Celines Post for April 5th 2009

Dear Family and Friends,

Time is flying by. I have not been able to contact anyone very much lately because the sister’s house computers have been down and when they’re not down we don’t have power. But alas, I just throw my arms in the air and say c’est la vie. Whatever, I can’t do a darn thing about it and I am just going to deal with it, what else can I do?

Another week has passed. This last week was a bit difficult due to the 3 funerals that occurred in one week with close members of the St. Lucy School. So I had sporadic adult flute classes, gave Seyoum his lesson over two days and small amounts of teachers attending the classes that I did give. This wasn’t a problem for me or them, it is what it is. In Ethiopia it is culture to attend the funeral of a loved one who has their loss and continue seeing them for the full week. This meant school got out early, classes were rearranged and so forth and I had to do my best to take care of all the lessons and general music classes that were on my schedule. All the children’s classes went fine though. The students can easily put their flutes together and are able to play an entire page of music. They are practicing their rhythm and starting to understand the concepts of the visual with the “feel” and connecting the two. So this is all good and I like seeing the students grasping the concepts and actually playing the flute.

As for the funerals, I will let Safia’s blog express the impact we experienced with this funeral. Sr. Reggie knew the mother of the boy that was killed. She came to lunch on Thursday extremely upset. She couldn’t eat and had tears in her eyes. She told us what was wrong and Safia and I felt bad to hear of such bad news. Later that afternoon, I was waiting on some teachers to come for their lessons and I stopped in Sr. Reggie’s office to see how she is doing and she told me that she went to see the mother of the boy that was killed in a hit and run accident. As she described me the details of this horror story I couldn’t help but start to cry myself. I have read a small bit of Safia’s blog and I do know the story very well. As Safia mentioned the boy was crossing the street that is heavily under construction. A dump truck struck the boy and didn’t realize what he hit; he just knew he had hit something. The driver then backed up and rolled back over the boy. Although the boy was not killed instantly he was left bleeding all over the road and screaming for his life. No one would help the little boy because it was a hit and run and it is against the law to disturb the crime scene. So all these people just stood there and watched this boy scream for his mother and his life and to please help him. Then finally a woman couldn’t stand it anymore and she starting screaming for someone to pick up the boy and get him to the hospital. (Now I know you’re thinking why didn’t anyone call an ambulance? Only a few people have mobiles and there isn’t an ambulance anyway in this village. So your next question is why didn’t anyone call the police? Good question. The police never came until night time.) So this man ran this little boy to the hospital as he was still alive. No one knew who the boy was until someone recognized him and ran to tell his mother that her son was badly hurt. The mother, who is crippled and in a wheel chair worked to get to the hospital as fast as she could only to get there and find her son dead. This boy was a high school student, made excellent marks and was a leader in his high school community. Sr. Reggie and I sat and cried a little bit as she told me the story. She invited Safia and I to attend the funeral the next day with her.