Anyway, I've been wanting to write about another group of boys that we met, and one boy in particular. I've mentioned Tilehun a couple times; he is the boy we met on our first trip to church, the one who knew Bereket from volunteering at KVI. He is also the one who came with us to Adama to meet Bereket's enat, acting as translator and just an excellent travel companion. You may be wondering his story, and I'm going to back up and tell what I know.
Tilehun was born to a very poor family in a rural village. He told me that when he was 8, he preferred to leave his mother and come to Addis "to make himself a future". He lived on the streets at the Merkato and worked as a shoe shine boy. When he was 12, a Canadian woman named Shelley was in Addis to adopt a little girl. She was overwhelmed at the number of street children, and asked her driver what they could do to brighten their day a little. He suggested taking a group of boys out for lunch. So she invited Tilehun and 5 of his friends out for lunch, and they were excited to accept. After lunch, she asked the driver if there wasn't more she could do. He said, well, if you really want to make a difference, you could help with school. So she quickly found 5 other families who wanted to make a difference, and together they sent the boys to boarding school for the year! After the year was up, they asked if it would be possible to live together and attend day school instead of boarding school. So Shelley and the other families arranged a house to rent for the boys and a woman to act as cook and housekeeper. We have visited their home, and it is simple and lovely.
So here are these boys, former street children, now with a safe, clean home, food to eat and school to attend. But what is so incredible is the hearts of these boys. They are so grateful and want to help out and give back however they can. When we asked Tilehun to come with us to Adama, we wanted to pay him for his time. He refused outright, and so we decided to pay attention and try to figure out a way we could bless him.
On the drive, Tilehun was telling us how this fall he begins highschool, and it is further from his home than the elementary school. We asked how he was going to get there, and he said he hoped to ride a bike. This planted a seed in my mind, and I wondered if maybe we could get a bike for him.
Also on the drive to Adama, Tilehun invited us to spend Ethiopian New Years with him. He said he and the other boys would be preparing a meal to hand out to other children on the street. We eagerly accepted the invitation, and planned to attend with the other families. We also all contributed towards the cost of the meal, but understand, the boys planned to buy the food and do this on their own with their own money.
I asked Karen if she knew about the bike situation, and she talked to Shelley. Four of the boys would be starting high school, and only 1 had a bike. She agreed that bikes would be a good gift, and so the three families that are here decided we would buy three bikes. We hoped we would be able to find good used bikes, but we wanted to give them as a New Years gift, and so the tight time frame meant we ended up buying new bikes. They were a little more than we had hoped to spend, but we decided the boys probably don't get new things very often. Dave and Rob went with Markos to get the bikes, and we had them delivered to GT. When Lee (the manager) saw them, she asked what on earth we were doing with bikes?! I joked we should have told her we were tired of always hiring a ride! lol. The plan was to deliver them on New Years Day when we went to help with the meal delivery.
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Tuesday night, we learned that our ride would be coming to get us at 5:30 am! Oh my! That changed our plans slightly. We decided that our boys would likely not do well with such an early start, and so just Faith and I went along.
When we got to Tilehun's and the other boys' house, operation goat was well under way. They had stayed up all night cooking. The goat head was still laying in the middle of the yard! I took a few pictures, but then discovered I had failed to put the memory card in the camera. And now the few I took are trapped on the internal memory of the camera. I did snap this one of one of the younger boys with a bike. He was pretty amazed! When we gave the bikes, we said they were a gift for the whole household; that the older boys had first priority to use them for school, but the others could use them on weekends and evenings.
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This was the first day of what turned out to be 4 days of extreme sickness for me... And so I had the "experience" of using the boys' squatty potty, in the dark, with no door, and half a dozen teenage boys 6 feet away. Oy.
We had to wait for the injera shop to be open, and so it was about 7 am by the time we were bagging up the food. They folded a whole injera, put it in a plastic bag, and then added two scoops of meat and sauce to each bag. The filled bags went into a large rubbermaid tub. I think we ended up with 75 bags in the end. When we were ready to go, we loaded everything into the van and headed for the Merkato.
I guess the reason it had to be so early in the morning was so that the street boys would all still be gathered in one area... As the day gets going, they scatter to various places to work, usually as shoe shine boys. We drove past the place where Shelley had first met Tilehun and the others, and then to the area where their friends were. We were told to stay in the van, and asked not to take pictures. They kept the bin of food in the van, and one boy passed it out the door to another who gave it to anyone who wanted it. Mostly it was 8-16 year old boys, but there were some girls, some mothers with little ones, some grown men, too. After we had given out about two thirds of the food there, we drove slowly along the street and passed it out the window to people who approached.
I had been worried that we would be swarmed, but it was very orderly. The only "kerfuffle" at all was at the very end... A group of 5 or 6 people approached, and we only had 2 bags of food left. So there was a little upset among them as to who was going to get the food. We drove off before they sorted it out.
After that, they drove us home to GT. We were home by about 10 am. I was feeling terrible, and went to bed, and basically didn't come out again for 4 days! Very glad that is now behind me!
Anyway, it was a fantastic day, and something I would definitely plan to do again if we are back in Ethiopia.
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