A thought from my time in Ethiopia

So one of the things that really made us (the 17ppl that traveled as part of the DEEP program) super uneasy was the amount of food we ate while over there. I mean, we ate A LOT of food! It was really laid out of us and sometime we even had silver service in top restaurants! This caused some serious issues because, well, we were in Ethiopia and there were starving people all around us and we didnt really go there to eat heaps of food - in fact many of us were going EXPECTING to eat very little (and loose weight!).

So, I can hear you saying "well... why didnt you just eat less"? And this certainly is what we were thinking too but there was a complication. We were being hosted by VERY hospitable Ethiopians (who were partners with TEAR Aus). Part of the culture in Ethiopia is to really really really look after your guests, and they certainly did. As you can imagine, it would have been extremely rude of us to refuse this food and even to eat less! (yep, thats right. We were often TOLD to keep eating/order more in quite a stong and repetative way!)

One day quite early in the trip we visited a feeding program run by Hope Enterprises in Addis Ababa - they fed over 1000 very poor people every day. It was quite an experience for all of us and we felt totally useless standing there observing.

Aftet seeing this, we walked 3 shops down and had lunch in a nice restaurant - which was the most awful thing I think many of us had ever experienced. We just had to take up a big offering and deliver it up to the feeding program so that we didnt kill ourselves.

But I've been thinking abdout that experience latelty and have really come to realise that this is waht I/we do everyday anyway... its just not right next door! We need to have that same feeling of 'wrongness' every time we exploit how much we have.

Once again - this is waaaay to challenging even for me to handle... hopefully we can learn from this though.