Disappointing Tuesday

At 2:30 a.m. Heather flew out of Addis to Frankfurt to visit our dear friend Laura for a few days. Out photographer was gone, so the pictures will diminish in number and quality. When I started going through my pictures I realized that the girls had taken most of the pictures on Tuesday. Let's just say they have an interesting perspective on the day. They did get this really nice one of Honeybee. The pictures they got of Michele and I are not so flattering.


Our original plan for Tuesday was to pack our bags, since Michele was leaving that night, and the girls and I were leaving Wednesday night. We wanted to make sure we had the bags evenly distributed weight wise. We had one suitcase that was still at the AAI office we were planning to get, and we were scheduled to meet Jubilee's family that afternoon. When I called the AAI office no one answered. I remembered that it was Timkat, so I called Ivy to see if the office would be locked all day. Sure enough it would be. When Ivy asked about our plans for the day, and I mentioned that we were planning to meet Jubilee's family at AHOPE, she said no, they rescheduled for tomorrow, today is a holiday. She also told me that she hadn't gotten anyone at the embassy to return her calls due to the holiday, so I was just going to have to take my opened envelope and pray for mercy. I was very glad that I had called.

When I broke the news to Jubilee she was devastated. She was angry with her brother, she was in tears, and later in the day she took out all of her braids in anger. I was frustrated that we hadn't been given more warning, but TAB. She did eventually get over it, but it was hard to watch and know there is nothing you can do. Because the holiday pretty much shut the whole town down we stayed at the guesthouse.


Michele did an amazing job of making our stuff look like this, when it started out looking like the picture below.

Honeybee asked at one point what we were going to do with our empty water bottles. We ended up using them as packing material. They were light, but rigid which kept my coffee table in tact. It was a brilliant idea. Michele left that night with two bags, which left the girls and I with one bag each. It all worked out very well.