Team Ethiopia South: Travel to Awasa (Wed.)

On Wednesday Luccie and I traveled south from Addis down to the city of Awasa. The drive took several hours and we really enjoyed the scenery on the trip… Around the Addis area, there were a lot of seemingly abandoned construction projects going on with rickety-looking scaffolding built from raw tree branches. There were tin houses and shops alternating with frequent decorative orthodox Christian churches and Muslim mosques. As the city slipped away, grassy meadows with dramatic hills in the background appeared. There were more and more donkey-drawn carts on the road, and the clusters of tin houses became fewer and farther between. I dozed off briefly a couple of hours into the drive, and when I awoke, my first thought was whoa, I’m in the African Savannah! The gray morning had transformed into a sunny day; there were patches of dirt fields surrounded by grassy plains as far as I could see, and huge trees that spread into flat far-reaching branches dotted the landscape. Occasionally someone would be walking along the street with a few cattle or there would be people laboring over hay or other crops planted alongside the road in the good old fashioned way. I think mostly because it was so flat and the views so far-reaching, it really seemed like we were in the middle of nowhere. There were traditional huts with mud walls and straw-thatched roofs. Some people had painted random murals on the outside of the muddy walls that look pretty cool and most certainly African! As we got closer to Awasa, the drier dirt transitioned to a greener landscape full of more large-leaved palm-type trees and other more lush vegetation. Jagged hills once again appeared on the horizon. We had our first wildlife sighting of HORNBILLS, and when we stopped to get photos of the birds, we also drew some attention from cute curious kids!

We arrived in Awasa and found it to be a cleaner and either newer or more up-kept city compared to Addis. We settled into our hotel before our Jhpiego leader Yodit met up with us. Yodit might be the coolest person ever—She is really easy to talk to and extremely knowledgeable and also fun! She showed us around the area a bit, including Awasa lake, where we may have accidentally found ourselves on a boat ride and may have spotted hippopotamuses… There were also a couple different kinds of monkeys and some huge ugly birds around the lake. Yodit took us to a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony as well and told us lots of interesting facts about the country before leaving us to rest up for our first big hospital day.