My hat it has three corners

Okay everyone. So my blog is confusing, right? I am sorry. I mostly just write it down in my scatter-brained way, and while I do realize I am kind of writing for an audience, I do not take that into consideration while writing. Things that make perfect sense to me just confuse everyone reading my blog. So please comment/email if you have any questions. We all know I love, love, love mail of any sort. I have had a request to describe the Learning Village. The city is Addis Ababa. There is a section of town called Kalaala. We live in Kalaala, in a kind of rural area. The city is encroaching on us from the back, but we live on a plateau ishthing with an awesome view of the city. It is quiet (except when the planes fly into/out of the airport, then they fly RIGHT overhead). The clinic’s proper name is Summit International Higher Clinic. The school is named Shibu-Ejersa Primary School (grades preschool-8), and it is located on the grounds of the Learning Village. The best word I can find for it is “compound.” We have a fence around the immediate living-area (as opposed to the fields where we grow teff and wheat), and guards (with flashlights and guns at night!). There are approximately 16 people (we tried to count) who live here, plus the three of us student missionaries. In addition to the school and clinic, they have a bee hive, a dairy, fields of teff and wheat, a garden, a greenhouse (well, it is under a tent), and are trying to grow fruit trees. They plow the fields with oxen. We have a few wells here (but are in need of another!), and we provide water to the surrounding community. They have no other way (well, I suppose they could walk all the way into town…) to get water except here. Sometimes we have electricity outages, but thusfar they have not been bad. We have had a tougher time with the water situation. Since we share with the community and the people who live here (who use it, like us, to do laundry and cook), sometimes there is no water to wash dishes (oh darn), and sometimes we do not have enough water to shower. Yay for being dirty. The fields of teff and wheat are so beautiful—they remind me more of “amber waves of grain” than the US ever has (then again, I have never been to the Midwest). All of the people are awesomely nice to us. We like to go stargazing at night. We get to see so many stars, and the lights of the city below us, and the airplanes landing from the west and taking off to the east (over our heads). Everyone here is so good at football. Soccer, rather. We play most weeknights, and Sunday mornings. Cameron is a really good goalkeeper. I can do…defense?
We go grocery shopping about once/week. We like getting our produce from a produce stand (better quality than the supermarket). The roads are pretty good, for the most part. There are parts where you really need to be careful and navigate the gaping holes. Drivers have to navigate the holes, people, donkeys, goats, sheep, dogs, not to mention other cars. The people walk right in the middle of the road and it is not unusual to see a donkey walking seeming without anyone following with two yellow water-jugs strapped on its back. The traffic can be horrific. There are no pollution laws, I do not think, so sometimes it is quite smoggy in the city itself. While parts of the city seem obviously impoverished (tin walls, etc), right down the road there are often very ritzy homes. Man, and this totally does not sound appealing, but it really is a great city (for a city haha), and Kalaala (especially the Learning Village) is awesomely beautiful and I love it.