Happy New Year

2002 will be a year that I look back on with joy. It is the year that I graduated from Moody Bible Institute and consequently started my first full time ministry position as a Sr. High Director with Campus Life. I’ll look back on 2002 as the year that Andrea and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary shortly after moving out among the Gmz people in Ethiopia. 2002 will also be the landmark year that we turn 30 years old…yikes! Wait a second. All that will have happened in 2002? Absolutely. We are learning that we can accomplish a lot in one calendar year, especially when you have the opportunity to live it TWICE!

This past weekend, we participated in the Ethiopian New Year celebration, which according to their unique calendar, welcomed in 2002 (FYI: Ethiopians also use a different clock so that the sun rises between 12:00 and 1:00, they eat lunch at 6:00, and get off work at 11:00 in the afternoon. Time confusion is a daily occurrence for us.). Great excitement was building all last week as chickens and goats were bought, butchering knifes were sharpened, families were invited and preparations were made for the New Year’s parties which spread out over 3 days beginning on new year’s day - Sept 11^th).

“inquan aderesachu” (Eng: Hooray, he caused you to arrive) would be the standard greeting during this time, to which the response would be “inquan abro aderesen” (Eng: Hooray, he caused us to arrive together). The “he” in these statements implicitly refers to God, which is yet another example of how Christianity (namely, the Ethiopian Orthodox church) permeates this culture. These greetings not only reveal the Ethiopian perception that God is the one who granted them the blessing of reaching a new year, but it also shows the importance of community (we arrived together).

Saturday night, we were invited to the house of an Ethiopian friend for a celebration. Yenesao (whose name means “my man”) is one of our favorite teachers at the language school so we were eager to meet his family and spend this holiday with them (along with a few other foreigners who were particularly good friends with Yenesao). As guests at this party, we were treated with such great honor. There was an amazing spread of food, including “doro wot,” a chicken dish that is served only on very special occasions. As is typical, the guests eat first, with only Yenesao joining us in eating. The rest of his family would eat later after we were full. In the corner of the room, some of the women of his family were performing a “coffee ceremony,” a very traditional manner of serving coffee which includes washing, roasting, grinding, boiling and serving the coffee all with traditional tools. When the coffee came after the meal, I made the mistake of drinking all the way to bottom – forgetting that coffee filters have no place here. Needless to say, I spent the next 5 minutes or so trying to discretely pick the coffee grounds out of my teeth – Yum! All in all, it was very, very nice to be able to spend an Ethiopian holiday with an Ethiopian family. It made the celebration much more real for us.

So in conclusion, we would like to wish you a Happy New Year and would you join us in praying that God would give a prosperous 2002…again.