Trip to Zeway

Mon Feb 9

Dick and I met our driver, Blatto, at the round a bout at 7 am. We heade East and south on our 3 hour journey to Zeway. We will be spending 2 days with Gary and Peggy whom Dick knows from language school he attended last year. Gary is an Ethiopian Greg Mortenson. the usual perils, mini buses, crazy cars, thousands of walkers and a new challenge – 3 wheeled taxis imported from India with former donkey cart drivers at the wheel. Add to this the constant stream of goats, sheep,cattle, occasional camels and angry brhma bulls and you have an interesting 3 hour thrill ride. Blotto is an Ethiopian Bill Vuchavich –to date myself- and does a masterful job of weaving through this menagerie at 60mph.. We arrive at Gary’s place a comfortable 2 bedroom home that he rents. We are immediately taken to one of his budding schools a one room building with about 50 kids who are in pre k. They range in age from 4 to 7. They like all of the kids here rush to greet the Forengis. You feel like a prince if somewhat embarrassed by all of the attention.

It is difficult to describe Gary – he spent a long time as a chief bean counter for State Farm Insurance until he and Peggy heard the calling of their God. They have since done missionary work from Brazil to Africa. Until now I have rarely met a Christian whom I considered to be a true follower of what I think Christianity really means but Gary and Peggy are the real thing. They are not the pompous mountebanks that one encounters in every corner of the world. They are not in search of riches except those that naturally occur when you are as giving as they are.They are here to help people who need help and not primarily to lead them down the path to rightousness. I digress, the school has little light but the children sit 3 to a desk bug eyed with desire to learn, enthusiastically waving there hands and shouting Mister , mister when a question is asked. They are enticed to school because of the feeding program Peggy has started but they stay because of this very tangible hunger to learn. I am humbled by what I see – so much good.

Peggy and Gary are just putting in propane gas burners at the school and we help in the hook up. Tomorrow morning will be the first time gas is used and the Ethiopian ladies see no advantage to gas even though it is cleaner and easier to use than wood . Tomorrow is the big test and we are all anxious for the morning feeding. But right now it is time to see the hippos.

We regroup at Gary’s house after visiting a new hotel owned and built by a guy named teddy who shows us his attached wood shop where he makes fine beds and school furniture. The workmanship in this shop is far beyond most Ethiopian building standards. Teddy has also air conditioned several of the beautifully wood floored rooms in his new hotel. Dick ,Gary two of his workers and I head for the lake to rent a boat to take us to the hippos.

We hire a maybe 20 ft boat and driver for 300 birr 25 dollars. Lake Zeway is quite large, maybe the size of Millacs, and has large and small islands on it. You can,t swim in it because it has flukes like the ones that cause swimmers itch in Minnesota only these flukes cause cancer which make them a tad more annoying. I love the boat, it is wide and deep and powered by an out board that sounds and looks like a 3hp Sea King circa 1946. But it moves us close to the hippos who are congregated about a mile from shore in fairly shallow water. Their curiosity is aroused as we approach. They go under and then breach with open mouths and pig eyes facing us from about 50 feet. They are huge and their open mouths look like bay windows. I take pictures but the boat is bouncing and I am shaking and then the driver kills the engine and we drift toward them. The driver laughs as one hippo breaches within 20 feet. He restarts the engie moves to the side of the pod. This is not exactly like herding mudhens in duck boats. These babies could make splinters out of the boat if we pissed them off enough. After about twenty minutes of photo ops the driver turns and heads to shore. As we deboat I walk over to a commercial fish fry spot where they are filleting fresh caught fish and frying them in some kind of oil. We are having fresh fish at Gary’s tonight but I am tempted to try this.

Day 2 Zeway

After breakfast we return to school for the inaugural gas fired breakfast and everything works well. After breakfast I wander into a third grade class with 45 kids and no teacher. So I take over the class and begin with word ladders. The kids seem to have some idea about word families and enthusiastically rush to the front of the room to write a consonant in front of "at" to form a word. Everyone claps when this is done and I erase it and call for another. This goes on for 30 minutes and we switch gears and talk about animals and what they know about horses , hens , elephants and ostriches. I felt successful for having kept 45 10 year olds busy for an hour. They remained fired up for the entire hour. When 1st hour ended there was a 45 minute tea break. I asked how they could have a 45 minute break after only one hour of class and mumbled something about learning being directly related to time on task. Gary totally agreed and decided that I should stay here until April and direct the school. I settled for teaching 56 4th graders the next hour, shortly after which they had lunch which I was told lasted 2 hours.

We went to lunch in town and then went on a tour of a 1000 acre rose farm owned by Scherr, a Dutch flower power. This is an incredible farm with 36 greenhouses that produce and ship 2 million rose stems a week to Holland where they are further shipped all over Europe.