Going on an African adventure

Its time to let you know that I’ll soon be going off on an African adventure with my family. Before you get all worried about whether you’re still going to be able to buy things from my website – YES, you are! I have a colleague (Belinda) who will be running the business while I am away.

[And for those nasty people out there who look at people going away as an opportunity to do nefarious things, we will have a wonderful house sitter, who will be taking great care of all our stuff.]

We will be leaving at the end of the year to go to Ethiopia, where my husband will be volunteering at an international school for three months. Our kids will be attending the school, and I will be a lady of leisure. Well, not quite…

I plan to visit the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, to see the life-changing work of Dr Catherine Hamlin, and her wonderful team. I have made some enquiries, and it is likely that I will be able to spend some time with some of the patients, very informally showing them some needlework skills. I am looking forward to this! I am also sure that I would not be turned away from being a parent helper at the school, just as I am never turned away from our kids’ school here in Australia!

I plan to spend as much time as possible learning the language, Amharic. I have never learnt a language other than English before (I don’t think you can count a term of German and Indonesian in Year 7 at school) so it will be quite a challenge! Amharic does not use a Roman alphabet, so I will be learning new characters as well as new words. But learning the language will help me to understand the culture (and vice versa), and will help me with shopping, getting around, and trying to communicate with the fistula patients.

I hope to see some Ethiopian embroidery, and I am pretty sure that there is at least one people group who have embroidery on their traditional clothing, but other than that I am not sure.

We expect to experience culture shock, having never been to a developing country before. We have been to non-English speaking countries, and we have also been to countries where we are very obviously foreigners, due to our appearance, so that will be helpful, at least. However, culture shock and how it will affect us is a big unknown. We will be with other English-speaking people (even if it is a second language for them!) and this will hopefully help us to feel less alien.

So we are off on a great big adventure!

Please keep in mind that for Vetty Creations it will still be business as usual. You will still be able to buy all my books, and all the other embroidery supplies that I have, directly from the Vetty Creations website. If you phone and leave a message on the answering machine, someone will get back to you – it just may take a little longer than usual. But someone will get back to you!

I am unsure whether I will be able to post much on this blog while I am away. How good the internet connection is, remains to be seen! It might be so difficult that all my time online is taken up with communicating with family etc back home.