First trip to the field

Well hello again from the beautiful Sheraton in Addis. I'm here after a 5 day trip to eastern Ethiopia to check out some of the projects we fund. It was a great trip and I'm already learning a ton about Ethiopia and its people and about the projects that are going on to address identified needs. Here are a few shots from this trip....I forgot about the uploading order for blogspot so these are totally out order and the connection's not fast enough that I want to redo this...so bear with me....

As we drive on the road in the early morning, we pass a few men heading to their fields....


One of the projects brings spring water to a village through an enclosed (and there for cleaner) system. It's used for people.......
agriculture (here one of the men of the village show the large potatoes they've been able to harvest far from the spring becuase of the water overflow system that waters the field)

and for livestock. Even though the trough is just starting to fill up, a thirsty cow gets a drink.

While we were walking around the village, we had quite a following. Here are a few of the friendly faces.....

The view on the road as we drive to one of the projects.

More friendly faces....

Some roadside traffic slows us down. It could be these guys, or sheep, cows, etc.

Some terracing can be seen as people try to take advantage of every available inch of land for agriculture....

Some of the vehicular traffic seems more scary than the animals meandering along....

Most of the road was pretty good.....

And the view was lovely. My colleague remembers when this small lake was actually quite large and could provide much of the water needs for several villages. Now it is being overused and with less than average rain for the past year or so, the lake isn't quite as plentiful....
As we get to the bottomor of the hill (from the road picture above) we come through a typical town....

Here are some of the first friendly faces we saw.

This little guy was a bit more suspicious...

but with the large crowd following us from the spring, to the animal trough, to the fields and then finaly the water source, it was a bit overwelming for me too!

These women, part of a savings and loan program, show us that the lock box has three locks and three keys held by three elected women of the group. Maybe we should have thought of that for some of America's financial systems??








Anyway--there's more to share that's not related to the trip but it's late on Sunday evening and I'm heading out on another trip tomorrow at 6 am so I'm off to bed. But these pictures should give you a bit of an idea of what I'm seeing....

More soon, love Jane