One More Day To Go.

Wednesday Morning August 22 to Thursday Evening August 23, 2007

Wednesday morning, after eating breakfast at the Hotel, Almaz met us and we walked over to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. This hospital is specifically for woman with injuries from child birth. After the visit we went back to Hannah’s Hope and piled into the van to go out for lunch. We had lunch at a Starbucks’s clone (same colors and similar logo) and then headed to the Sheraton for Swimming. I managed to finally upload some pictures from the Sheraton, but I had to use a tricky backdoor method because Ethiopia blocks blogspot for censorship reasons. The Sheraton is the ultimate contrast in a land of many, but the pool is warm. As an impending thunderstorm loomed in the distance we headed back to the hotel for rest and dinner. As you can tell now that all the official business is done we’re just mostly hanging out. We managed to go to bed early around 8 PM and that was great until a South African army unit moved into the hotel at 11 PM. It was quite loud. Apparently they’re headed to Sudan as part of the UN force. Thursday morning we shared a hotel buffet with the soldiers and then we headed out for souvenir shopping. We hit an indoor and an outdoor market and then lunch and an art gallery.We also received our orders of Ethiopian coffee to take home with us. We’re back at the hotel now and later we’re going out for traditional Ethiopian food with music and dancing. I walked up the street a little while ago and bought some more of the local baby formula called “NAN 1” for Grace. She’s been a real trooper as we drag her all over Addis all day. She loves to talk and smile and is sleeping well. We are looking forward to getting her back home and settled in. We’ve been very fortunate with the weather here as it is the rainy season. We’ve had a consistent pattern of wet nights and dry days since we arrived. Tomorrow is our last day here in Ethiopia and there is not much scheduled. We’ll mostly wrap up, pack up and say goodbye. Our flight is a late night 10:40 PM departure from Addis, so we’ll have a late checkout from the Hotel. We’ll probably squeeze in one more update tomorrow but no more pictures until we get back. Pray for smooth flights back with Grace as they are 9 hour and 10 hour flights. God is good. Bye for now.

The Redman’s