Photo Phriday.

I thought I'd wrap up this week by sharing a few leftover photographs that I have lying around, so pardon me if I revisit some things I have mentioned before.

Here's one of Joy and E. in E.'s office at FH/Ethiopia, which would become the office of all three of us by the end of the summer of 1995. (Spoiler alert: the reason I'm not using E.'s name is that we ended up having a very rocky relationship, and although I have no intent to slander her, I would prefer that she not be able to find herself here).

Here's J in the process of opening one of the packages that arrived in time for our birthdays. I definitely mentioned this back in August, when I posted another photograph, taken on the same day, where I'm playing with a hand puppet from the same package. The hand puppet ended up going to language school with us for about a week, where we expanded our vocabularies by learning and retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood in Amharic.

Speaking of language school, here are four of our language tutors -- Zemenay, Genet, Solomon, and Yosef -- posing for an album cover. No, just kidding, they're goofing off during one of our breaks. The other day J. and I had a conversation about whether language school was a half-day or a full-day experience, and we couldn't remember at all. Then I came across an e-mail message I had written to my sister indicating that the hours were 8:30 am to 3:30 pm, just like, you know, school. That made sense because we had recalled occasionally eating lunch with our friend Wendy, a missionary teacher from Canada and senior level language student who was living at the SIM Press compound at the time. A few years after this photo was taken, Wendy and Solomon were married. We hope they are living happily ever after.

Finally, a photograph of J and myself taken outside the Institute for Ethiopian Studies at Addis Abeba University. IES operates a museum in what used to be the Genet Leul Palace, built by Emperor Haile Selassie in 1930. Twenty years ago the museum was pretty basic, essentially a couple of rooms set aside to honor the Emperor's memory. The tour included the imperial bedroom and a couple of cases of artifacts, including a tiny dress uniform -- Ethiopians tend to be small-framed people and Haile Selassie was only about 5'4" tall. IES also had/has a research library and an art gallery, and we were able to view an exhibit of Ethiopian art that had opened in Baltimore in 1993 and traveled around the USA before ending up in Addis Abeba. Poor as we were, we splurged and bought the catalog for the exhibit, "African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia." Fifteen years later we met the author, Marilyn Heldman, when she came to speak at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem. So how's that for a small world?