I have written about this in a previous post, but this is a little more detail of some of what we saw and experienced on the trip. Our host and driver during our time in Addis was Esubalew Alemayehu Biru. Fortunately he prefers to be called Habtu, which is much easier to say. He is about 27 years old, and district president of the Addis Ababa, Ethiopia District, which contains 4 branches. This is the only district in Ethiopia, which is about has about 850 members of the church. Habtu is a busy man. He works for the church as National Director of Public Affairs for Ethiopia. He is also manager of missionary support for 16 young (American and African) missionaries, He ensures that the missionaries have a place to live and that they have enough money to buy food and pay their expenses. There is also a Senior Missionary Couple (the Parrish's) there that help him with the finances and the missionaries.
With that being said we traveled to Awassa to audit a branch there Habtu drove the Toyota church van. He is a very good, but aggressive driver and although we felt safe, I was a little concerned about the high rate of speed that he drove. When we got out on the open road, we were clipping along at about 140 - 150 km/hr. The big reason for my concern was all of the animals along the road and occasionally crossing the road. We saw goats, cattle, horses, donkeys, and even wild camels along the road. Habtu told us that when horses outlive their usefulness, they are turned out along the road somewhere and required to forage for themselves and sometime starve to death or get hit by cars. We saw one horse that had been hit and killed by a car and was lying in the middle of the road. It had not been hauled away at the time. Fortunately we never hit any animals.
As Habtu was driving along, he would suddenly stop to buy stuff. Once he stopped and purchased a large bag of charcoal and loaded it on top of the van on the luggage rack. Charcoal is commonly used for cooking in Ethiopia. He also stopped at a roadside stand to buy some red onions. We had a good time talking to the kids that were selling the onions. Habtu took good care of us and was a good host. He scheduled all of the audits and made sure the branch presidents and clerks were there to help me with the audits. He booked our hotel rooms, and got us to restaurants for lunches and dinners. He is also a good friend.
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