On Friday, February 15th, 2008, eleven members of the MTW medical team left their homes and families to begin the long journey to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where they will spend the next two weeks serving the staff and beneficiaries of the MTW HIV/AIDS project. For some, the journey took a bit longer. Drs. Bobby Bain and Joe Moore from Zion Presbyterian Church in Columbia, Tennessee left a little earlier than most of us, but after an almost three hour delay getting out of Nashville, they missed our flight from Washington Dulles International Airport to Frankfort, Germany by about 15 minutes. Those of us traveling from the Baltimore are – Abbott members Rose Rode, Mark Renner, Carpenter Warren and Paul Warren, Hunt Valley member Derek Armstrong and Severna Park EP member Cathy Wingate – were met at Dulles by Christiana Sahl from Park Slope Church in Brooklyn, NY for the first leg of the trip. In Frankfort we were joined by Vito Aiuto, the pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY and Pige Schuette, also a member of Park Slope Church. For the nine of us the rest of the journey to Addis was easy and uneventful. We landed on time and made it through customs without a single bag being opened. We were met at the airport by several of the MTW project staff, including Gizaw Melese, the coordinator of short term teams for the project, Dr. Jon White, the MTW project physician and Sara Philips, a nurse who has interned with the project the past two years. They took us to the project guesthouse that will be our home away from home the rest of the month. Unfortunately, Drs. Bain and Moore had been rerouted through London on a British Air flight that didn’t arrive in Addis until almost 4:30 Sunday morning. And even more unfortunate was the fact that they arrived without their luggage. Still, we give thanks to God that everyone is here safely and that we are ready to hit the ground running.

We had a wonderful Lord’s Day. We worshipped at Covenant Life Church, an Ethiopian congregation affiliated with Sovereign Grace Ministries in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The pastor of the church was incredibly gracious and welcoming to our team and arranged for translator to sit among us and help us follow along through both the singing and the preaching of the Word. Afterwards, we went to one of our favorite Ethiopian restaurants, Dashen, where many of our team enjoyed their first taste of traditional Ethiopian food. We spent the rest of the afternoon doing inventory of the supplies that had been donated that we brought with us.

While almost everyone slept like a baby on Saturday night, jet lag hit last night and sleep was intermittent for most of us. This morning there was a lot of discussion about who snored and who made what noise and what time everyone woke up. We just finished breakfast and we’re off to the project office to start to work.

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