Week Without Walls Ethiopia: by Cecily

Week without Walls is a new program at my school.  Basically the whole high school shuts down for a week and everyone leaves to go on trips.  There were lots of options for trips.  I could have gone to Paris, Switzerland, Nepal, Amsterdam, Ethiopia or stayed in Jordan.  I chose Ethiopia.  My trip was the only service trip and it was amazing!  We flew to Addis Ababa and then drove to a little town about 2 hours away called Debre Zeit.  We stayed at Kera Hora Elementary school in Debre Zeit for 6 days.  Over the course of those 6 days we started building the foundation for a bathroom complex and taught English and photography lessons.  For those 6 days we camped in tents and ate nothing but rice, pasta and porridge.  It was a challenging week but it was all worth it.  My favorite part of the week was the first day we saw the kids because right when 8 o’clock hit we had around 500 kids running right at us.  To be honest, it was a little overwhelming at first but it was the best 2 hours of my life.  We took pictures, danced, sang, played hand games and learned simple phrases in Amharic.  This trip was definitely the highlight of my senior year. 

Enjoy my film that I made about the trip for my school.