite worried about getting the proper paper work done so that we have no interruption of services for the women who live at Women for Women. Also, I really don’t want to do anything illegal. The fear of prison in a developing country is even bigger than my fear of being stung by a bee swarm or loosing my mascara in the jungle.

So we worked. One day we needed seven signatures including one from the US Embassy to verify my signature. We kept at it and got pretty good results. Finally, we were down to my last day. I did have some dreams about saying goodbye to friends and having a relaxing dip from my little pink bucket (I didn’t have running water one day in three months in my house). But we didn’t give up our hope of the last day. After Kassa picked me up in the early morning we headed straight to the office to print off the final fixed asset report only to find that there was no electricity. So Netsenet took the computer in the car and went searching the city to find electricity to print the report. It was done! We ran it to the DPPA office only to discover that on the employee report about educational levels we could not leave the space blank — it had to say, “none”. So back to the computer. We fixed this detail. It was now about 4:00 in the afternoon but the office doesn’t usually close until 5:15. We took our paperwork back to the DPPA only to discover they needed one more paper from the Ministry of Justice. We knew it just wouldn’t happen.

The last time we got our agreement it took me over a year so I was disappointed but knew that step by step we would keep trying. As we walked past the secretary’s office, I stuck my head in her office to say “Goodbye.” We’ve become friends over the years and I did want to have one last chance to see her but her office was packed with people. She called me in and told me to wait. We waited….. finally after everyone was gone she checked to make sure everything was finished. When we told her what happened she called her boss and sent us into his office. He has also been a great supporter of ours and VERY helpful in every way. When I told him what happened he threw his hands up, asked me for the agreement, and signed it right then and there. So…WE ARE OPEN LEGALLY FOR AN ADDITIONAL THREE YEARS. I CAN GO BACK HOME WITHOUT WORRY!!!!!

I know it’s been tougher to communicate with you all this time, but I sure miss you! I’ll be back in my office by April 20th. I’m sure I’ll be able to get at least some more connection time before then. See you soon!