Ethiopia by E-mail
Subject: Merry Christmas to all
Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 12:14:36 -0500
From: Pat Rollin parollin9923@hotmail.com
We are getting ready for Christmas and have just come back from Church. We
came all the way to the Horn of Africa to celebrate a Christingle Service,
which is an advent tradition begun by the Moravian Christians in Eastern
Europe. We celebrated at an Anglican church with an international
congregation that included Swedish, Dutch, British, Ethiopian, Sudanese,
American and other worshippers. It was a very interesting service. We were
given a Christingle which is an orange with a candle in it, a red ribbon
around it and 4 toothpicks with raisins on the top. The orange is the
symbol for the world, the toothpicks represents the 4 seasons, the raisins
are the fruit of the earth, the red ribbon is the blood that Jesus shed for
us, and the Candle the light of Jesus to the world. We sang some Christmas
carols and had a short message. We are also learning new Christmas Carols.
This morning the children of the church did their story of Christmas. It
was the Story of Baboushka, a Russian lady who was too busy with cleaning to
be excited about a shining star or to go with the Three Kings to follow the
star to find the Baby who was born and was king. After a little while she
decided she should follow the kings and when she finally got to Bethlehem
the Holy Family and fled to Egypt and she went home still trying to find
Jesus.
We wanted to write to say Merry Christmas and hope you are having a good time with family and friends. We are having a very quiet and slow paced holiday. We have an IFESH meeting on Saturday, so all the TFA's are together to celebrate Christmas. We will have a Christmas Dinner on Saturday night (Christmas Eve) and then we will attend church Sunday morning with some sight seeing on Sunday afternoon here in Addis. We have two of the TFA's coming into Addis on Wednesday so they have asked to use the spare room. So we will have house guests for a couple of days. I will be working at Gemini on Monday and Wednesday and on Tuesday getting ready for the holidays. I want to make banana and date bread and roast some peanuts. I have been making a few gifts to give away to people here but I will probably give them for Ethiopian Christmas which is January 7th. Jim will be working most of the week. Alice is here until the 22nd and Jim has gotten most of the students' placements done so things are going well for him.
Have a wonderful holiday season!
Pat and Jim